Folks who know me are familiar with my running battle against "entropy"
This is a picture of one of my two "franken lights" I began with a common solar driveway lamp and heavily modified it. The goal for back when I still played pick-up basket ball was to avoid my rain ditches while finding my driveway in the dark.
The major modification was to cobble together two solar battery charging panels in series to capture more sunlight energy, so lights would last later into the night. Another mod was I changed the inductor that sets LED light current. This made the discharge current lower so the modern high efficiency LEDs would stay lit longer. Another tweak was replacing the stock rechargeable battery with more mAhrs.
I am revisiting this franken lamp after years of reliable duty because I have noticed that one lamp is going dark sooner than the other. My first test was to pull the batteries and top them off with my bench charger. Night one both lamps were lit past my bedtime but that doesn't tell me much, night two one lamp crashed hours earlier than the other. For today's troubleshooting experiment #2 I have swapped the two batteries between units. It is currently raining and overcast but the franken lights with 2x solar panels can still gain some charge during cloudy weather. Tonight I will see if the same side goes dark early, if the problem follows the battery over to the other side that will suggest the easy remedy (replace battery). These batteries are 3 years old so maybe.... It isn't obvious what kind of fault could still work partially?
More troubleshooting to follow.
JR
For my purposes I redefine entropy as "everything breaks, sooner or later" and needs fixin...www said:
This is a picture of one of my two "franken lights" I began with a common solar driveway lamp and heavily modified it. The goal for back when I still played pick-up basket ball was to avoid my rain ditches while finding my driveway in the dark.
The major modification was to cobble together two solar battery charging panels in series to capture more sunlight energy, so lights would last later into the night. Another mod was I changed the inductor that sets LED light current. This made the discharge current lower so the modern high efficiency LEDs would stay lit longer. Another tweak was replacing the stock rechargeable battery with more mAhrs.
I am revisiting this franken lamp after years of reliable duty because I have noticed that one lamp is going dark sooner than the other. My first test was to pull the batteries and top them off with my bench charger. Night one both lamps were lit past my bedtime but that doesn't tell me much, night two one lamp crashed hours earlier than the other. For today's troubleshooting experiment #2 I have swapped the two batteries between units. It is currently raining and overcast but the franken lights with 2x solar panels can still gain some charge during cloudy weather. Tonight I will see if the same side goes dark early, if the problem follows the battery over to the other side that will suggest the easy remedy (replace battery). These batteries are 3 years old so maybe.... It isn't obvious what kind of fault could still work partially?
More troubleshooting to follow.
JR
