Opening up Battery Chargers?

[ryaneogilvie]

I have been working on a new battery charging station for our team. I'm trying to get it as small possible while storing 8 batteries. I had seen 2177's cart and saw that they had opened up their chargers. They mounted the light circuit board of the charger up front and the charging circuit in the back.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/35787
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=86130)

I was wondering if anyone thought that it would be dangerous to open up/modify the chargers. It would be advantageous for us to open up the chargers, but I wanted to make sure it would be safe to do so. We are planning to make the charging station out of .09 aluminum sheet metal.

[Jon Stratis]

It can be dangerous, depending on the implementation. There are really two items to consider:

1. What happens in the case of a short?
2. What happens with all the heat that is generated by the circuit board?

For 1, we built ours in wood box, which should prevent any real chance of getting shocked by a short. If you build yours in a metal box, you'd really want to be careful with this, especially since it's a box that'll move around a fair amount.

For 2, we built in plenty of air space around the chargers, and included filtered fans to help keep the area well ventilated.

And finally for both, there is a master off switch that will kill power to the entire cart, in the event of an emergency.

So, safety first! We've had the cart now through 3 seasons, and the only issue we've had was when one of the chargers managed to get itself unplugged, forcing us to open up the back to plug it back in. We also perform a maintenance check once each year to make sure everything still looks ok.