General > General Technical Chat

Cooling electronics

<< < (2/2)

coppercone2:
any reasonable ambient temperature save the death valley desert will be drastically more power efficient with greater flow then any sort of cooling technology to cool a smaller airflow

if you need active cooling for a restricted air flow it means the systems engineer fucked up

the suggestion to go from 80mm to bigger fans will be like turning summer into winter for your inverter. Try 100 or 120mm. The extra sun shield idea is also good. Furthermore bright highly reflective, white paint might be the easiest solution.

indeterminate:
I have a couple of inverters mounted in a cabinet of similar size to you
there are two low speed fans that cum on @ 40c via a thermostat switch you can see in the upper right.
The second thermostat switch turns on the other four fans if the cabinet temp exceeds 50c
at the base of the cabinet are eight 60mm holes with fly wire covering
the fans are powered by the din rail mount 12v power supply, its been running happily for the past nine years.

5U4GB:

--- Quote from: SeanB on February 18, 2024, 07:22:18 pm ---Have seen a bank of Sunny Boy inverters at a large commercial solar install that have, in the locked wire mesh enclosure that protects them, a trio of Big Ass fans that provide extra cooling for them,

--- End quote ---

Note that in a lot of cases you don't need huge amounts of forced-air cooling but just anything that's better than natural convection cooling.  I haven't actually taken readings for this so don't have hard data, this is just from experience, but even the woosiest fan providing at least some air movement will give you a huge leap over natural convection, after which you only get comparatively small increments in cooling with increased fan power and noise.  So anything is better than no fan at all, you don't necessarily need an industrial-grade ventilator to see benefits.

rthorntn:
Thanks!

I should reiterate that my inverters are off-grid, they have active cooling, the main problem is that the two tiny fans inside are garbage and there is only minimal heatsinking.

These 3 spare parts are pretty much the whole inverter:

https://maximumsolar.online/product/5048mgx-fan-set/
https://maximumsolar.online/product/5048mg-mainboard/
https://maximumsolar.online/product/hv2-5048-mppt-board/

So it's cheap and nasty and does the job but the enclosure is too small for two of these and the 80mm enclosure fans don't move enough air.

The enclosure is pretty crammed, there is no real depth to put bigger fans in there, I got my estimated depth of 20cm wrong, it's more like 12cm.  I could put thin 120mm computer fans behind the vent on the enclosure door but thin fans tend to be weak.

I can't just put a bigger enclosure there, the wall is pretty crammed.

I could shade it or build a bit of a lean-to shed over it.  It's already on the shady side of the house.

coppercone2:
the easiest way is to make like a shell that you screw on to the unit with bigger fans in it and cut holes in the old enclosure

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod