Well, I have had a new interest sparked lately. I have been having a discussion on DIY Live Forums about generators, and charging batteries with a generator. I will admit at the beginning that this is new knowledge of mine, but I decided to just do some out loud brainstorming. I discussed on the forums that I know how to convert a sin wave into DC. That is pretty easy to do, and can be accomplished by using a full wave rectifier. For those of you that don’t know, this is simply a series of diodes that convert the negative part of the sin wave into a positive wave. With the help of a capacitor, you can make a fairly clean DC voltage.
Anyway, I am not sure exactly how to make a portable gas powered generator to make a 60 hz sin wave. I wanted to get some input from my readers to explain this. I will do some research and find out, and I will post my findings. Come discuss it on the forums.
As far as the picture you see, this is one way of making your own generator. (This is what I was researching). They used a lawnmower engine, and an alternator that has a built internal voltage regulator to charge a bank of 3 car batteries. They then connected a DC/AC inverter to the batteries to power small things like tvs and stuff. This is a simple and effective DIY project. The problem is that this power inverter is pretty inefficient. Check out this lawnmower generator here.
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