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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Electrical lesson
Posted By: Vic Roy
Date: Monday, 25 April 2005, at 8:16 p.m.
Well, since it's raining and cold (59.9, and that's COLD here for this time of year), thought I'd share an observation. I had bought the Igloo Kool Mate 24 thermoelectic cooler on ebay new and it works great on 12VDC. So I was hunting around for a 120VAC adapter to run it off when the genset is going, or at the dock,or in a hotel room. Walmart.com had one for $21, 6 amp 12VDC output vs. the Igloo 5.8 amp one for $50, probably made in the same Chinese factory, so got the Wally World one via the Brown Truck today.
Nice compact little transformer/rectifier unit and will be handy for charging cell phones, etc, or anything that needs less than 6 amps regulated 12VDC. So I hooked it up to the Igloo, shot everything with the infrared heat gun to get a base point, and let it run for a while. The little Igloo box is pretty amazing, pulling the empty box down from an ambiant of 74 to 43 in less than a half an hour. After running for 3 hours the cold air output in the interior is 33. Will keep the boudin rouge for a week for sure.
Anyway, the point of this ramble is that the 12VDC output of the transformer is a female cig. lighter socket that the cooler plugs into, and the joint seemed hot to me, so I shot it with the heat gun and the shell of the output female recepticle was running about 120-122 and the male plug from the cooler about 100. The vents on the top of the transformer were running about 115. Since the plug was running cooler than the recepticle, I figured there must be some resistance in there creating the heat. Both units are brand new out of the box. Soooooo- did what I always do, shot both sides with CX, let it sit a few seconds to drip out and pluged the cooler back in. Well, maybe some other stuff may have worked too, like Penetrox conductive grease, but I've been shooting the female shell for a half hour and it has not gotten above 106, a big drop you can easily feel by hand. The cooler is a few degrees cooler. The vents on the top of the transformer are now up to 125, indicating its carrying a bigger load.
Moral here? There are potential signifigant losses in 12 VDC systems due to high resistance connections, whether they be dry plugs, bad crimps, loose screws, corroded connections. Two squirts of CX improved the performace of this little system by a good 20%. When is the last time you shot CX on every 12VDC joint, breaker, light bulb, radio plug, battery terminal, etc on your boat?
I know, I'm the walking, talking salesman for Corrosion X, but the stuff is magic in a can, and I just proved it again.
UV
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