Ghost Battery Gate Opener battery took a crap tonight it refused to close gave me three beeps

[stj]

i am willing to bet that the original charger if it is gell doesnt have a cutoff voltage,
it probably just slow-charges forever and lets the battery get rid of the excess through heat.

[sam_sam_sam]

I have not tested the voltage on the Ghost gate opener but I have done it on the Might Mule one and if I remember correctly it around 14.2 volts is when the yellow charging turns off and the voltage drops a little bit until it comes back on again when you open or close the gate I have to check the Ghost gate opener and see if it basically works the same way but I know that it is not cooking the battery because it is never even warm to the touch so I can assume that it is not destroying battery quickly now it degrading it because of it being a little bit high in voltage maybe or is just that the gate openers are hard on batteries this is my theory of why you only get a couple of years use out of a battery

[stj]

is the battery rated for the current draw?
maybe open the gate with a clamp-meter on the battery lead

[sam_sam_sam]

is the battery rated for the current draw?
maybe open the gate with a clamp-meter on the battery lead

I will have to that because now you have me wondering what kind-a-of current we are talking about

[stj]

if it's a screw-jack with a reduction gearbox then it could be more than you think.
i have experience with those on big sattelite dishes.

[sam_sam_sam]

if it's a screw-jack with a reduction gearbox then it could be more than you think.
i have experience with those on big sattelite dishes.

I will not have time to do anything about checking the amperage until the weekend because I have to set it up with my multi meter because I do not have a dc clamp meter that works anymore

[stj]

make sure it can handle atleast 20A
if it's 12v then it could be upto 15A running and much more inrush before it moves

[redwire]

Ghost Controls for solar it's a 10W or 30W panel need 6hrs of sun, and two 12V 7Ah batteries. And even then you don't get many gate cycles.
The AC power transformer is a big wall wart at 20VA so overall they seem to charge at 1-2A max. There is an optional ABBL battery box, for up to Group 27 car battery! Those are 100Ah so I don't get why they don't offer more charging power.

If motor draw is 10A for say 60 seconds cycle (30 open, 30 close) that's roughly 0.17Ah used each cycle. So a 7Ah battery is much less at high drain, so I guess 20 cycles max. and of course none of this is 100% efficient or brand new.
The charger would have to put in 1A for 15-20 minutes to recover one cycle.
My math seems a bit off. They say the motor is 5A and it's got polyfuses there, so the gate opener should do much better?

[stj]

a 7A gell battery is going to have a maximum charge current of about 1600mAH based on my datasheets.
go higher and you can dry them out.

[sam_sam_sam]

That sun chart for the state of Florida is bs because you would be lucky to maybe 10 cycles before it would start beeping to let you know that your battery is low unless is was very clear day no clouds in the sky you might get higher than that

[redwire]

That chart looks stupid - if you add dual solar panels you get fewer (half) the gate opening cycles? Seems wrong. You had one job.

At high drain, it's way less than 7Ah you get. 4.5A gives a 4.5Ah rating 65% only Powersonic PS-1270
I don't know if the LiPo4's Sam was going to put in have the same capacity loss at high drain like lead-acid does. Maybe UPS-rated are better.

[sam_sam_sam]

The lifepo4 battery cells that I was going to use are 1 amp hour @ 30 load capacity @ 3.2 volts these have orange heat shrink sleeve but do not have the A123 on them but according to Battery Hookup they are testing like the A123 systems battery cells I did a write up about in one of my previous posts a while back I bought 200 of them they were a very good price they were sold in lots of 100 in a box of 200 for a case of them they were $0.72 each

I was going to make a 10 amp hour battery pack with some of them but it will take two 12 volt 7 amp battery pack enclosures to accomplish this with the 3 BMS wire from each battery enclosure to an BMS protection balancing board and see if this battery pack will last longer than the lead gel battery that I have been using

Here is the website link for them

https://batteryhookup.com/products/c...42956739707042

[redwire]

Those batteries look like a good deal, I haven't switched over yet.

I looked at datasheets for (different brand) LiFePO4 18650 1,100mAh the discharge curve shows it does not make a big difference in capacity with high-rate discharges, unlike lead-acid. But you can't freeze them, if your gate opener gets cold like here.
It should work much better, even a 5,500mAh pack should be better than the original SLA I think.

chart from https://www.evlithium.com/LiFePO4-Ba...4-battery.html

[sam_sam_sam]

For the most part this true as long as the battery load capacity amperage ( not amperage hours ) is higher than your load if not it will drastically reduces your running time so it is important that you choose the correct battery for the load of the device that you plan on using for best performance and results

This is the reason I am very choose about what I use these batteries for because they have such high current capacity and not to use low current capacity for this project

I also have some low current capacity lifepo4 batteries for another project that does not require high current capacity batteries for that project

I will be putting ( high current capacity battery pack together ) this battery pack together very soon and I will post the results of it when I have it available