Lead acid batteries

Moseph

Moseph

Veteran
do lead acid batteries discharge on their own or are they pretty good at maintaining a charge for a prolonged period of time? (the lead acid battery that im talking about is a bescor MM-7 and an HP-3 as a backup if that makes any difference).
 
They discharge 3%-5% a month. Do not leave them in discharged state, or they can be damaged.
HTH
 
Don't fully drain it either, that just kills it... I use one for my Andromeda system in the field, for now, till I can afford smaller lighter Anton Bauer batteries.
 
I'm not sure batteries are the best solution for powering lights. My jump starter battery can give me 400 watts AC, but it only provides 400 watts for like 25 minutes before you just kill the battery. A quite genny might be a better bet.
 
If you run lights on DC you'll get a much better yield than if you invert the DC and run AC fixtures. DC is especially conducive to LED lights.

I built a fixture that runs on 6V batteries, it runs 6 4W T5 5" fluorescent lamps (600+ lumens balanced tungsten or daylight), enough to light a small area like a tent or cave. It's perfect for shooting at night in the field, without getting that "we only had a vidled" look. The whole thing draws about 3A at 6V, so I can get about two full hours out of my battery packs, and I can run them off of D-cell batteries from the store if I don't have time to charge.

Someone is going to come up with the LED&battery equivalent of redheads in our lifetime, and they are going to be very rich.
 
Thats true, the DC to AC adapter (which is built into my jump starter) is less efficient (but I need it for the camera and computer gear I use). How do you wire up your battery? Did you just buy an outlet and wire it up to the battery? My jump starter also has 12V DC out, so maybe I could buy one of the plugs and rig it up to an outlet....

Any tips?
 
http://batteries4broadcast.com/index.htm

This looks promising... though I don't have any user reviews. Given the price, I'm sorely tempted to buy a bare bones package for my camera. If you to B&H, you can buy generic mounts that you could wire an outlet up to if you wanted to use these for lights. 150 watts is the max you'll get from the biggest battery (which will give you one hour of run time).
 
I just wired things up directly, but since then I've learned that 12v is normally carried on 4-pin XLR cables, so I'll be retrofitting my kits with those eventually.

I wouldn't use a household outlet, you could really confuse someone running DC through that. Also, when comparing batteries, you should probably be comparing Amp hours, all other things being equal.

Personally I buy sealed gel-acid batteries for lights. Trying to run lights on lithium is too expensive for me right now. If you build a 12v kit, batteries like this:
http://www.batterywholesale.com/battery-store/proddetail.html?prodID=377
have a much better price/performance ratio (but they're also heavy).
With 18Ah (or 18,000mAh), you're only paying $35. I have a battery store in my hometown that could get me that battery for even less.
 
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