Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Here's a thought for running the compressor that might be workable. Instead of running heavy wires all the way from the tractor to obtain 12V for the compressor, install another battery on the planter near the compressor. Attach that battery to the compressor. Then run lighter duty wires to the tractor. I'm assuming the compressor only runs on demand so the electrical load of running it is fairly substantial but not constant. With this plan, the battery is supplying the power to run the compressor when it is running which would draw the battery down some but it would be recharged in the mean time when the compressor is not running. This would keep the compressor and the Ag Leader systems completely separate which I think would be desirable.
I agree with the idea of avoiding drawing 12 Volts off of one of the 12V batteries that are connected in series to produce 24 volts for the Ag Leader system due to the uneven load. This might work for a while on a short term basis of infrequent use but I don't think it would be a good long term solution. Especially during planting season when down time is not an option.
This reminds me of the 24V system that Deere used on the early 4020's. They used two 12 Volt batteries wired in series to provide 24 volts for the starter. The batteries were directly connected and the starter did not use chassis ground as is usually done. There was a ground wire going to the chassis from the connection point where the positive terminal of one battery connected to the negative terminal of the other battery. That meant that one battery was -12V in reference to the chassis and the other battery was +12V to the chassis.
This allowed them to run some lights off one battery and others off the other battery. This is why the light switch was so complex as they did this all within one switch. By having some lights on each battery, the load was close to equal. A consequence of this could happen if there was a certain type of problem with the starter where it became connected to chassis ground. This would then burn out the light duty wire that was attached between the two batteries. This meant that the lights could receive 24 V. The lights were really bright but soon burned out.
Another situation with those tractors was that after market cabs were often installed. These cabs usually had a 12V fan in them. If the fan was run off only one battery, it would cause the imbalance as mentioned above. The fan was often wired with a more complex switch so that with the toggle in the center the fan was OFF. With the switch to the left, the fan ran off one battery and with the switch to the right it ran off the other battery. An old rule of thumb when using the tractor was to flip the switch to the other battery each time you turned around.in a manual attempt to even out the load on the batteries. Fortunately this was all eliminated when Deere went away from the 24V system.
Edited by tedbear 2/12/2021 07:48
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converting 24v to 12v
