For those of us operating battery powered vessels is there a lot of difference in power requirements between transducers that produce output as 4-20mA vs 0-5V or 0-10V? It looks to me that there are 4-20mA transducers that operate over a range of voltages and I don’t know how many mA the other transducers use. Has someone put together a comparison table between different transducers and their power consumptions in real world use?
Hi @MattHixson,
This isn’t something I have experience with in underwater use-cases (especially since we sell multiple digital pressure sensors), which use PCB-mounted pressure transducers with measurement and communication circuitry included. Physically speaking though, if you have two sensors mapped to the same output current and pressure range but one has double the input voltage then it will use double the power on the same wires, at least while a measurement is taking place.
The actual power usage of a sensor depends on its peak power usage (while it’s actively measuring), as well as its idle power usage. In the case of a current-based output, it’s effectively always “active” while the sensor is receiving power, but depending on the measurement frequency that could be all the time to mostly off. Current also needs to go through a medium, so if you have high resistance wires there’ll be more power usage than with low resistance wires.