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No power? No problem :-P

We had our power cut for 6 hours today while our electricity provider was working on the power grid in our neighbourhood.

Me, being a geek and all, I just could not stand not having internet so I borrowed my dad's 12->240VAC inverter and his 12V 33AH SLA battery.

I connected up my modem, my wireless router and my sisters Nintendo DS to charge.

I also had our 2.2kW generator running for a little while to get the fridges cooled down, but I don't have any pics of that.

18 comments

Aug 24, 2010. 11:09 PMthepaul1993 says:

Australian? Is that a Telstra modem i see?

Aug 25, 2010. 12:15 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

You have a good eye. Both right. Over with Internode now, I rather dislike Bigpond.

Aug 25, 2010. 1:45 AMthepaul1993 says:

Everyone dislikes Bigpond.

Aug 25, 2010. 1:49 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

Only the smart ones. The others never realise they are getting ripped off.

Aug 25, 2010. 3:41 AMthepaul1993 says:

Yeah. We used to have bigpond, now i have AAPT and get 12hrs a day unlimited. So much cheaper and I get so much more downloads.

Aug 25, 2010. 3:51 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

I could do with unlimited at the moment, on a 30GB plan (was on 12GB with Bigpond), with unmetered uploads. It usually doesn't mind me until I want to download something like the 38.96GB Criminal Minds torrent. Gotta wait for some unused quota to burn as to try not to take us over our quota.

Aug 25, 2010. 5:30 AMthepaul1993 says:

I also had 12GB with Bigpond. Now with AAPT we get 20GB Peak (8am-8pm), and unlimited Off-peak (8pm-8am). Over the last few months i normally download about 500-600Gb of data. Trying to get 1TB this month :).

Aug 25, 2010. 6:01 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

... Wow. I don't even have enough space for 600-800GB's of downloads. The largest HDD in this household is 320GB. Haha.

Oct 2, 2009. 12:10 AMwee_man says:

Hi i was just wondering how long did this last?

Oct 3, 2009. 4:10 AMBerserk87 says:

my laptop takes 2 amps to charge, the router and modem shouldnt take up a whole lot, and the ds would take 500mA. i have a low powered msi wind though, the posters laptop probably takes 5+Amps to charge. All of that combined and being that inverters are VERY inefficient, he probably got around 3 hours. thats also assuming that the battery was full charged when he used it.

Oct 3, 2009. 4:36 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

Not many new inverters are very inefficient, most inverters these days have an efficiency of between 80 and 100%. The laptop and the DS were only plugged in for a small amount of time, it was mostly just the router and the modem plugged in.

Oct 2, 2009. 12:15 AMthermoelectric (author) says:

I didn't really time it but it lasted long enough to occupy my time during the 6 hour power outage...

Oct 2, 2009. 3:34 PMwee_man says:

Oh nice. I thinking about doing the same setup as you but hooking it up to a huge bank of car battery's

Oct 3, 2009. 4:12 AMBerserk87 says:

car batterys are only ment for very quick bursts of high amps, not sustained discharges. doing it to normal car batterys kills them pretty quickly. thermoelectric is using a deep cycle battery.

Jan 5, 2010. 1:09 AMriverreaper says:

hu realy about the car batt not liken it , i bought a frig chest the runs of ac/or dc an it works strait threw for week at a time befor i switch out car batts , i put them on the disscharger the recharge them up , they been holding out for over a year now , an they were used batts to begin , no telling what the owner befor me did with them , but there were outa trailer that used them as back ups when no power was to be , for inter lights an radios. car batts are like what 40.00 to 80.00 now days , thats like what 1 or 2 vid game prices , i think if the brother an sister arnt fighting thats an easy fix ? i would watch out for them fires thou theres better ways to heat the place

Oct 2, 2009. 5:08 PMthermoelectric (author) says:

Ah cool. You have to be careful about discharging the bank if the car batterys too nuch, Car batteries don;t like that