I would like to make my own heated clothing that could completely eliminate the need for heating my home (aside from making sure water pipes don't burst - they could potentially get their own heaters for that purpose). I would want it to be easy to power with a battery whilst moving around but also be able to plug it into a PC ATX power supply that already powers a few things in my bedroom.
I don't know how much power would be needed to stay comfortable in a cold UK winter with zero heating of the house but I'm willing to go through some iterations to get it right. I may start with a maximum power of something like 60 watts and of course I will wear plenty of insulation over the top. I am planning to use a PWM controller to drop the power to comfortable levels when 60 watts is too much.
The problem I'm hoping to address in this thread is that when I switch over to the battery, the power will vary a lot (up to 42% or 72% (depending on your perspective) for li-ion batteries) depending on the state of charge of the battery. Of course I could address this by using a buck or boost circuit as appropriate to keep a steady 12 V but that would mean wasting precious power in the conversion. I was wondering whether there was some simple solution (not as simple as just manually adjusting the PWM controller as the battery discharges; I'm not a savage!) that would automatically adjust the PWM controller according to the voltage of the battery?
Thanks for reading.
I don't know how much power would be needed to stay comfortable in a cold UK winter with zero heating of the house but I'm willing to go through some iterations to get it right. I may start with a maximum power of something like 60 watts and of course I will wear plenty of insulation over the top. I am planning to use a PWM controller to drop the power to comfortable levels when 60 watts is too much.
The problem I'm hoping to address in this thread is that when I switch over to the battery, the power will vary a lot (up to 42% or 72% (depending on your perspective) for li-ion batteries) depending on the state of charge of the battery. Of course I could address this by using a buck or boost circuit as appropriate to keep a steady 12 V but that would mean wasting precious power in the conversion. I was wondering whether there was some simple solution (not as simple as just manually adjusting the PWM controller as the battery discharges; I'm not a savage!) that would automatically adjust the PWM controller according to the voltage of the battery?
Thanks for reading.