Why do we bother making our pedals battery powered?

[markm]

I like batteries in effects pedals. 

[deaconque]

who would've thought a topic such as this would have garnered such a response.  i guess "batteries vs. power supplies" is more important than I thought. 

[cheeb]

MARK! I sure hope you're back.

I swear this arguing hasn't been going on the whole time you were gone. There were arguments when you left too... 

[StephenGiles]

It seems to rest on one's personal hangups from reading this lot - had some practice over at Free Stompboxes have we??

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

HA!
I've seen whacky dudes bring CAR BATTERIES to power their board!
kinda' goes against the whole portable aspect.

Well, it's pretty portable if you leave the battery in the car!

Seriously though, a big advantage of a car battery, is that you can run an amp off it as well, and go play out on the lawn, or busk, or whatever

[StephenGiles]

Very true, I ran a 50 watt amp from 2 motorbike batteries - more manageable to carry, when I played guitar for Northwood Morris Men in the 1980s, great for drowning out melodians! It was pretty loud until the batteries ran down, then the sound just collapsed.

[ayayay!]

I like batteries in effects pedals. 

Me too, I actually prefer them.  But I don't prefer the hassle of metering all of them and unpluggin 15 of them on my pedalboard.  (Good time to plug my new BBE Supa Charger now by the way...)

Also (and we may have touched on this but I didn't see it) it's a GREAT troubleshooting tool if you suspect power supply issues.  I'm a big advocate of using batteries only if you are experiencing trouble with a pedal, especially time based circuits. 

[caress]

i have so many keyboards / amps / and pedals to plug in, anything less is a huge luxury.  i've gotten to the point where i am building effects into my keyboards so that i have one less thing to plug in... that being said, i use 3 pedals WITH power supplies and 4 without.  the 4 are all fuzz-type pedals and have very low current draw so it's no biggie to use a battery; in fact, i haven't changed batteries in any of them since i built them, some in around a year.

[flo]

I like my rechargable 9V batteries but I don't like the hassle of getting them out of the pedals and recharging them. What I need is to be able to keep them inside the pedals and then to be able to recharge them "in situ". Same with the batterij-pack idea: The battery pack is kept connected to the pedals via daisy-chained DC power lugs or something. When recharging it, you just hook it up to the mains power without disconnecting anything! One shoud be able to even continue playing! Just like recharging the cell phone really... cell phone dying... hook it up to the charger and the charger to the main power ... I can still make a call with it while its charging... there you go... no need to open the cell phone, get the battery out of it, putting it into the charger, not being able to use it while charging... Well, you get my drift!

[frequencycentral]

This is my latest:



Its a Colorsound Fuzz, should work out ok once I've worked out what value resistors I need to rebias it for 240 volts.

[Solidhex]

It's interesting how experience affects one's point of view.

Exactly. I think that's what a lot of it comes down to. Whatever method has given you less hassle is the method you won't use.

I fully realize my feelings are based on my personal experience- every gig I do is basically at the same venue. There are no power problems there so it's easier just to plug in and not have to worry about batteries going dead. If I was on the road or playing a different club every week though, I would probably have more issues with noise, bad grounding, and etc. It might be simpler just to use batteries for the pedalboard in that case too.

However something just occured to me... A good way of producing good clean predictable power would be a "battery pack" for the whole pedal board. That way you don't have the hassle of individual batteries for ea pedal, needing to unplug input jacks to conserve power, the whole silly input jack ground wiring, etc, etc. Just put a switch on the battery pack, and use the DC power jacks/wiring from your pedals to plug into it. You could put an indicator on it so you know when it needs to be recharged (yes, it should be rechargeable). Bring a charged up spare to a gig and when one starts dying throw it in the charger and pop in the fresh one. Then you have all the hassle-free convenience and predictability of both methods.

Yo

  I believe this is pretty close to what you described. I have no idea how well it works though....
http://www.bananasmusic.com/productdetail.asp/pid_9523/productname_DNA-Mr-Eight-Portable-Power-Supply

--Brad

[DougH]

The battery pack is kept connected to the pedals via daisy-chained DC power lugs or something. When recharging it, you just hook it up to the mains power without disconnecting anything!

The cordless drill battery packs are super easy to remove for recharging. You don't have to open anything as they are "outside the box". You just press a button to pop it off and pop a new one in.

I believe this is pretty close to what you described. I have no idea how well it works though....
http://www.bananasmusic.com/productdetail.asp/pid_9523/productname_DNA-Mr-Eight-Portable-Power-Supply

That's a good idea! A little pricey, but yeah, that's the basic approach I was thinking of. The main convenience issue for me is to have the pedal board configured and ready to go- no need to plug input jacks in to turn pedals "on" or having to open individual pedals up to change batteries. I like having everything plugged into one source and "operated" from one place.

[Eric H]

I play in church and there's a lot of breaks, 3 services with sermons, etc...

Dang Doug, that's as bad as a bar gig.

I use a very quiet DIY power supply for my board-of-many-boxes, but have toyed with the idea of running it off one of my power-tool batteries. I only play gigs a couple times a year now so it's not that important.

-Eric

[birt]

hmm motorcycle batteries seem to be cheap and have like 22AH at 12V... but they are big and heavy.
laptop batteries are smal, a little more expensive and have around 3000mAH, cheap secondhanded but you don't know what you get. same goes for power tool batteries, expensive when new and possibly worn out secondhanded...

ideal would be to have 2 small bateries, one for negative ground and one for positive ground. so you basicly have a nice bipolar power supply. add some voltage regulators and you can have 9, 12, 18, -9 and -12V. 2 stacked laptop batteries would be ideal i think.

[StephenGiles]

hmm motorcycle batteries seem to be cheap and have like 22AH at 12V... but they are big and heavy.
laptop batteries are smal, a little more expensive and have around 3000mAH, cheap secondhanded but you don't know what you get. same goes for power tool batteries, expensive when new and possibly worn out secondhanded...

ideal would be to have 2 small bateries, one for negative ground and one for positive ground. so you basicly have a nice bipolar power supply. add some voltage regulators and you can have 9, 12, 18, -9 and -12V. 2 stacked laptop batteries would be ideal i think.

I built a cabinet to fit the batteries/amp and preamp which was not very heavy at all, and bought a small trolley in order to transport it longer distances. The main purpose of using larger batteries was to have high volume available, in order to be heard by dancers in the open air, often near traffic. Unfortunately, the first batteries I bought eventually leaked acid and rotted part of the wood!

[flo]

Battery packs meant for electric model racing cars also look interesting. They have the correct voltage, are not expensive and are easy to swap. Perhaps the power capacity is too small.
Link to a German store:

AKKU-PACK PP2 :: Akku-Pack, NiMh, 9,6 Volt, 1,1 Ah, 8 Zellen
http://www.reichelt.de/?;ACTION=3;LA=3;GROUP=P56;GROUPID=1019;ARTICLE=28046;START=0;SORT=artnr;OFFSET=16;SID=27xMeYe6wQARsAAHJL9C0d1398b53218a082b33ce956827b9f06e
11,40 €

HIGH-AMP 5 :: Akku-Pack, NiCd, 9,6 Volt, 1,7 Ah, 8 Zellen
http://www.reichelt.de/?;ACTION=3;LA=3;GROUP=P56;GROUPID=1019;ARTICLE=8553;START=0;SORT=artnr;OFFSET=16;SID=27xMeYe6wQARsAAHJL9C0d1398b53218a082b33ce956827b9f06e
27,20 €