How do those who routinely use them in Europe find availability and cost. The US of course is easy and you can frequently get them for free if you buy fuel. My experience in Europe is that they are hard to get and often very expensive. Any ways to mitigate the pain?
At my homebase EDAZ it is easily available and costs around 10 Euro. In the US it was free and on Iceland they wanted 90 Euro so I rather used the battery and managed to start the piston with a little charge remaining. In Europe I guess getting a GPU for every start will be very annoying and expensive.
I won’t need one every time but is nice to be able run the A/C on the ground when it is warm without using an engine. There are mixed views on whether better to regularly use your battery vs GPUs. Some say the battery lasts longer if it is regularly used for starts.
This is probably a really stupid idea, and happy for those who know more about electronics/elecgtrics than I to set me straight, but why not get one of those power boost starters from halfords, keep it charged up, and use it when needed?
i know the connection is wrong, as it comes with crocodile clips to connect to the battery, but wouldn’t an expensive/big capacity one of those do the job?
happy to know why not, as looks like a good project if feasible.
Andrew
@Andrew: yes, or at least perhaps, but that was not the point. Your suggestion is about having your own, either in your hangar or carrying it around in the back/belly of the plane. The original question was about availability at various aerodromes, so as not needing to carry one’s own around. There are those with payload challenges, you know ;)
PS should you consider concocting your own, one very active and very concerned contributor to this forum has posted sketches of a quite fine design. Vastly superior to what one would get in the average shopping centre.
Andrew there are lots of those around in particular Lithium ones which save weight. Those can provide power for starting but typically not for something like running A/C on the ground. They are also not cheap.
Is this “GPU” to be a self-contained or a mains-powered device?
With a self contained device you are pretty severely limited on what you can get out of it, because batteries have poor energy density. Even my TB20 draws 28A with everything on, so two of my Concorde batteries in parallel would do 1 hour only. And that would be a damn heavy box. Lithium ones would be about 1/2 the weight but they are a significant fire hazard (mainly via mechanical damage, overcharging, or defective manufacture) and if one that size went off that would be the end.
GPUs are run from diesel. There are self contained charged battery based onesc (eg Startpac). They are typically made to provide a cracking current ie high current for starting an engine but not made to run avionics for long.
GPUs are generally a pain in the proverbial and FBOs charge the earth.
U.S. GA aircraft tend to be designed with air con and ground services to use the ubiquitous free GPUs (the original Lear 40/45 is a case in point) but the economic climate in Europe with the FBO charges make them impractical. We are fortunate on the 45XR that we have an APU (when it’s not MEL’d or banned for noise reasons) to meet those needs but when we don’t my employer won’t pay for GPUs as they won’t run the packs anyway. Instead, we start the right engine when we know pax are on the way to cool things down.
I’m afraid that probably doesn’t help you too much as you are the pax as it were but it’s another failing of European GA.
Looks like I need to run the right engine if needed. Thanks Josh.
