Danny left a comment about powering a 12V, 3 Amp LED light with super capacitors.\u00a0 He asked for my thoughts on this.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve made higher power Joule Thiefs and I’ve tried to power several things with super capacitors and although my experience with this isn’t as extensive as my experience with JTs, I think I should be able to give some words of wisdom.<\/p>\n
First off, 12V and 3A is 35W according to Danny, and that’s a whole lot of power.\u00a0 I have charged the Maxell 2600 farad Boost Caps with a 2 Amp supply and it takes a few tens of minutes at 2A.\u00a0 If the current drain\u00a0 is 3A, it probably won’t last even that long.\u00a0 Also, if the supply uses 350 farad caps at 6 dollars (U.S.) each, it will take 7.5 of those to make a 2600 F capacitor.\u00a0 That’s about $45.00, so if you can get the Maxell 2600 F caps for less than $45 each, then you can save a lot of money and space (each 2600F cap is about the size of a 12 ounce soda can, not counting the studs on the ends).\u00a0 I bought some used ones a year or so ago for ten dollars each but they are going for more than that now.\u00a0 You can buy the 3000F caps new, but the prices are much higher.<\/p>\n
If you connect five of the 2600F 2.5V caps in series, you have a 520 F equivalent at 12.5V.\u00a0 This will give you less run time but you will need no other electronics – no Dc to DC converter, Joule Thief, etc.<\/p>\n
As you might have suspected, it will take ten or twenty of these capacitors to make a large and heavy power supply that has enough capacity to run your light for a reasonable length of time.\u00a0 This is going to cost hundreds of dollars, so it would probably be more economical to buy a 12V sealed lead acid ‘motorcycle’ battery instead for a few tens of dollars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Danny left a comment about powering a 12V, 3 Amp LED light with super capacitors.\u00a0 He asked for my thoughts on this.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve made higher power Joule Thiefs and I’ve tried to power several things with super capacitors and although my experience with this isn’t as extensive as my experience with JTs, I think I <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lighting","category-power-supplies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8368"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8375,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368\/revisions\/8375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}