Genovator, yes, your assumption on the layout is pretty much spot on.
Here are the specs. Again, please excuse my lack of knowledge, experience, and education with electricity. I didn't even know what the difference between AC and DC was a month or two ago, and just barely learned what a solid state relay was last night. Attempting to deal with freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer to see if I can reduce, if not altogether eliminate the power bill. So this is a project to try to accomplish that, as well as a science experiment, as I have found this all very fascinating, and has really peaked my interest in learning a ton more. We take electricity for granted every day, until it goes out, or the bill comes, and your wallet is suddenly under attack.
1. Electric motor source will be house power, via a variable voltage transformer that is plugged in, running at about 50-55v to the motor. Electric motor is an old 1/2 hp washing machine motor, 8 amp (9-12 start?), with a start capacitor. House is showing 122v from the outlet.
2. Generator is a home grown version, used about 20 pounds of magnet wire in 8 air coils, with 16 rather large magnets running over them. I've been able to successfully test it, and read about 115v. The plans indicate it spits out about 1400 watts, but due to the change in those plans, have no idea what it's capable of. Is there any way to test the limits, other than to run a load, and see where it fails?
3. The charger is a 30 amp charge controller. Will I be able to hook directly up to that from the generator without having to reduce the DC voltage going in? One of the other parts I'm not certain about. One of the other concerns was whether there would be enough power for the charge controller to do it's thing.
4. The battery bank will consist of 3 x 12v deep cycle 260 amp hour batteries.
With this info, is there the best way to approach this to do a "timed" approach? The charge controller will obviously control all the charging, and protect the batteries from over charging. At the same time, I want to reduce wear and tear on moving parts of the generator, so not sure if there's a way to have some kind of a relay sense when it's low, turn on the power to the motor, and then turn off when a certain voltage has been achieved?
Thank you for any help, it's always extremely appecicated!
This is a right forum for your question, however, it would be better if you could provide as much details of what you already got. As what you wrote, I am assuming you have an electric motor, which runs a generator, which supplies power to your charger, which charges your batteries???
ELECTRIC MOTOR => GENERATOR => CHARGER => BATTERIES
If this is your layout, you have to give some specs of the above things like,
1. By which source your electric motor runs? By your house hold 230v AC or something else?
2. What is the power output of your generator? At what peak voltage? Does it produce sine or DC output?
3. What is your charger's input & output voltage?
4. What is your batteries voltage and capacity?
Then we could try to help you.
In a general way, you need to measure your batteries voltage level for a particular margin you would declare as "low battery". When that particular margin is reached, you need to activate your motor for a particular time period depending on the time required by your batteries to fully charge. Then turn the motor off and start rechecking your battery level.
And to achieve this, there are endless possibilities.