Help Calculating time to recharge air tanks

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by MrBasse

The thing that everyone always seems to overlook is that adding more tanks won't make your compressor run less. It will just run for a longer period of time less times.

Kids always stress over the need to have ten tanks on the robot and then they complain that the compressor runs for the whole match. When we reduce it to three or four tanks, the compressor may run twice a match, but for only 15-20 seconds each time. Unless you need to dump 80 cubic inches of air at a time, you rarely need 80 cubic inches of storage.

To add to this (quite correct) post: the only upside (that I can see) to lots of storage is that one can start the match with a lot of stored energy. This effectively increases the total power that the pneumatic system can expend over the duration of the match.