Sittin' in the dark.......

[sarduci]

....listening to battery powered air pumps......

*sigh*

Should have planned better...... Only got fish in my 90g, so all of the air pumps went in there.... glad I didn't pick up any fish last weekend.....

[sarduci]

So, anyone got any power backup plans? I should probably just get a few batteries, an inverter and and charger.......

Oh well, three day weekend comming up so I'll have plenty of time to think about this all.....

[sticky]

Good thought.....I have no plans....gets me thinking as well. Being close to the weston 4 power plant has its bonuses.

[sarduci]

I'm going to do some research, and I'll post what I find here....

It's probably going to be battery based, will have to be switched over by hand, and geared to running the absolute basics. I have a utility room right next to my room, so I'll end up stashing it in there and running remote power to the system with some heavy duty wire to move my timers over to. I'll probably scale it at 4hrs, 8hrs, 12hrs, 24hrs.

Remember, no sump here so no return pump, don't need to run my lights, heater is right out, skimmer is powered by a little Maxi-jet, and my circulation pumps are SEIO's so the take almost no energy to run.

Might have to rethink my current wiring to make it simple enough that if I'm gone anyone can do it for me.

If it's small enough it could be portable in case someone else would need to borrow it..... hmmmmm.....

[ronkent]

I have a 400watt inverter i can run from the car so i'd be ok. Now if i'm not home i'm screwed.

[Sk8r]

Wonder if you could run a marine [boat] battery from the garage with an intermediate unit, with a battery charger (when the power is on) to get the thing recharged occasionally. Those deep-cycle batteries are tough, and capable of sitting a while between uses.

[sarduci]

The AGM are suppose to be deep cycle (marine) batteries.

I'm working on a couple of ideas. A guy I work with knows a bunch of guys who run electric funny cars and "stuff" like that out in California. I'm going to see what they can suggest for a battery array/inverter, charging, safely and all that jazz. If anyone knows how to pack a ton of power in a small space, they'd be the people who would know.

Anyone know where a good place around here is to buy golf cart batteries?

[sarduci]

Found some interesting things out about electricity in general. I've got a few e-mail out to different companies and stores asking for ideas and help.

I found something that's called a "3 Way Automatic Transfer Switch" and i've just started poking around with them. It runs off of mains, then cuts over the generator if available and then DC (battery) if needed. Cost so far is $220 for a 30 amp version that is able to handle my whole system if needed.

[sarduci]

I've stumbled into another field that uses this exact same idea - RV's! I'm going to stop at King Campers tonight and talk to them.

Here's the camper scenario -
Tooling around in the RV - battery power
Parked at a camp site - generator
At home - AC power from the wall

Here's our scenario-
power outage - battery power
long power outage - generator
power is ok - AC power from the wall

Campers have been doing this for a long time apparently. I almost have an all-in-one package from TheInverterStore.com, but it's modified sine wave output. It's their PWR2AXFER30 for an automatic switch over to generator or battery power if AC power is not available. Cost is about $230 + wires and shipping, I'm looking around right now to see if I can get a pure sine wave output from somewhere else or I'll have to find some kind of converter/UPS to take the modified and clean it up for our use.

They recommended also the PWRIG150012S but I'm not sure how to hook them both up. Maybe the output of the PWRIG150012S goes to the generator input of the transfer switch.... Hard to say, waiting on an e-mail back from them about that.

Cost for both of them is about $1000.00, which is still well below the cost of generator and transfer switch and getting that all installed to code. Most quotes I've seen people getting for that is $4000.00+ for whole house which is not much more than powering a single room.

[ronkent]

Interesting. Let us know wht you find out about the camper setup.

[sarduci]

I talked to the parts guys at the camper shop. I've got the model # and manufacture for a $78.00 + shipping automatic transfer switch. They said it made "clean" power. I'm going to do more research since they knew how to use it, but they didn't know the difference between modified and true sine wave power. The one I got the info off of was a 30 amp unit, which for me is twice the amps I can pump into it. I figure if that is what I need, I can add in the cost of a charger, and 2 or more batteries in the array and some wire. It would all be off the shelf parts, and can be scalled up or down for any use.

[sarduci]

Oh, the 50 amp version was about $200. They did have that one there, the 30 amp was out of stock. They said 3 to 5 days to get one in stock if they had to order one.

[sarduci]

Still working on this, I'm going to have to make some phone calls I guess and talk to the manufactures about this. I guess not many people understand what the heck I'm talking about.

[jeramiej]

How long of an outage duration are you planning for? Appears an unlimited amount.

The longest I have ever experienced is a few hours. I guess our utility company is very responsive towards upcoming storms.


A PC backup with auto switchover will power my recirc and heater fine.

[sarduci]

Yes, but let's say it's the middle of winter, you have no power for 1 day and some how you can heat the room to a constant 80 degrees.

Can you cover that?

Let's assume you have the biggest UPS that APC makes, a 1500VA unit.

Let's keep my skimmer (70w) and my pump (65w) going for as long as we can....

1 hrs 47 mins

Not bad, would have covered half of the last power outage I had from the last big set of storms.

Let's move to the middle of winter and assume that I don't plug in the battery backup until I need to keep the water temp from dropping far enough to kill everything in my tank. (Sometimes I have to travel for work and can't heat water on the stove to float in the tank. This could be an issue as did happen this past winter from the ice storm we had, but fortunately I was home.)

70w + 65w + 250w

32 minutes

Wow, not good, considering how some areas this past winter were without power for about a day.

Lets go another route. You leave for work and go out to dinner with the guys and have a few beers, coming home, oh say, 16 hours later. You come to a 70 degree fish tank from a normal, constant, 81 like mine, no skimmer, no return pump, no heater, no circ pumps, no lights. Looks like the main breaker for the house tripped when the power company came to do work on the lines outside your house. Too bad for you. (Had it happen the week after I setup my fish tank.)

Let's say you have 960 watts (8amps) worth of equipment in the above sample. I can run that off of a random AGM battery online that I looked up (GPL-24T Lifeline Deep Cycle Marine Battery, the smallest one they have) and run it ALL for just over 8.5 hours. That's one battery. Add a second, get another 8.5 hours. Cut the load in half, like my HOB skimmer and SEIO pump with a 250watt heater, and you've got better than 17 hours per battery. (Smaller loads are more efficient on "deep cycle" batteries.)

This is what I'm trying to do. Find an affordable, reliable, easy to setup system. that can be scaled to work for anyone. All the parts I'm looking for are off the shelf, minimal work to hook up, and can be moved if I move or if someone needs to use it.

If someone has something that can power my fish tank with true sine wave output for more than 2 hours with an off the shelf solution, I'm all ears.

[sarduci]

The key to the above is true sine wave, since my lights will NOT work on modified or step sine wave without a slight flicker, which can damage the bulbs and ballast.

Computer battery backups do not output true sine wave unless you buy one that is a few (as in $300+) dollars. The only ones on APC's web site that have any kind of capacity that are true sine wave are the audio/video ones which have only a few minutes of run time at best with a minimal load.

[sarduci]

Well, I've found a few more companies that make transfer switches. I'm going to look into them and gather some more information.

[sarduci]

Well, here's this thread back from the dead......

Tripp Lite APS750 + batteries seems to be the best bet for a non-generator scenario. Found the APS750 for about $300 give or take for shipping, and running a set of marine batteries.

The APS750 is an inverter/charger, run 950watts on AC and 750watts on the inverter. I'm thinking I'm going to match that with a Aquacontroller Junior with the serial port upgrade. I can hook a relay up to it and when the relay goes open the unit can be programmed to turn off devices like my lights and skimmer. The people over at Neptune were extremely helpful in getting a clear idea of what could be done automatically in the case of power loss.

Now, the only remaining issue is how to get enough Amp Hours and not run the bill up to generator sized costs. For now it'll be hooking up my tank to my car with a 750watt inverter until I shake out the numbers.