how best to get electricity for emergency prepareness

Please tell me more about alternators? Does it use gasoline? It gives out AC?

Arthur or Art

Which kind? My IBM Thinkpad uses 10.8V 4Ah battery, the charger uses 110V to give 16VDC 4.5A. What kind of car adaptor do you recommend?

generators: you mean gasoline or diesel generators? What kind, what power rating, what brand?

down

until the inevitable moment when that POS generator breaks at the worst moment..

Naturally, it won't break when it is not running.

Keep the unit maintained and keep up with a regular test routine and it is certainly better than no generator at all.

Jim

You are right, it is better than no generator, but, unfortunately, not reliable and not as usable. These cheap generators are designed to look good, that's about all. The cheap parts in them normally fail after a few hundred hours.

I had a generator like that at some point and hated every minute of owning it. It was a 4 kW diesel powered Coleman generator. Impossible to start in cold weather and enormously loud. All attempts to quiet it down failed.

I sold the POS and am glad that I did. Now I have an old but relatively little used 1800 RPM Onan diesel generator. The difference is night and day.

I had to restore it a bit, but that was easy. No engine rebuild etc, just some control parts.

Oh, you definitely get what you pay for. These days, if you have paid less than $800/5kW you probably bought a light duty unit.

We had a V-Twin Onan 11kW gasoline unit that was used for 4 months out of the year just about 24hrs (depends on when we wanted the A/C) a day 7 days a week for 15 years. Keep up with the PM schedule and they would go forever. In fact, the only reason I don't have it now is because it was stolen. Other than the battery going dead in the off season I can't remember the unit being ACTUALLY broken, although hand cranking that guy was NOT fun, but it did have a hand crank.

Fortunately my current unit only has to hold us over for the 7 or so days each winter that our ice storms take down the lines.

For the average homeowner that has to deal with a day or two without power, every other year or so, a Coleman would probably do. A nice brushless generator with a decent engine is all most people would ever need.

Jim

I am confused a little about your question. Alternators convert mechanical power into electrical power. They do not use gasoline or diesel, they run off a car belt that spins their rotors. They are installed on gasoline and diesel vehicles and also on dedicated electrical generators.

There are all kinds of beefed up alternators that are sold as drop in replacement for stock car alternators, to achieve higher output.

Check out ebay item 7995481840 for one example.

They produce 12V and claim to have high amperage capability. They could be used with larger 12V inverters.

In this case, an alternator is the device on your car engine that recharges the battery.

Honda, Yamaha, and others make generators of various sizes that will produce 120 V AC - these are driven by gasoline or diesel engines.

You appear to be confusing "illiteracy" with a commonly- used electrical engineering term ("no load").

Is that the same as "Don't run it without a load?"

I'm sorry, but illiteracy just confuses the crap out of me.

Notan

Hello A. Jacobs,

Don't know from the top of my head. New laptops use up to 20V and companies like Dell sell adaptors that have little switch mode DC/DC converters in there. I believe I had also seen these at Walmart or Best Buy. They didn't list my laptop so I didn't buy one.

It is similar to buying a trailer hitch or oil filter, they listed the compatible laptop models on the box. The adaptor has to fit the model of your laptop. The safe bet here would be to buy it from IBM. After all, some batteries can explode if something goes wrong with the charging process.

Beware: A full laptop re-charge takes a considerable chunk of energy from the average car battery. If you overdo it the engine might not turn over anymore on a cold day.

Regards, Joerg

and light duty means "we hope that the consumer does not run it within the warranty period" :)

Sounds great!

if they work at all. For instance, if I bought the previous grnerator during summer, I would not know that it was not startable in winter, until winter.

And don't run it with no load.

Ignoramus26409 wrote in news:tShVe.13445$ snipped-for-privacy@fe24.usenetserver.com:

I suspect that in NOLA,poor and better-off neighborhoods are not all that far apart,and the same in other US cities. The very wealthy can afford security,passive (big walls,gates,cameras)and active(armed guards),that middle-class cannot.

Besides,they may be known or recognized in their own neighborhoods.

Peter Bennett wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The term "generator" when used for home emergency power sources only means "generating electricity";just like the "generators" at your local power plant,they actually are alternators,making AC power,not DC.

They are available in a lot of stores around here. My 70+ year old dad bought one last year. On the other hand I have a Sony SRF-49 AM/FM walkman with a belt clip that will run over 24 hours on a single AA cell on the AM band. It came with decent headphones, but I keep a set of non amplified computer speakers in my emergency kit so that it can be used as a table radio. I have 24 new AA alkaline cells in the kit, so I am set for three weeks. I have a Radio Shack DX-375 AM/FM/Shortwave digitally tuned radio that uses a pair of "C" cells. I have a weeks worth of batteries for it in the kit, along with four flashlights and a couple weeks worth of "D" cells. The rest of the kit is my medicine and medical supplies.

Toss in a bag of clothes, a folding chair and a couple pillows and I'm ready to leave for the shelter.

I got 1,600,000 hits when I Googled for: thinkpad car adapter

It would be hard to go wrong with a name-brand IBM (Lenovo) one, but there are likely many 3rd party clones available.

Yes, internal combustion engine powered.

Impossible to answer absent ANY details about your situation.