how best to get electricity for emergency prepareness

1. Crunch the numbers; a separate car battery doesn't store enough energy to run an inverter for very long. Also, inverters tend to shut off if the input voltage falls below, say, 10V. That protects the battery from discharging, but prevents the inverter running off only a battery for long.

1. Only obsolete inverters produce a square wave. The current technology gives a modified sine.

2. The starting current that motors draw is a real issue. The inverters I was reading up on yesterday claimed that they could supply a starting current twice their continuous current. However, I wondered if that was conditional on enough DC current being available w/o drawing down the supply voltage too much.

1. I was unable to run a stand-up freezer on a 700W inverter, even using a large gauge extension cord, with the car running, and revving the engine. I haven't tried to power a fridge yet.

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:01:19 GMT, Rich Grise wrote in Msg.

Ahh, that's what real MEN read:

"This place is going to look like Little Somalia, Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guards Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. Were going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.

robert

Sounds like an UL. The Apache has a crew of two and can carry zero passengers. The Apache is an attack helicopter, useful for killing people and armor but hardly for pulling people off rooftops.

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Sounds like an UL. The Apache has a crew of two and can carry zero passengers. The Apache is an attack helicopter, useful for killing people and armor but hardly for pulling people off rooftops.

Dah, tell that to all the folks in New Orleans......None of the telephones worked, after the Emergency Generators ran out of fuel at the Telephone Exchanges, and could not be refueled, due to the road system being UNDER WATER.....Cellphones didn't work for the same reasons, and all the Telco Interchanges stopped working that connect the Cellsites. ALL Telecomunications USE POWER, it just may not be needed at the subscriber end. If the infostructure is down, nothing on the subscriber end is going to work either......This makes the event a Disaster, when the basic infostructure is disrupted......

Me

Yep, But you do what you can. My home internal wireless phones AND the cell-phone chargers are on UPS; plus I have car charger adapters.

...Jim Thompson