Case car lighter technical info :-D

[acemcmac]

I was playing around with a car lighter assembly that I ripped from a rental car after I noticed the LanLi style ones being offered on 5.25? bezels on some vendor sites. I?ve been curious about these for a while, as they can be used to power mini refrigerators such as the 48 watt Coldmate for LAN?s or any number of cell phone chargers (true wireless internet anyone)?

Anyhow, to make a long story short, I?ve heard a lot of the concerns about having such a ?high-draw? device in the same enclosure and on the same power supply as your precious components.

Here?s some food for thought
12v power line
3 million ohm?s of resistance from the closed switch that is the lighting mechanism.

Applied to Ohm?s law (Voltage = Resistance x Current), this yields 2e-9 (0.000002) amps producing a draw of 2.4e-8 (0.000024) watts. Apparently there is some truth to the claim that these devices are safe for computers. There?s one running in mine right now, and even when its running, its taking less power than any of my 4 drives.

Now all you have to do is cool it 🙂

 

[acemcmac]

After further testing, i have concluded that these statistics, which reflect the device under full load, do not reflect the entire situation. Initially, before the current goes in the toilet and the resistance goes through the roof, the resistance starts at a nearly insignificant value and the current starts at a much higher value... one which regrettably, i have been unable to ascertain yet. So basically, what you have is a load, probably in the neighborhood of 40-50 watts that over a period of about 20 seconds descents into the infinitesimal as resistance shoots through the roof. What does this mean? This means that the ad on the website really needs a disclaimer for its power consumption, but simultaneously, if you can support an extra 50w load, now you can take a dc refrigerator to a LAN and circumvent power restrictions among many other useful toys.

I hope someone finds this info useful.