Way long ago, when the Solars first came out, they were unreliable because they were so fragile and easy to short.
Then, someone at Estes created the plastic ignitor plugs for each nozzle type, and that helped to make the Solars more reliable.
But still, there were some years when the pyrogen was more like nose snot (brown), to non-existent. Since the late 1980's or early 1990's, quality control got a lot better and they were pretty great. I even did clusters with them, that I'd never have even tried with them in the late 1970's or 1980's.
With the plugs, sufficient battery, and the old pyrogen, they have been incredibly reliable. The key is installing the ignitor correctly without damaging it, so the pyrogen head is far enough in, and wire not shorted. It's not hard to do, just can't do it haphazardly - and need to tell, and show at least once, to "amateurs", how to do it right.
The new BATF-forced change from real pyrogen to the "epoxy" or whatever the new flammable but non-pyro coating is….. seems to be not quite as reliable but not horrible. For example for contest flying, I try to use the old black pyrogen tipped ones and sport fly with the newer ones, since a misfire for a sport flight is not as annoying as during a contest flight.
Once I run out of the old black ones, I'll start adding my own pyrogen to the new ones (mix of dissolved Ping Pong Ball and old Firestar pyrogen, as I used for my 100% home-made nichrome ignitors this past spring)
As for battery power, for Solars, you do not need a deep-cycle discharge battery or trolling motor battery….. unless you were trying ignite dozens of Solars at once or wanted to run a huge launch with hundreds of flights. I mean, if you've GOT the battery and it's not an inconvenience to use, GREAT. But it's overkill for 99% of non-clustered personal flying as far as Solars go.
The old AA's are definitely too wimpy, UNLESS they were replaced by Nicads or NiMH's (NiCads and NiMH's deliver far more current to a short than Alkalines do). For most of the 1980's, I used a control powered by eight AA sized (500 mAh) Nicads, that fit inside of the enclosure:
One drawback to that was if the Nicads were not charged, the whole controller was dead. So when the nicads got to be a bit too old rather than replace them I rewired it to use an external battery again, and still use it (that controller has been rewired several times, the only original part is the enclosure itself)
Small 12V Gel-Cel batteries were my Go-To ignition battery, for many years (1990's till 3-4 years ago) 4.5 Amp Hour to 7 Amp-Hour.
Now in more recent times, I use 2200 mAh three-cell 11.1V LiPo battery packs for power. They produce a plenty of current and could perhaps launch hundreds of flights in between charges. I have them, and use them, due to the fact that they are very popular for R/C electric planes and multicopters, so there's plenty of the packs available to use and easily charged up (they need a special charger, but have good chargers for R/C use).
- George Gassaway