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.

Comments

[thepaul1993]

Australian? Is that a Telstra modem i see?

[thermoelectric]

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

[thepaul1993]

Everyone dislikes Bigpond.

[thermoelectric]

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

[thepaul1993]

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.

[thermoelectric]

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.

[thepaul1993]

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 :).

[thermoelectric]

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

[wee_man]

Hi i was just wondering how long did this last?

[Berserk87]

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.

[thermoelectric]

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.

[thermoelectric]

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

[wee_man]

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

[Berserk87]

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.

[riverreaper]

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

[thermoelectric]

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

[dwjp90]

That looks incredibly dangerous

[thermoelectric]

Not really, The mains voltage is all after the inverter so it isn't too bad, If you want dangerous, check out my MOT stack