Sunday 1 March 2009

New 12v circuit for the eco-shed!

Last week I added a new 12 volt circuit to the eco-shed. The idea is that this can be used charge mobile phones and battery chargers etc. without switching on the inverter. The inverter draws power itself to raise the voltage to 240 volts, so it seemed a shame to then use a mobile phone's transformer to take it back down to something like 5 volts again. So I bought a 12 volt adapter, such as you might get for a car for charging 2 items from a 12 volt socket, cut off the bit you plug in, wired it to a 1-way light switch and ran a 2-core cable to the battery. Great!

The bad news? My mobile car phone charger is for an older model of phone and doesn't charge my phone. And the universal adapter I bought to solve that problem doesn't seem to work either. What have I done wrong?? Well I would check but I accidentally left my multimeter on & the battery went flat. And it's a weird battery too, a 12v 23 amp one, so I'll have to order a new one before I find out. Drat!

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