Powering a car stereo from ebike battery

[toxictoad]

Hey,

I am in the ideas\research stage of a project that I wish to start. The objective is to customise a Fat Bike and add a car stereo to it.

The idea of cruising around the city on a fat bike booming out tunes made me smile and this is what I'm planning to do.

I first started thinking that I could put a car battery, stereo and speakers into a bike trailer. It would be simple, but after speaking to ones of the guys in a local shop that sells car batteries & stereos, this doesn't seem to be such a good idea. I was told that even the better batteries would only power a stereo for a couple of hours.

So I thought, surely the battery on my kit (not the fat bike) would be better than that.

However I know very little (about anything lol) so here I am.

The battery I use on my other bike is a Samsung 36v 15Ah (bought with a 8fun 350w BPM front motor). If I was to use that battery in the same fashion as the car battery setup (not connected to an ebike motor\kit), would it work and how long would it power a stereo? I guess that I would need some kind of converter to go from 36v to 12v?

Are there other things to consider that I haven't mentioned?

Thanks

 

[wesnewell]

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1311.R1.TR11.TRC2.A0.H1.Xbuck+converter.TRS0&_nkw=buck+converter&_sacat=0

 

[toxictoad]

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1311.R1.TR11.TRC2.A0.H1.Xbuck+converter.TRS0&_nkw=buck+converter&_sacat=0

Thanks, I was looking at those.
If I was to connect this stereo http://bit.ly/1MGUa0x and these speakers http://bit.ly/1J7MGzO, any idea how long it would run them?

 

[markz]

Why bother, just get a personal player with an external speaker. Or go Sirius XM, they sell small units.

 

[e-beach]

You could step it down to 12v which is what you car stereo runs on. Or you could wire our battery pack to have a 12v outlet.

As far as the watts used, you would probably have to put an rc watt meter inline to see what you are using for your music.

The reason the car stereo guys said that your battery is not the best way to go is that car batteries have much more available amp hours then e-bike batteries generally do.

I am in the camp that thinks a boom box or portable satellite radio with it's own batteries and self powered speakers would be a better idea.

 

[wesnewell]

Thanks, I was looking at those.
If I was to connect this stereo http://bit.ly/1MGUa0x and these speakers http://bit.ly/1J7MGzO, any idea how long it would run them?

Well, your 15ah 36V pack is 540wh and a typical car battery is ~800wh, so about 2/3 as long as a typical car battery. Now if you can find out how many watts your radio uses, you can figure it out, but I think that's going to be variable depending on how much you turn the volume up.

 

[dogman dan]

For sure, todays car stereos will eat your battery up fast, much as cruising at 800w will. But you could get a 70s-80s era rig that runs on 50-100 watts. You'd be able to hear it, but not people half a mile away.

On country rides, with less car hum, I can ride along listening to my ipod play through a small portable speaker. Not loud, but I don't want a boom bike. Just able to hear some jazz without a headphone. My setup is the tiny Bluetooth speaker thing, with internal battery that plays for hours. I doubt it's even 10 watts.

Anyway, my point is unless you want a boom bike that annoys everybody but you, you might look into devices that can play an ipod. You don't need to lug a full blown cd player, you just need some power speakers. Computer speakers, whatever. Then the converter to run it on whatever voltage it needs.

 

[toxictoad]

Thanks for the input.

I'm not dead set on having a car stereo setup, I was actually thinking it might be a cheaper option than buying a portable speaker (when thinking music output) to connect to my player but due to the power consumption and therefore a powerful battery and the complications that come with it, maybe not...unless it was just for show. For example, there was an event last year and another next month, Sky Ride (http://www.goskyride.com) where the main roads in the city centre are closed to normal traffic and they say there was about 6000 cyclists out that day. I could see myself kitting up the bike just for that

I'll keep looking into it and as I want to make the fat bike electric, I'm sure I'll be back with more questions.

 

[markz]

I bought a 2x battery from Anker for my Samsung S3 or it might be S4 cant remembr, can use a small speaker on it and its just fine.
You can buy small speakers with batteries to help the boom factor.

 

[toxictoad]

I've got a bluetooth portable speaker...it's output is ok, when indoors.

Today wasn't a good day to test it due to the rain & wind but as I had it with me I thought I'd try it but had to keep it in my backpack. It was no good, could hardly hear it. Hopefully on my ride along the canal after work tomorrow I'll cable tie it to the headset where it fits just nice and see if it will work.

This way might be good enough for this type of thing but I am definitely wanting it loader and a lot more bass (I'm a DnB head!). The end objective (a booming sound system) isn't for everyday use but for big events like I mentioned it will stand out from the crowd...There's also a gathering of motorheads in a Sainsbury's car park not from from me where I've heard them revving their engines and turning up the bass bins...rolling past them on my booming fat bike will be a laugh

No one said I could hook up more than one car battery for twice the power! 2 batteries, 2 hours each...I'd probably get bored after 4 hours lol.

 

[e-beach]

I don't know about your town, but around here if you are "cool" you ride a fixie. as a follow-up, I saw for the third time in a couple of week that the coolist of the 'cool-cats' on their fixie's are riding with a large radio in a cloth back-pack (ruck sack). The radios look to be about 10-12 inchs long, and a few inches high, but I can't tell for sure because they are in a back pack.

Today, the third guy I saw had a small exterior speaker strapped to the front of the straps of his back pack. It placed the speakers about chest level. The speaker was in a box and looked to be about 3 inches square.

 

[e-beach]

I don't know about your town, but around here if you are "cool" you ride a fixie. as a follow-up, I saw for the third time in a couple of week that the coolist of the 'cool-cats' on their fixie's are riding with a large radio in a cloth back-pack (ruck sack). The radios look to be about 10-12 inchs long, and a few inches high, but I can't tell for sure because they are in a back pack.

Today, the third guy I saw had a small exterior speaker strapped to the front of the straps of his back pack. It placed the speaker about chest level. The speaker was in a box and looked to be about 3 inches square.

 

[markz]

Fixies are un-cool in my books, but then again anyone riding a bike is alright in my books!

 

[danielrlee]

The majority of car stereos are horribly inefficient - don't go down that route. I could speak for ages on the subject, but I'll keep this post short. Take a look at class D amplifiers with a TA2020 chipset (or TK2050 if you really need the extra power, which you shouldn't). The key to an efficient sound system is high sensitivity speakers with a low powered amp. You'd be surprised how much noise you can make with 10W.

Alternatively, I personally recommend a Pasce Minirig with Minirig Subwoofer, a truly astounding portable setup and worth every penny.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the power source.... The magic thing about class D amps and their ultra high efficiency, is that they can be powered directly from your bike pack with a regular 12v buck converter and will make next to no difference in regards to power consumption compared to your bike motor.

 

[bionicdan]

I use an alpine pdx 600 digital amp running a 12 inch solo baric square kicker sub on my home cinema. It runs from a 20ah 12v lifepo4 battery. After shaking my huge house for an hour its only used about 5ah max. It was so loud my neighbour who is detached but close by put poison on his stove fire and nearly killed me.

I bet its the biggest bang for your Watt Hour but definitely not cheap gear. These subs need the smallest enclosure in their class I believe. My 12" sub blew out the back window of its previous owners car.

http://www.caraudiodirect.co.uk/subwoofers/10-inch-subs-25cm/kicker-11s10l34-solobaric-10-l3-dual-4-subwoofer

http://www.caraudiocentre.co.uk/product_m-alpine-mrx-t15_p-27157.htm?gclid=CjwKEAiA9uaxBRDYr4_hrtC3tW8SJAD6UU8GuOGYxJhB2C2nlJOle5l-GW5Uv2fEnh17fPxFozQN8RoComzw_wcB

If you get a trimode capable amp it will run the sub and two full range speakers via an external cross over thingy

Alpine often run 11-16v so you could use a small 4 cell lipo for 40 minutes of noise charged to 4v per cell max. Or 3 cell lipos that wont discharge lower than 3.66v which could be handy for safety. would give you good practise and ready you for building your own pack one day perhaps.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__56840__Multistar_High_Capacity_4S_5200mAh_Multi_Rotor_Lipo_Pack.html

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__62884__MultiStar_High_Capacity_3S_5200mAh_Multi_Rotor_Lipo_Pack.html

 

[amberwolf]

I don't use it on a bike, or in a car, but I am using a car stereo amp (actually it's a quad amp, but one channel was blown when I got it used) run from a 4s Thundersky 60Ah pack on my music composition studio setup.
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=72867

I don't run it really loud, but it does put out volume if I wanted it, using a rather large single-boxed-set of speakers, which are kinda muddy-sounding but have some bass. It's far better with an old pair of Acoustic Research speakers in independent boxes, but there's not as much bass with those; have to have a separate sub with them.

I don't recommend switching supplies / DC-DC converters to run the amp; I've tried a number of them to run this amp off the wall supply, but all of them add way too much noise to the system, even with various filtering schemes.

Running it right off the 12v pack works perfectly with no induced noise.

Would be nice with a better amp, but I already have this one, and it has an "auto eq" feature that helps to set it to the room's characteristics and the speakers in use, saving quite a bit of time setting it up when I change things.

 

[MlGCanada]

:lol: I'm running a 20w 2 channel amplifier with aux and red and white inputs off Amazon for 12$ cad and a 300w alpine 2 channel car amplifier bridged with 8 inch subwoofer I get head light flicker on bass drop but I shake the block and you can hear my speakers from half a mile away but I still make around 80kms a charge on my emmo zone with 72v 30 ah battery ripping 70k with no pedaling involved