At 11:00 AM 12/16/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:
I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back into the secondary.
Take a hint. Fine to set it up and start it with batteries, but batteries are tricky to monitor, they don't easily show the exact state of the charge. Put together a capacitor bank with enough depth (farads) to cover the draw phase, and charge it up to the battery voltage. Then once you are running, take the battery out of the circuit. You can then directly monitor the power storage by monitoring the capacitor voltage. No guessing. You will know right away if you are over unity, and how much, or, if you are under unity, exactly how much you are under unity.
The larger the capacitance, the more even the available voltage will be. I'd think of making it really large, so you would not want to directly connect the battery to the capacitor, that can melt wires! You'd charge through a resistor. You could make all this part of one circuit, with a switch on the battery, or you could eliminate the battery and use a power supply which you then, once the thing is running, disconnect.
Unless, of course, you want a "demonstration" that looks reasonably good through the idea that a battery couldn't possible last this long. As another pointed out, pulse charging can make batteries last much longer than we might expect. But a capacitor won't lie.
