Battery-Driven Tanis

Winter means thick overcast, how well will your solar panels
work in the cold with dark overcast and short days?


"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
oups.com...
| Annoying and expensive! The Honda's go for around $600
and the
| Coleman's about $450.
|
| True, but you'd have something that would be truly useful
in other
| applications all year long. (Like a power outage?) Not
sure what
| else you could do with a solar-powered Tanis heater
contraption...
|
| ;-)
| --
| Jay Honeck
| Iowa City, IA
| Pathfinder N56993
| www.AlexisParkInn.com
| "Your Aviation Destination"
|

Winter means thick overcast, how well will your solar panels
work in the cold with dark overcast and short days?

I don't know. However, winter isn't always a thick overcast,
especially at this time of year.

When it gets really, really cold, we are often under a big bubble of
Canadian high pressure. The sky turns cobalt blue, the winds die
down, and the temperature plummets. Today was an absolutely perfect
day to fly, if you don't mind the cold.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination

"Marco Leon" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Jan 31, 6:41 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
Sounds like a perfect application for one of those annoying little
Honda generators that we always seem to get stuck next to when
camping...?

Annoying and expensive! The Honda's go for around $600 and the
Coleman's about $450. There's a DuroPower line that runs just north of
$100 but that price makes me take a step back.

Get creative. A weed eater motor driving a car alternator that had one of
it's three diodes go out, and had to replaced comes to mind. Combine that
with an inverter, and you have your needs met, for only junk parts.

That is on my list of "round to-it" projects, for one rainy day. g
--
Jim in NC

"Morgans" wrote

Get creative. A weed eater motor driving a car alternator that had one of
it's three diodes go out, and had to replaced comes to mind. Combine that
with an inverter, and you have your needs met, for only junk parts.

Something else I just remembered. I think instructions are out there to
change the output of an alternator to 120 volts DC. The heater does not
care if it is getting AC or DC. You would not even need an inverter, then.
--
Jim in NC

"Morgans" wrote in message
...

Get creative. A weed eater motor driving a car alternator that had one of
it's three diodes go out, and had to replaced comes to mind. Combine that
with an inverter, and you have your needs met, for only junk parts.

Amazon has a generator for $89. Sounds like what you just descibed. Shipping
is $42, so I passed.

Marco Leon wrote:
I have a common problem of possessing a Tanis heater in my Warrior but
no electrical source by which to run it.

You may have already read this thread, but if not, you might find
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.a...e8d8cc0078d41b
and in particular
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.a...46b39f6df7c857
where I went through the math on sizing the battery.

As to what kind of battery: If I wanted to do this and money was no
object, I'd go with a gel-cell/absorbed-glass-mat battery, plus a decent
charger to go with it. The gel-cell battery is more expensive, but has
the redeeming feature that if you tip it over, acid doesn't go everywhere.
A "decent" charger probably means a microprocessor-controlled one with a
setting for gel-cell batteries - they should be charged a little
differently than a flooded battery. If you overcharge a gel-cell with a
cheap charger, you can't (usually) add water to the battery to fix it.

If I wanted to do it on the cheap, I'd probably go to Wal-Mart and buy
their big yellow "deep cycle" flooded lead-acid battery and whatever
cheap 6 or 10 amp charger they sell. You have to be more careful when
handling a flooded battery, and the cheap charger means that you have to
remember to shut off the charger yourself. But, if you do accidentally
overcharge the battery, you can add distilled water to the battery to
make up for what you boiled off.

Whatever you do, DON'T leave out the fuse between the battery and the
inverter. Batteries can deliver a whole lot of energy in a hurry and
that's probably something you don't want happening around your airplane.

Matt Roberds

"Marco Leon" wrote

I have a common problem of possessing a Tanis heater in my Warrior but
no electrical source by which to run it. Past newsgroup and online
knowledge (including an email from Tanis) say that at least a couple
of hours are needed to heat the engine in about 20 deg F temps.

An old post from 1999 suggested that a "deep cycle" battery be used in
conjuction with an inverter to be turned on a couple of hours prior to
flight.

Does anyone currently use this setup? If so, any suggestions on the
myriad of battery types and brands?

More information is needed, as to the current draw of the units when plugged
into a standard outlet. Buy or borrow an AC amp meter, and report back.
Also, do you have the cabin heater, or just the engine heater?

I have used power inverters for quite a few different things. They are good
at some uses, and very poor at others. Part of the design that causes some
problems is the wave form in most consumer inverters. If it is called a
modified sine wave converter, it is basically a square wave, with on and off
pulses, and not much in-between, unlike a sine wave.

They are very poor at running inductive motors, like air conditioners and
refrigerators. Sometimes it is necessary to run something like a light bulb
along with the refrigerator, to trigger the unit into producing the wave
form.

As I recall, most inverters say right on them that they are not to be used
for powering resistance heaters. They will do it, but it will strain the
power switching transistors. That seems to be the weak link. Also,
chargers for power tools and such that are constant current, variable
voltage units should not be used on inverters. I burned out a Dewalt
charger on an inverter, while trying to do what was not recommended.

Inverters usually have a rated wattage, such as 500 watts constant, 1000
watts peak. The peak is a joke. It may do that for a millisecond, but any
more will result in a very low output voltage, and trigger a reset
condition, which usually must be done manually. Not a good thing, if you
are not there.

I would think that if you do go this route, you would be advised to get one
at least twice as big, or more. If you say the heater unit draws 500 watts,
get a minimum of a 1000 watt, but a 1500 watt or 2000 watt would be better.

Post some more specifics, if you will. My feeling is that it will be
doable, but not cheap. Triggering a small electric start generator may be a
better option.
--
Jim in NC

On Jan 31, 5:43 pm, "Morgans" wrote:

More information is needed, as to the current draw of the units when plugged
into a standard outlet. Buy or borrow an AC amp meter, and report back.
Also, do you have the cabin heater, or just the engine heater?

Just the engine heater. The standard Tanis for the 320 engines are 250
watts and drawing about 2-3 amps according to Tanis.


As I recall, most inverters say right on them that they are not to be used
for powering resistance heaters. They will do it, but it will strain the
power switching transistors. That seems to be the weak link. Also,
chargers for power tools and such that are constant current, variable
voltage units should not be used on inverters. I burned out a Dewalt
charger on an inverter, while trying to do what was not recommended.

Inverters usually have a rated wattage, such as 500 watts constant, 1000
watts peak. The peak is a joke. It may do that for a millisecond, but any
more will result in a very low output voltage, and trigger a reset
condition, which usually must be done manually. Not a good thing, if you
are not there.

The inverter I have can run continuously at 400 Watts with a peak of
800W. I learned my lesson about the "peak" rating when I was a
teenager buying my first boom-box...

I would think that if you do go this route, you would be advised to get one
at least twice as big, or more. If you say the heater unit draws 500 watts,
get a minimum of a 1000 watt, but a 1500 watt or 2000 watt would be better.

That's why I bought the 400W inverter. While not twice the rating,
hopefully it will be enough for a 250W heater.

Post some more specifics, if you will. My feeling is that it will be
doable, but not cheap. Triggering a small electric start generator may be a
better option.

I think the generator would be the ideal situation but I'm trying to
avoid spending ~$500 on a good generator. I did some research on
generators and there are some Chinese non-name brands out there but
the feedback has not been good. Duropower comes to mind but at less
than 1/2 the price of the Honda, I hesitate due to the "you get what
you pay for" rule.

But if there's any good feedback from fellow pilots on the Duropower
generators, I'll go and get one today.

It seems to me that a low-voltage pad heater would fill the bill. The
following link is for a company that makes pad heaters much like the
Tanis, but designed to operate on 12 Volts:

http://www.padheaters.com/sizing.html

A resistance heating element doesn't care if it is run on AC or DC, so
a battery would do the job. You could charge the battery with a solar
panel - and rig up some sort of means of turning the heat on remotely
if you want to get fancy. I have heard of people using modified cell
phones for such things. A pager modified to provide a contact closure
would work as well. You'd need to do some experimentation to work out
pad wattage, battery capacity and solar panel size - but I think it is
a practical solution.

David Johnson

Dave wrote:
It seems to me that a low-voltage pad heater would fill the bill. The
following link is for a company that makes pad heaters much like the
Tanis, but designed to operate on 12 Volts:

Are you suggesting installing the 12 V heater along with the Tanis
heater, or instead of the Tanis heater? If the 12 V heater replaces
the Tanis heater, you then need to carry a 120 V to 12 V transformer
or power supply if you want to preheat your engine at a remote location.
Assuming you have a 250 W heater, browsing Digi-Key says that a 250 W
transformer weighs about 6 lb and costs about US$75, while a 250 W
power supply weighs about 3 lb and costs about US$250.

Matt Roberds