Forever Power (almost)

I wouldn't buy a charger that wastes twice as much power as it delivers. It's very easy to do better than 30% efficiency, in fact, it's hard to do that badly. The crappiest transformer-based charger will waste less than 20 watts.

You said the charger wastes 100W. The inverter will waste some too, say 40W (80% efficient). So you have a net 140W drain on the battery, or 12amps. A mid-sized car battery is 60 amp-hours, so it'll last less than five hours, turning all the stored power into waste heat.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath
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This is just a stupid idea that I had, which will acomplish nothing, other than see how long it lasts.

I dont know how much a standard 12V 5 amp battery charger requires from the 120Vac power line, but I read it was around 150 watts.

So, lets say I connect a 200W inverter to a car battery. Then plug into that inverter, a 12V 5A battery charger, and connect the leads from that charger to the battery that is powering the inverter.

So, it's an endless loop, the power being drained from the battery is being recharged by itself thru an inverter and battery charger.

How long would this actually work? I know there is going to be some loss due to heat in the inverter and the charger too, so this really would not last forever, but just how long would it last????

Reply to
oldschool

Google free energy zero-point energy

You'll find a zillion discussions of this nature. It's the sum of the losses in the system. It's a complex calculation, but you can measure it easily. Build it. Disconnect both the inverter and the charger from the positive battery terminal. Insert an ammeter. Measure the net amps flowing out of the battery. Calculate the hours from the amp-hour battery capacity and the meter reading. Sure, the amps will drop over time, but you'll get in the ballpark with a simple calculation.

Reply to
mike

I wonder if the OP thinks the 200W inverter will put out 200W when the load is only 150W.

Reply to
Aussie

I invented the motor-generator perpetual motion machine when I was 7 years old. An older guy explained why it wouldn't work; I think he was

9.
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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Heh. Even if it could be got to work you couldn't extract any energy or it would stop.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Energy can be extracted as long as it is less than a quantum. Then the net balance of the remainder doesn't change. Take all the fractions of quantum you have and add them up and you will have a bunch of free energy!

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

It's just a complicated way of turning useful energy into heat. You may as well connect some car light bulbs to the battery -- that'll give you heat and light, which on a winter's night may be welcome.

"Plug the power strip into the power strip" perpetual motion machines don't work any better than any other ones.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Grin, you had smart friends. My son (16 yo) is still hoping that this conservation of energy theory will be shown wrong.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Another time, when I was a little older, I said that I wanted a pair of binoculars with 1x mag, but that made things brighter, for use at night. A slightly older guy immediately told me that would violate thermodynamics and conservation of energy.

Good thing I'm an engineer. I'd be a terrible physicist.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

All that needs is a larger aperture.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

After you've built that contraption, put really small wheels on the front of your car so it's always rolling downhill.

Reply to
krw

OK, if the 150 W is correct, that is an efficiency of 40% (12 * 5 / 150) Not great. Your inverter might have similar efficiency. So, 150 W to run the charger, X 2.5 =375 W. 375 W draw from a 12 V system is 31 A, So, you are drawing 31 A from the battery, and putting back 5 A. So, the total draw is 26 A.

Umm, I guess you might get a bit more than 1 hour before the inverter shut off on low voltage, assuming a regular car battery. Most likely it would be more like 20 minutes with typical batteries.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Maybe not very long at all, it depends on the state of charge of the batter y and the setpoint of the charger. If the battery has drained down to full charge from the charger, say 5 Amps, then if the inverter and charger are b oth 90% efficient making for 80% composite, the 5A charger output requires

5/0.8=6.25 A from the battery terminal. 5A of that is coming from the cha rger so the battery has to supply 1.25A difference. So your setup never rea lly charges the battery, it just offloads some of the drain of the inverter + charger combo. The best way to offload the inverter + charger combo is t o physically remove it altogether.
Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

This is a lot more fun in person. If you tell 'em that it runs longer if you just disconnect the charger from the battery, you can watch their mood go from disbelief to denial to anger back to denial in a few seconds.

I once got involved with a couple of free-energy guys. One was starting a business based on using his car's electrical system to generate Brown's gas to stuff back into the carburetor.

He was undeterred when he forgot to turn the generator off one night and got a surprise the next day when he started the car. I don't think he ever found his valve covers. He was lucky. But that's another story.

His entire sales pitch was based on one seriously flawed test drive. He was immune to logic, so I offered to build him a gadget to give him continuous readout of his gas mileage to make a verifiable test. He was initially excited, but when I had a prototype a week later, he had vanished into thin air. Suppose he really didn't want to know.

Reply to
mike

I reckon ya have to stop with the jokes, it's not your scene !!

Reply to
Rheilly Phoull

the max output is about 68W* the max input will be ballpark 80W

the battrtry goes flat, the charger can't keep up with the drain imposed by the inverter.

maybe an hour to day before the battery goes flat, car batteries come in different sizes and I'm not interested in doing the arithmentic

it'll last much longer with the charger disconnected.

(*) assuming 13.6V charge termination

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

Looks like you are looking towards the perpetual motion machine. Well it ai n't happening.

I do have it on good resources though that something similar is extant, and has been tested. It is a motor/generator combo that actually supposedly ha s greater than unity efficiency. Seemingly, but it is not.

Through a complex scheme of magnetic shielding, bucking and aiding, someone figured out how to utilize the strength of super magnets. The unit runs fo r about seven years and you can drain power off if it. After the seven year s it is almost useless. Rebuilding it would be a nightmare.

And then there is the cost, it is over a million dollars for a unit that ca n power your house for seven years. Now take your electric bill and figure out what you pay in seven years and it is nowhere near a million dollars.

The thing is not magic nor is it perpetual motion, it is draining off the s upermagnets. Just like a dry cell which does not have to be charged and run s of the chemical energy, these units run off the energy stored in permanen t magnets.

Contrary to popular belief, permanent magnets are not necessarily permanent . They lose power when stressed. Well that device stresses them. A permanen t magnet on a speaker is stressed, but alot less and has no problem lasting fifty years. Not so with this gizmo.

But it is impractical and destined to remain that way. The process of makin g one is not easy. That is why they cost so much. And if anyone found a che aper way they would be bought out forthwith. But from what I understand abo ut how they work, it can only get so cheap.

Would you pay a million dollars for seven years of electricity ? A factory would but the unit that would handle that load would cost a bunch more. We are back where we started.

The people who developed did it right here in Cleveland, OH. I know two peo ple who worked on the project. I'm told they had good reason not to patent it, because someone might come up with enough variations to usurp their rig hts after the design was made public, which is of course necessary for a pa tent.

From what I heard a bunch of rich people bought them for the holocaust and that was it. Probably never started them, because once you do, the clock st arts ticking. But if the whole civil structure breaks down they might come in handy. I mean, if you can't get electricity, natural gas, diesel or gaso line to run your generators, how do you keep the deepfreeze running ? As a billionaire I would want a few, but I am not a billionaire.

Reply to
jurb6006

Well, there actually is free energy out there, and some of it is actually harvestable.

If you live near the ocean, you can harvest wave or tidal energy. You build gadgets with PVC pipe and big floats. As the tide or waves raise and lower the floats, the up-down motion can pump water or air to shore. Then, you can use an engine of sorts to generate energy from that.

There is hydrothermal energy if you live someplace like Florida or Hawaii. You pump water from way down in the ocean, and use a Stirling engine to extract heat from the warm surface water and sink it to the cold water from below.

There was the Atmos clock that used high/low pressure weather systems to keep the spring wound. Some poeple who have big caves have put air turbines in the entrance to the cave, and when the pressure changes it runs the turbine.

There was a radio and TV station on a mountain top in Colorado that was constantly having equipment damage. They eventually put up a super "lightning rod" near their transmitting tower. On a stormy day, I think they were getting several THOUSAND amps flowing through their ground system on the lightning tower. That could be harvested, but all they wanted to do was prevent their gear from getting popped.

Some of these systems can be built pretty much by backyard mechaincs.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

By your definition all energy is free. All you need is some free lightning to set the free forest ablaze. All you need bring is the marshmallows.

Harvesting is far different from "free energy", something for nothing, perpetual motion as defined by the OP.

Reply to
mike

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