Winch power idea

[scotsdale83]

I came across people using capacitors in there car steros to help eliminate lights fading and other electrical problems with there big subwoofers amd amps. Would you be able to use something like this to help while winching?http://www.crutchfield.com/g_725/Capacitors.html?tp=739 Good idea? Bad idea? Not worth it?

 

[Mountain_man]

not worth it. A cap is designed to store a little more power when the other systems are at a low point. While winching you're not at a low point until you stop winching. A cap stores enough power to do about 2sec of "loaded" winching if that. It's really not at all worth the effort. In stereos the cap only helps on those extended base hits and continous hits. It does nothing for when you hear basically just highs and such. Why not just get a bigger alternator?

 

[scotsdale83]

The bigger alternator is the next plan. A buddy had a capacitor he was willing to give me.

 

[blazin_blazer]

i have 5farads of caps in my tahoe...they are meant for almost instantaneous unloading which wouldn't help a winch...my caps are also 24v surge...meaning when my amp puts a draw on them they ramp the voltage which will burn stuff up if its not meant for it, so theres a huge diode so it doesn't feed back into the electrical system and also an 1800 watt amp is rated at 12 or 13.5V, but when they get fed the 24v surge the amp becomes capable of 3600 watts, so you have to have good equipment or you will let the smoke out the box! its kinda double cheating- the 1800 watts is at 2 ohms from a 900 watt amp thats 1/2 ohm capable, but only gets wired 1/2 ohms for the sound offs, i listen to it at 2 ohm(1800/3600W) in 1/2 ohm its 7200W@12V add in the doubling of the V from the cap...i am in the under 1000W class w/almost 16000W on 2-18's & 4-12's...titanium coned CV's

 

[dremu]

Wow. I won't go into the various and sundry electrical impossibilities in this thread (including a capacitor generating voltage... doesn't matter if it's 12V max, 24V or 3kV, it's just a maximum rating past which ... oh, wait, I'm now going into them )

Anyway, a capacitor is more or less like a little battery... a very little one, so for a winch, it'd be no bloody good. For winching you need continuous power, which comes first from a big battery or big batteries, and then from a high-output alternator.

The capacitor does well for audio because it can supply momentary bursts -- but of *current*, not of voltage, and in fact keeps the voltage *steady* at the nominal 12V (13-point-whatever if the alternator is running.) Just like a battery, the energy in the capacitor must come from somewhere, so you still need a high-output alternator to drive audio.

Said another way, the capacitor acts as a filter; when the amps momentarily draw more power -- due to that horrendous bass-heavy crap you youngsters call "music", or preferably a very low chord in Bach's Tocatta & Fugue, say, or even Mark Knopfler doing his amazing thing with fridges and microwaves -- the capacitor fills the gap, keeping the supply voltage constant. It can't do it forever -- it does so for only fractions of a second at full load -- but it only needs to do so for short times.

-- A