new idea. (no alt with chargeing system)
 

The Idea is too Take a car with a carburetor like a honda crx with a manual fuel pump. And do a alternator delete and have a small 12v dc motor (like a electric fan motor) with a pulley and have the motor in place of the alt and a solar charge controller that connects to the battery.

So it would charge your battery back up but not be a big drain on FE
And we could also use a small permanet magnet motor that's a lot smaller then the fan motor and it would be even less of a drain on the FE

I want to name this "mini alt mod"

What do you guys think?

A load of X amount of watts is a load of X amount of watts. The size of the generator/alternator is irrelevant.

The solar panel will help though.

So you want to take an easily regulated, rather efficient, reliable alternator and remove it, then replace it with a less efficient generator then hook up an external voltage regulator to it?

Well ya in away but like it take less energy to turn a fan motor then it does a alt

Brent, if you had an orchard, would your first choice for harvest be a helicopter?

Not if the alternator and fan motor are spitting out the same amount of power.

How do you figure that? around 750 watts is one HP the rest of the mechanical energy that it takes to produce 750 watts is lost in the form of heat, if you put 1 hp of energy in to a wide range of generators and alternators you can measure the electrical output and see what you have for losses.

DC generators tend to be less efficient because they are mechanically rectifying the AC power to DC via the brushes and commutator, my understanding is that permanent magnet alternators and generators tend to have a narrower range of speed that they produce usable electricity at so you are going to have to have a gear ratio that spins your little generator faster to get 13.4v out of it, but at some point it's going to spin fast enough that it will just fly apart so don't spin it to fast! also the faster you spin it the more energy is going to be wasted in the bearings and just the friction of the parts moving in the air, so after you have those losses from using a permanent magnet DC generator you still have to regulate the voltage so you end up with more losses and when your battery reaches full charge your generator windings are still spinning inside of a magnetic field that you can not turn off.

well guys you made alot of points why this would not help back to the drawing board lol:D

Guys, to be fair there
ARE DC generators in the 90%+ efficiency area, higher than most any alternator, add a pwm "regulator" or a simple contactor on/off setup and it could be more efficient at delivering power although it may not keep up at idle.

I always figured this would be a good way to downsize the alternator, have a bigger battery and integrate solar as a method of keeping the battery alive while using the least power output.

Heck control it and charge during decel :)

Cheers

When I redid my Tempo accessory drive which slowed the alternator about half speed, I mused about also putting in a much smaller alternator such as found on lawn and garden equipment. Haven't really thought it through but there must also be some sort of micro-gain there too.