Charging Off Grid Batteries With A Welder? (NO! There Is A Better Way!) 

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Hi, I'm Carlin.
Welcome to The Daily Ranch Rant Show!
Sometimes referred to as Ranch Rants - A Not Very Daily Video Broadcast.
I live off grid, and sometimes I have stuff to Rant about,
but usually not every day. When it happens, it'll be here!
I might lightly edit these, I'll try to keep them short... short ish?
I'll be dropping these randomly inbetween my normal video content.
What ever Normal means, right?
Anyway, let me know if you like these, maybe I'll make more of them.
And now, On with the Rant!
Thought Experiments lead to Solutions...
could that be an interesting video?
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This starts off as kind of a Thought Experiment.
Rather than actually hooking up wires to see what would happen,
we'll just start with an idea, and then think about it for a while,
maybe do some google searches,
calculations, and see if it seems practical.
I remember once my Dad saying something along the lines of...
Technically you could use a welder as a battery charger.
As a kid, all I could imagine is all the arcing and sparking,
I didn't comprehend the concept of power as volts and amps.
First, I found the welder owners manual for my MIG Welder.
Technical Specs
Power Supply 120V 20 Amps
No Load Voltage 69 Volts DC
Output Range 30-140 Amps DC
Duty Cycle 30% at 90 Amps
Ok that's interesting.
I couldn't hook it directly to a 12 volt battery,
but my MPPT charge controller can handle 100 volts and 30 amps DC
So in theory I could see a welder as a power supply
to charge the batteries.
For now, I think there is probably a better way.
But first, why do we want this?
I live off grid. That means I don't have power lines coming to my house.
I create my own power out here, mostly from Solar Panels.
I do sometimes use a generator, when I don't have enough solar.
Welding is the only time I use the generator now.
But sometimes if we get a few days of cloudy weather,
my batteries start to run down.
I now have 4 of the 100 amp hour lithium iron phosphate batteries now.
You'll see that sometimes abbreviated as LiFePO4
Li for Lithium Fe for Iron and PO for Phosphate.
If I'm looking to charge my batteries,
they'd probably be pretty low.
So lets say I'm starting from zero, so I'd need 400 amp hours.
Literally, if I needed 400 amp hours,
and I had a 15 amp battery charger,
we could divide 400 by 15 and see it would take 26.66 hours to fully charge.
Now, I'll probably be charging before we get to zero,
but the idea of running a generator for a full day isn't why I moved out here.
I like the quiet! I really hate generators.
I don't have a truck anymore,
so I'd have to ride my electric bike to town
about 24 miles round trip,
and then haul gas home on a bumpy road.
The generator can provide a lot of power,
so rather than running it for 24 hours,
what we need is a bigger battery charger.
Like, if we could do 100 amps, I could fully charge in 4 hours.
That's a lot more reasonable.
Well, I figure I get about 15 to 20 amps of charge from solar most days,
for about 6 hours of peak solar.
Since normally my batteries aren't dead,
I'm probably using about as much power as I'm generating.
If I generate 15 amps for 6 hours of solar, that's 90 amp hours.
So if I had one of the 100 amp hour batteries,
that would last a day.
By having 4 of the 100 amp hour batteries, I could run 2 or 3 days
and still be in good shape.
If I had a 100 amp hour charger,
I could add enough to the batteries in an hour
to run all day.
I have about 300 days of sun a year out here,
so since I upgraded to the Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries,
I've not needed to charge the batteries with the generator.
When I'm welding, I start the generator just to run the welder,
a minute or two later, I shut the generator off again,
until the next weld is ready.
So that gas lasts quite a while.
I think I found a pretty good option for a battery charger.
Prices are reasonable even.
I'll check into it and get back to you soon,
be sure to subscribe
and look for part 2 coming soon!
Thanks as always for all the support
and for watching the video to the very end,
it really does help!
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Thank You!
It seems that a lot of my life out here is just
in hacking things together to get them to work.
Thanks for reading, and watching the videos.
Ranch Rants?
So I had this awesome idea, I was going to do a quick little Daily Video show.
Then after a few weeks I realized I usually don't have much to say
first thing in the morning!
And as always, thanks for supporting local independent video producers!