[Ziggythewiz]

Has anyone used a camera to monitor their battery charger?

My charger pulls about 12 amps while charging, and about 10% of that while 'off'. If I leave it plugged in from get home to leave home that's ~16 hours, with the charge taking 7-8, so the majority of the time it's not doing anything useful, but is pulling over an amp continuous anyway.

I'm planning to install a dedicated charging circuit and would like to make a switch to turn off the charger from inside the house, and need a means of viewing the charge status also from inside. It could be incredibly low resolution as I just need to be able to recognize a charge percentage or 'CC'.

Any good (relatively easy/cheap) solutions out there?

Wireless would be preferred, but is not required (I can plug in a cat5 or coax along with the charging cord).

 

[rwaudio]

there are some small and inexpensive cameras with wireless video senders for RC airplane/car use one of those might work. but your solution is still a very manual one, I would think a system that turns off the charger automatically when it goes below a certain current draw would be more useful. Or even a simple timer (like for block heaters or lights etc) that way you just give it a little extra time to make sure it's charged and let it turn off the charger. There still might be some idle time, but it would be less than the full 16 hours.

 

[dtbaker]

if you have a good grip on how long its going to charge based on miles driven, just put it on a manual timer... I had to do this toward the end of FLA life because it never reached the final voltage to tell charger it was done. I had to manually click off to prevent it from cooking along in the de-sulph phase and never finishing....

 

[Ziggythewiz]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'll hadn't thought to look at RC plane cams. Even with a timer I'll want to be able to easily check charge status, just to make sure I'm always getting fully charged.

Any good suggestions for a cheap timer that is grounded and can handle 20-30 amps?

 

[pm_dawn]

You could use a timer and a 20-30A AC motor contactor.

Use the cheap timer to control the contator engage input.

Regards
/Per