how best to get electricity for emergency prepareness

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That's .jp = Japanese web site, not Chinese.

Jim, what is the gel cell you are talking about? Is this better and easier to use compare with a spare car battery? Thanks.

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Not if the alternative is an electric stove.

Or even being unable to pay the bill.

I found LED bulbs for my Maglight flashlights that out perform the incandescent ones and quadruple the battery life. I think I got them from

-- Tom Horne

"A. Jacobs" wrote in news:Pe%Ve.918$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com:

Gel-cells are sealed lead-acid batteries with a gelled electrolyte,they don't spill acid,and can be used in more then just the upright position.They come in all sorts of sizes and Amp-Hour ratings. They are commonly used in uninterruptable power supplies,small electric scooters.You use the same sort of charger as for automotive LA batteries,float chargers. Wal-Mart sells some small,low A-H sizes,for the electric toys they sell.

A microwave is a drain on resources. It does not matter what kind of stove you have. There are any number of more efficient ways to cook. Even an electric immersion heater would be more efficient.

Electricity for anything more than LED lights and a radio is the only thing I would like, but not need in what I would consider an emergency.

The irony if a usenet post extolling freedom from computers should not be underappreciated... You are getting into the real of philosophy. Whether certain things make us happy or not. And that's fine, but generators are convenience devices that allow us to do what we desire, which could be browsing the internet, for example.

My favorite was an early panasonic service manual for a stereo cassette deck that described how the reray logic worked. "If not reray

Ever notice the uptick in births nine months after such an "outage"?

Don't forget that "regular" TV station needs an antenna and a transmitter. And the transmitter needs power. And they also need some sort of programming feed, which needs antennas, studios, etc. How much of this infrastructure survived Katrina? Any more questions?

You think there's going to be cable????

Thanks, Rich

At least in my area, you can watch TV with a regular TV antenna. The quality will not be great, but probably good enough for figuring out just what are the latest news.

Not all electrical outages involve hurricanes that knock down TV stations. The stations also have backup generators. Most outages are of different nature and TV is usually available.

How many hours of fuel do you think a TV station has on site? Either at the studio, or the transmitter? a lot are under 24 hours because the amount of power required to fire up the transmitter. The last transmitter I worked around needed well over 250 KW, just for the transmitter. By the time you added the cooling system and other loads, they had to have a 500 KW diesel generator. The studio was a big load, as well. Sure you could shut down some of the equipment and reroute the signals for a bare bones setup, but that takes time. When the hurricanes hit Central Florida last year a lot of stations were off the air for the duration. If the storm damages the STL equipment, backup power doesn't do you much good, unless you have a secondary control room and studio at the transmitter site, and I haven't seen a TV station built that way since the early '60s.

The local TV station was off the air, and most of the radio stations. Some had power at the studios, some at the transmitter, and some lost their STL feed. One station managed to re-aim their STL transmitting antenna to hit another transmitter they owned that had power and get on the air at reduced power, and hours. If you haven't been in the trenches during an emergency, you have no idea. The engineers present plans to the owners to improve things, but they won't spend the money, because they want to by more poorly equipped stations rather than fix the ones that they already own.

Yes, but not CNN!

I can get channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 28, 44, 50, 56, and 58, but I'm like 10 miles from Mount Baldy, where all of the transmitters are. Actually I can get more channels than that on UHF, but they're mostly Mexican. And I did build a little Yagi for 50, 56, & 58, but the signals are so strong from 7 - 13 that I can get them with the same yagi - clearly, it's acting like a random-wire at those freq's.

I have a battery/12VDC 5" TV that takes 10 "C" cells, that last about 2-1/2 - 3 hours, although the radio works for a while. A load of 'C' cells costs more than the damn TV did, so it's hardly worth it.

Cheers! Rich

Watch DirecTV CNN for news. Local channels are no good for news.

There was no usable sat service or CATV during the hurricanes last year. The heavy rains stopped the KU band signals, and the CATV UPS systems couldn't keep everything on line for more than a couple hours. We had a private microwave link to the shelter that is normally used for educational TV, but the high winds would cause the towers to vibrate and flex enough to chop the signal. It was the first back on line, but the national news services had no local news. We could pick up a snowy picture on a 4" portable TV from Jacksonville that had a tiny bit of useful news. We couldn't get a signal from any of the Orlando stations which were closer, because they are blocked by hills. I spent over a month without electricity last year, between the three hurricanes that affected my area.

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