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Solar NiMH AA Charger

S

slackwarelinux

Senior member
Its a slow weekend and I feel like building a Solar NiMH charger and I want some advice.

I have two 16ma 3 volt solar cells, and I am going to try to hook them up in parallel to some NiMH AAs to charge them. I am thinking about adding in some sort of diode to prevent discharge at night. According to my calculations, this means it will take about two weeks to charge a pair of 1600ma AA batteries (I don't get much daylight in Alaska).

Anyways, I just thought I should get a sanity check and make sure none of this would blow up in my face. I am also hoping that some people with formal education in Electrical Engineering will have something insightful to say. Any ideas?
 
To charge batteries like that, it is best to supply them with a constant current, of upto about 0.1C (which means 10% of their total capacity - in this case, 160mA)

You sure they're 16mA, that seems small, even for solar cells.

If you put a diode in series with the batteries, it will drop the panels output by 0.6V (to about 2.4V) Also, remember that niMH and NiCad batteries discharge at about 10%-20% per month.

RoD
 
Originally posted by: slackwarelinux
Its a slow weekend and I feel like building a Solar NiMH charger and I want some advice.

I have two 16ma 3 volt solar cells, and I am going to try to hook them up in parallel to some NiMH AAs to charge them. I am thinking about adding in some sort of diode to prevent discharge at night. According to my calculations, this means it will take about two weeks to charge a pair of 1600ma AA batteries (I don't get much daylight in Alaska).

Anyways, I just thought I should get a sanity check and make sure none of this would blow up in my face. I am also hoping that some people with formal education in Electrical Engineering will have something insightful to say. Any ideas?
Click to expand...


I doubt it will blow in your face. But if you are not getting a lot of sun in locale why bother building a solar powered battery charger? Dude, just get the regular charge and plug it in. It'll probably cost cheaper than the solar cells!
 
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