ORIGINAL: C2_Hobbies
ORIGINAL: afterburner
The only issue with using regulators is that it is almost impossible to get them balanced so only one battery will be supplying current unless it fails and then the power expander would switch to drawing from the other pack.
Marty
Not true. As a dealer and user of Smart-Fly, I use both Super and Turbo regulators and the voltage of both batteries is almost identical (within .1 volt) at the end of the day. I plug in 2 IC4 C-volts in to the charge jacks on the regulator so I can see the voltage pre-regulated at all times.
Chris, you're right about one thing, it's good stuff! Every plane I have (worth anything) has complete smart-fly sytems installed.
The point is, if you use the super or turbo regulator, all redundancy is lost. Like Quist said, it's only one regulator with two inputs and outputs. If the reg fails, your plane is lost even if your batteries are fine. If using two regs with two batts, you can have a batt or reg failure and still have power to the expander. I'd rather have the system drawing unevenly and keep the rdundancy at least up to the power expander.
Marty