On board AV

[terah]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

My 32” Samsung and the Sat receiver only draw 35W together, I have them plugged into a Watts UP Meter and can see the power draw.
I think the receiver drew about 8 watts, leaving roughly 25 W for the TV.
Lots lower that I thought. Seems to low, but that is what the meter says, and it has always been accurate before.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

I personally use a 32" Samsung via 230v AC (because the power supply is internal). I have my inverter on all the time anyway so it's no big deal to run it from AC power. YMMV.

So on a fairly unscientific comparison between your two 32" Samsungs, if @a64pilot's is drawing ~25W DC, any idea what yours draws through the inverter @dockhead?

Particularly interested as I think 32" is the ideal size and I like Samsung screens.

Appreciate this is a little academic until I do a proper power budget but I'm moving up from a 30' with pretty simply electronics to a 45' with a lot of toys on it so it all helps get a better understanding.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

On my boat, I use an ultra cheap fanless low powered microscopically tiny PC, powered by DC, mounted behind the nav table and operated using a wireless keyboard/mouse. This is my ship's computer, and I can use either a monitor mounted at the nav table or the TV on the salon bulkhead. Works great and uses minimal amounts of power. I use this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bqeel-x5-Z8.../dp/B06XH2CJDL

The appeal of the RPi's is price and power usage, and I have a few dotting around the house already. That said, the Bqeel looks pretty nice and at a price that would justify having a spare on board. Any issues with it?

Originally Posted by CatNewBee

you can try also Kodi. great SW, runs on any OS. (open source, check out kodi.tv). You can use even cheep android boxes if you want to.

Plex and Kodi both had origins in XBMC, which I messed around with years ago. I've used Plex for a while at home and really like it - haven't found any format it can't cope with. I'll have a look at Kodi too though to compare.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by terah

So on a fairly unscientific comparison between your two 32" Samsungs, if @a64pilot's is drawing ~25W DC, any idea what yours draws through the inverter @dockhead?

Particularly interested as I think 32" is the ideal size and I like Samsung screens.

Appreciate this is a little academic until I do a proper power budget but I'm moving up from a 30' with pretty simply electronics to a 45' with a lot of toys on it so it all helps get a better understanding.



The appeal of the RPi's is price and power usage, and I have a few dotting around the house already. That said, the Bqeel looks pretty nice and at a price that would justify having a spare on board. Any issues with it?



.

My Victron inverter is nominally about 94% efficient, so presumably 25 watts would cost something like 2 watts of efficiency loss.

But wait -- it's not linear. So if I turn on the inverter just for the TV -- the cost will be more. OR, if the inverter is on anyway, then the cost is almost nothing.

But in any case, we're talking about single digit watts.


The Bqeel is like any number of similar cheap "media computers". Works fantastic; no issues. Remarkably good performance despite only 2g of RAM and Atom processor.

Unlike the TV, I do keep ship's comp running pretty much continuously, so power consumption is a little more important. It uses only about 5 watts typically, a fraction of what the 23" 4k monitor uses.

[a64pilot]

Ref inverter efficiency, I don’t think it works that way.
Watching TV seems to cost me almost 10 amps. I’m trying to pin that down, the KVH I thought was the big power draw, but I turned it off and watched a movie with DVR and didn’t get a whole lot of decrease, 1 amp.
TV and the Dish receiver are on a Watts up Meter and draw 40 W, but that number does change a little, Bright scenes draw more than a night scene.
I think the rest is from powering up the big inverter charger.
I tried using a cheap 410 W MSW inverter, but the amp draw was the same.
So I’m a little confused, perhaps the cheapo MSW inverter was real inefficient, couldn’t live with it anyway as it’s little noisy internal fan ran almost continuously.

I think the big good inverters are real efficient at high power, but when making almost no power like powering my TV, they have an initial load that is constant. It seems just powering up my inverter takes about 4 amps or so of that 10 amps to watch TV for me.
Amps are all DC amps.

I think I will get me a very small pure sine inverter and try that, seems all I need is 100 W or so.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Ref inverter efficiency, I don’t think it works that way.
Watching TV seems to cost me almost 10 amps. I’m trying to pin that down, the KVH I thought was the big power draw, but I turned it off and watched a movie with DVR and didn’t get a whole lot of decrease, 1 amp.
TV and the Dish receiver are on a Watts up Meter and draw 40 W, but that number does change a little, Bright scenes draw more than a night scene.
I think the rest is from powering up the big inverter charger.
I tried using a cheap 410 W MSW inverter, but the amp draw was the same.
So I’m a little confused, perhaps the cheapo MSW inverter was real inefficient, couldn’t live with it anyway as it’s little noisy internal fan ran almost continuously.

I think the big good inverters are real efficient at high power, but when making almost no power like powering my TV, they have an initial load that is constant. It seems just powering up my inverter takes about 4 amps or so of that 10 amps to watch TV for me.
Amps are all DC amps.

Just like a generator, and inverter consumes something just for being on (the overhead) plus something for every unit of power it puts out.

On mine (3000 watts nominally, 230v AC, 24v DC), the overhead is 10 watts, and max efficiency is 94%. I think that means that if you are ONLY running a 25 watt TV off it, then you are paying the full 10 watts of overhead in addition to the watt or two lost in the conversion, so much more inefficient than a DC TV would be. But if you're running other stuff, then the overhead is divided between all the stuff you're running.

In real life, I just leave my inverter on and don't worry about it.

10 amps at 12 volts? I'm not sure what your consumption is, based on what you wrote. 120 watts sounds like a huge amount to me. Running the TV on my boat requires a fraction of that -- less than 2 amps at 24v.

[a64pilot]

Yes 10 amps or a little more than 120 W.
That is the TV, the dish receiver, the KVH sat dish and it’s “box” and the stereo, cause that sounds so much better than the TV, TV’s are such crappy sound sources.
I think it breaks down as approx 3 amps for TV and dish receiver and 1 amp for KVH, maybe 1 amp for stereo, now when the KVH points the dish, I’m sure power goes up, but how much I don’t know.

I think my TV and the other stuff is about 5 amps, and the overhead for the Magnum 2812 is about 5 amps. 5 amps overhead sounds awful high though.
Or I have AC power going somewhere that I haven’t accounted for yet.

[a64pilot]

Yep with everything in the Boat unplugged, just turning on the inverter increases my battery load by about 4.5 amps

[a64pilot]

OK Magnum says it should consume 2.5 amps or 30W inverting, but with no load, and it’s 90% max efficient

[aquadreams]

For what is happening with low power PCs, I follow fanlesstech.com. The low power cpu chips are being adopted and built into tiny cases with no fan. Think of an Intel NUC in a tiny case with heat dissipation body so no fan is needed, cutting down on power needs. I’ll be getting something like this for my boat pc.

For the media library I just plan to use a usb drive, rather than a NAS that will require more power. I’ve been building up my library and have about 400 movies on. 2TB drive.

[CatNewBee]

ATOM boards or AMD APU boards are around with very little power consumption, plenty of RAM and powerful enough for decoding BR / HD videos and rendering charts or even cutting / editing some light video footage, OS on SSD or on mSATA chips.

Have also a look at Zotac, there are plenty of different barebone mini-PC with a wide range of processors / graphics (z-Box, Nano series)

If you are a serious vlogger, well you will need a second unit with some more horse power.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by CatNewBee

ATOM boards or AMD APU boards are around with very little power consumption, plenty of RAM and powerful enough for decoding BR / HD videos and rendering charts or even cutting / editing some light video footage, OS on SSD or on mSATA chips.

Have also a look at Zotac, there are plenty of different barebone mini-PC with a wide range of processors / graphics (z-Box, Nano series)

If you are a serious vlogger, well you will need a second unit with some more horse power.

I use my i7 powered laptop for anything requiring horsepower. I don't think it makes sense to try to do that kind of work on a computer which you want to keep running 24/7 as a ship's computer. For that, a cheap fanless ultra low power Atom box is ideal.

I wouldn't try to edit video with mine, but it is astonishingly good for PLAYING video, even 4k. It is obviously optimized for this kind of work. It also renders charts in OpenCPN without the slightest problem. The OpenGL accelerated graphics work perfectly in O.

[Korvessa]

I will be purchasing a 12v TV shortly. I've done some research on the various brands and while Jensen is the only one that claims to be build especially for travel (in RVs) there are other brands (SuperSonic for example) that rate much better regarding viewing angle, picture quality etc.

Here is an example of a review page. The RV community take their TVs seriously, so I take their reviews seriously.

https://campaddict.com/12-volt-tv/

Here is the one that I plan to buy.


Good luck!