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I just got in two 18volt 20amp electronic power supplys to use for charging my farm's battery banks. Idea is feed the output from one of these 240 to 18vDC power supplys into a solar regulator, it's rated at 30amps, and the solar regulator drops the 18volts to a suitable battery charging voltage for the battery bank that is hooked up and I get about 20amps charging the batteries when the generator is on.

 

Problem...How to limit the amps below the 20amps max limit of the power supply coming out of it so the power supply doesn't keep tripping out through overload?

 

Fuse...no good. It will keep blowing

 

Resistor...going to be a massive resistor and it will drop the voltage as well.

 

Buck Inverter with current limit adjust.....maybe but it is adding more electronics and I'm after a simple solution.

 

Ideally I would like to limit the current demand on the power supply to 19amps so I'm getting the max I can out of it but not tripping it out.

 

Battery bank is over 1000amps by the way so it is going to try and pull all it can.

 

Any ideas?

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I think the buck boost will be the way to go I cant think of any other way to throttle the amps back

 

Yep that was pretty much my thinking as well. I'll give it a go without the buck first and see exactly what happens, who knows, it may throttle itself back and work quite happily but somehow I don't think so.

 

I think the batteries are going to pull as much as they can through the solar regulator and it will pull as much as it can from the power supply.

 

Pretty sure I have a spare 600watt buck laying around waiting on a project.:)

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Well I did hook one power supply up and it seems the power supply didn't smoke which is a good thing. It performed quite well outputting around 13amps max.

 

I'm thinking it gets to about 13amps on it's way to 20amps and then it cuts because the external ammeter was rising to 13amps and then starts to drop before ramping up to 13amps again at about 2 second intervals.

 

Not quite the 20amps I was after but watching the ammeter I would say I am getting a mean amperage of 10amps and that is 10amps after it has gone through the solar regulator.

 

I didn't have the right test equipment to really run proper testing to see if it is the power supply over loading and resetting causing this amp spiking or whether it is the solar regulator and it's normal operation as it drops voltage from the 18volts to 14.5.

 

I'm actually suspecting the first as the ammeter doesn't ramp up and down like it was when the solar panels are supplying the power to the regulator.

 

I found a Buck Inverter that may solve this problem should it be the power supply resetting....

 

https://www.banggood.com/DC-6-40V-To-1_2-36V-300W-20A-Constant-Current-Adjustable-Buck-Converter-Step-Down-Module-Board-p-1203369.html?rmmds=detail-left-hotproducts__3

 

20amps max it is rated at but I'll mount a PC fan on the heatsinks and see if I can adjust the current down to 18amps and set the voltage input at 18volts and the output to 16.5volts which should be enough for the solar regulator to work at a minimum shedding just 2volts but until it arrives I'll suffice with the 10 odd amps it appears to be supplying without a Buck in the circuit.

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