Power supplies for charging

My old "brick" style 12v power supply failed after traveling (squealing caps), and i'd wanted to upgrade to something stronger anyway.

I was tempted to use a 1250w HP one I had in a 1RU server in the shed but that server has another purpose, and besides it's damn noisey!

So I settled on a Corsair VS450 PC power supply, for a few reasons which i've listed at the bottom, but basically: clean 12v rail, reliable, cheap ($54 AUD), I could pick one up from the local PC store

Of course, a few modifications are needed..

Opening it and voiding the warranty you see the 12v rail (yellow wires)

I decided to cap off the 3.3v and 5v rails as I might use them in the future for Arduino/5v projects. The alternative is to desolder these from the PSU board, cross the PS_ON (see below) directly and only have the two 12v rails.. 

So, a bit of shrink wrap as below, before taping:

I then soldered the two 12v lines to create two 12v outputs, directly in to XT60 adapters

Shrink wrap before taping before wrapping again

That basically gives you the two lines:

Because the power supply is for a PC, it needs a switch to enable 'on' mode (PS_ON). Simply shorting the 16th wire in Green (ATX supply V2 standard), you basically turn it on:

And you're done!

This covers my two chargers at full rate with some headroom, 380w and 30a, as the power supply does 408w and 34a

Why I chose the corsair VS450

• Corsair are known for their reliability
• The output is clean and reportedly quite good on the 12v rail specifically
• It's super quiet with a dynamic fan based on heat/draw not feedback from a PC
• The specs covered what I had charger-wise today with some head room at max capacity (408w 34A)
• It was only $54 AUD, going up to 600-800w was > $100 for something good
• I already had one wired to my 3D printer so now had a degree of failover :)
• They had one at the local PC shop I could collect today