Battery Question

[Chuck Gedraitis Knives]

Ok I have a portable hummingbird fish finder and it takes 8AA batteries. Each are 1.5volts so in tandem they equal 12 volts I think? Can I just hook the unit to a 12V battery and be good to go?

The specs on Hummingbirds website says that the power input is 10-20VDC

The reason I ask is because I left the battery box in the car on a 90+degree day and some of the batteries got too hot and leaked acid onto the terminals in the battery box. I took it apart and cleaned all the terminals but it is just not working right.
The way it is set up now is there is just a battery box with 8 batteries in it, 2 rows of 4, each alternating with pos or neg down. There are 2 lead wires that run from the box to the fish finder unit. The unit takes 8AA non-rechargeable batteries. The were placed in a plastic box that had boards with springs and plates at either end for the batteries to run in sequence. You just replace them when they die. I was looking for an alternative power source that I could recharge, would be compact to take into a kayak with me.

The problem is when the batteries leaked the acid corroded all the terminals in the battery box making for poor connections. I cleaned the terminals but was still getting bad connections.

The unit works, I lined up all the batteries last night and touched the lead wires to the pos and neg ends and it turned on with no problem.

I called Hummingbird and they said with a different power cable $13 I can hook this unit up to a regular 12V battery. I also called a battery store and they said they have about 30 different 12V dc batteries that I could look at and find the one that would work for me.




I hook up my fish finder on my Kayak so less weight is good. They have one that 2.2lbs and that should do the trick, but maybe something smaller would fit behind the seat better.


I also found one 12V 3500mAh Flat NiMH Battery Pack for DC Power with Plug-in DC Charger

http://www.all-battery.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1590

Can I use this? A rechargeable power pack would be great and save $$$ on batteries. Should I hook it up with an inline fuse as well?

Thanks for any help,
Chuck

 

[Cougar Allen]

Can I use this? A rechargeable power pack would be great and save $$$ on batteries.

Yes. The voltage is within spec and 3500mAh will give you more runtime than you were getting with alkaline AAs.

Should I hook it up with an inline fuse as well?

That's easy to do and surely can't do any harm.

 

[65535]

Yep you can hook that upto any 12VDC source, car batteries, rechargeable 12V gel cells, 3 Cell Lithiums, 8-10 Cell NiCd or NiMH.

I would personally Recommend you use a 10 cell NiMH battery pack if you went with 1.2V rechargeable cells, this is because nominally (under load) the cells are rated at 1.2V and they are dead around 1V per cell, the unit is rated at 10-20VDC so 15V will not hurt it from a fresh charged pack and you'll get the full run time. Fuses are always a good idea with rechargeable batteries, alkaline batteries don't produce enough current to cause much damage, but new age rechargeable cells can cause fire ruin wire and do a lot of damage. Hope this helps.