I am thinking about a heating controller for my electrically heated motorcycle coat. It draws about 6 amps at 14V on my motorcycle.
My question is whether it is more efficient to drive a heating element by pulsing full power or just lower the voltage so that a constant but small current is drawn.
I am trying to determine whether it would be better to build a circuit (for example a 555 driving a FET) with which I could vary the duty cycle or just buy a variable buck converter from Ebay.
Not all of my motorcycles have that much spare generating capacity, so I would like to maximise how long I could run this for at a given level of heat output.
Apart from efficiency, could there be other issues such radio interference? I wouldn’t think that higher frequencies would be helpful in this application, so a few Hertz would be all that is needed.
I know that I may be over-complicating this, but I am the kind of person that bores aluminium bolts for the weight saving; it adds up if you can do enough of it.
I am a beginner with electronics, have I missed a power control technique that would be more suitable?
Regards
Otto