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Keeping Computers (And People) Warm In Winter?
Grimwiz writes "Similar to a few of you, I have some of my computers on a UPS. However, the UK press have recently been warning that power supply interruptions are likely this winter and I've been pondering about upgrading my power protection from those few machines to include a few key house components. In particular, I need to ensure that the gas-powered (but electrically controlled) central heating stays working. I have reviewed a few solutions, including Solar / Photovoltaic or purchasing a generator
but they seem to be hugely more expensive than my simple UPS solution, although they do provide a much longer lasting solution than running off batteries. (A battery solution becomes quite expensive if I require more than an hours backup.)
My power requirements for a quiescent house is about 4amps @ 250V, and I'd like to survive at least 8 hours. What solutions do you recommend?"
A warm jacket.
porn keeps me warm in the winter
or just buy an Intel Extreme P4
You should be able to get 32amp/hours with deep cycle batteries. You could use an array of series/parallel to get to your 250volt requirement. They could be on a constant trickle charge to keep them topped off. This is not the least expensive solution I am sure. Storing those things can be kinda of tricky though. Oh, well, just an idea.
http://www.busyweather.com/
will keep you warm in winter
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
Use a normal UPS to bridge the first few minutes in which you can comfortable start a generator.
21x twelve voltage batteries rated at 30Ah hooked up in series :)
-Foxxz
Its like, when you're thirsty, asking for a bottle of water or asking for iodine tablets. It would be better to have both.
It really depends on how long you expect your outage to last. UPS won't last for long, yet is crucial for small burps in the supply.
For example, what if your generator runs out of gas?
Keeping computers warm? I am personally more concerned about the problem of keeping computers cool, even in winter.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Intel CPUs are the hot ones temperature-wise now.
Oh, and drink whiskey. Lots and lots of whiskey. It makes good antifreeze for the blood :)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I have a small, 20 minute UPS. Once the battery could no longer hold a charge, I took it out and replaced it with a higher capacity VRLA battery that I got from work. With one LCD and one computer, I get about 9 hours of reserve time. The UPS does not get hot, even when the battery has been significantly discharged. I plan on doing this to two other UPS that I bought at a flea market for $10.
Vote for global prefs bug
Come on, you seem to live in a civilised country, not in a third world country like california!
Cellars would provide some natural insulation and reduce your heating requirements. To keep you heater running, I would look into a backup that doesn't depend on the power grid to keep it running. That's probably the only cheap way you're going to maintain your heat.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
so sticking batteries in series to 250v is not going to be a good move.
stick em in parrallel and hook up a 240V inverter.
32ah is a bit on the weedy side, around 110ah is standard and easy to find. over in the uk they tend to be called leisure batteries. dont use normal car batteries they are not designed to be run down - you will damage them
Well, 4A @ 250v = 1000 W, for 8 hrs is 8 kWh. That's a lot, and would probably be very expensive to maintain with a battery-based solution. I'd say a generator would be the way to go.
If you are going to need a generator occasionally, but don't want to pay the upfront cost, you might consider hooking your DC system (assuming that it runs at 12V) into your car and then using the car as a generator
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I run a benchmarking app and leave it on, and my room is toasty all winter long. Infact, if the window is closed, it gets too warm.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
If you have gas then you can get a natural gas electrical generator. Connected to the gas line, when power goes out some models will automatically ignite and provide power to the house, some require a manual ignition.
It doesn't charge itself, but a car battery with an invertor could last a long time powering your heating system.
Another approach you could take is to take steps to make your household more energy efficient -- upgrade your insulation, get energy star rated appliances, change to flourescents -- all of those things we should have learned in school and keep learning about in the adverts that come with our energy bills.
You could look into alternative energy sources, but since cost is a factor, I won't go into details, except to say the up-front costs can be prohibitive.
In all honesty, a generator IS your best option if you want to keep running in a blackout. You may be able to poke around and find a used one for 1/3 the cost of the new article.
If that's still not an option, build a fire pit and stock up on wood...
We get natural gas directly from the wellhead.
The lease dates back to the 1940s and at the time it wasn't uncommon for the leaseholder to be able to use all the gas they needed from the well for household use.
The oil and gas company that has the lease desperately wants to change those terms.
The only downsides are:
1) Occasionally the well will freeze up in the winter. That's not that much of a problem because my oldest brother who also lives on the farm is retired from that same oil and gas company and can thaw out the well.
2) There are no odorants added to the natural gas and so it has no smell to tell you that you have a gas leak. I ended up in the hospital once because of that when a natural gas heater went out and let the room fill with natural gas.
You can get used to the cold, just like anything else. Hypothermia is an absurd myth perpetuated by the heating and clothing companies to sell you their expensive and unnecessary products.
Simple as that. The first option is cheap and effective, but makes a bit of noise, and will need somewhere outside to run it. The second option needs quite a bit of space, is expensive and requires a fair amount of other expenditure for charging circuits, inverters, etc. It also runs out after a while and there is nothing you can do then. If you use a generator, you can always put more petrol/diesel in, assuming you keep a decent stock.
Solution: Google for a 1500W generator (e.g.). Problem solved - next question please.
Beach, beer, boobs and nice winter and summer temps.
P.S. No matter how nice the locals are be wary of any necklaces you recieve as a gift that include strangely named idols.
Seriously my roommate and I are planning on trying to keep our heating bill to a minimum by running our computers 24/7 and using them as nice little 400watt space heaters. Here I am trying to waste more power you want to save it. shameful.
The majority of houses in the UK do not have cellars. The majority of those that did pre-1939 have since been bombed flat.
;)
As for the second component of your comment, isn't that stating the obvious?
Personally I'd go for photovoltaic supply as I've nearly succeeded in getting a Mini-ITX based server operating 24/7 on solar power via a bank of 6v FLT batteries.
For heating, being as we face no natural-gas outages just now, I'd recommend by-productive heating from your cooking sources after their normal use. The laws of thermodynamics can be useful when heating a house by this method
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
You might want to talk to an electrician who specializes in backup power systems. There are safety and electrical code issues on how circuits are switched from mains power to UPS/generator power and back again.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Are probably your best bets in terms of reliable, long term power failure protection. UPS power is as you note very expensive in terms of dollars per kwh, but a generator is more hassle since, if you don't pay huge bucks for an automated solution, you're gonna have to drag your nice toasty butt out of bed and get it started. You also have to maintain it an dkeep fuel around for it. But if you do these things and get it wired into your electrical system properly, you can keep your house going for as long as you have gasoline. Days easily. Your power requirement are very small, so almost anything you buy will be overkill. 250V at 4A = 1000VA, and assuming a power factor of about .7, you will be drawing close to 1500W. Off the shelf 3KW generators are cheap and readily available. Be sure to put your PC on a good UPS - one that conditions power, because the power coming off the generator will be ugly and your PC may not like it too well. But to run electric motors and lights, it's fine.
It's quite likely that you don't need heat if your power interruption is only going to be 8 hours. During the Quebec ice storm we were out of electricity for 7 days. The house will stay decently warm for the first 2 days. It will be chilly for the next 2 and getting cold after that. But even after 7 days the appartement was still above freezing in weather that was always a little below freezing.
My recommendation: don't sweat 8 hours of power failiures.
That said, if you really need electricity, say to prevent perishable from going bad your best bet is a generator essentially because it's easy to refuel and keep going for days. You also get decent power in relatively small packages.
Is there a reason behind their statement? Here in the midwest US there would be hell to pay for 'power outages' in the winter...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Put everything on a UPS with a few minutes of battery power. Buy a cheap generator (no need for a fancy automatic one like the one you linked to). When the power goes out, plug the UPS into the generator and start it up.
The only downside is you've got to have someone at home to turn on the generator, but unless you're leaving the house for a few days, an unpowered heater shouldn't be a problem. A few hours of no heat won't harm anything.
Your best method (but not the cheapest) is a hybrid battery (UPS) and Generator solutions. Generators for 4Amp@250Volts are not that large, or that expensive. (Well, this is all relative I suspect, but if you think a UPS is really cheap, I figure you can afford it.)
Get a large-ish UPS that can support this power consumption for, oh, 15 minutes. Make sure your generator is ready to work at any time. Power goes out, plug the UPS into the generator, and start it up. As long as you have the UPS (a kind of power cache) your generator can act up a bit, or run out of gas, and as long as you can get all that fixed in 15 minutes, you're power supply will be constant. If you're not sure if 15 minutes is enough, get a bigger UPS.
This is more of a large scale disaster scenario setup though. I don't suspect your power company would leave the power out, in the winter time, for more than 15 minutes. If they do.... you're not the only one in deep shit!
Now, WHATEVER YOU DO, do NOT run the UPS or the Generator back into the grid!!!!! If you're thinking of setting up something a bit nicer, like running your entire house off the UPS without any cares, you'll probably need to integrate the UPS (and generator) into your home's power system. If you're doing this, do it right, don't screw around with it if you don't know what you're doing. (If your laws are anything like ours, you'll need a permit to do this in the first place, and an inspection afterwards.)
Anyhow, this is the cheapest method I could come up with that would actually work pretty well, and I have it. Truth is, I don't really need the generator, but bought one for outdoor events and camping, and figured I might as well put it to (possible) use if it's around the house most of the time.
8,000 is alot of energy. Can't you turn something off? Or better yet - turn something ON! ;) Look at the power outage as a chance to experience life as our ancestors did. Light some candles, snuggle with the significant other - procreate! Sex burns calories - which in turn produces heat.
OR
When I was a kid we had a huge blizzard and the power was out almost everywhere. Many people had broken pipes. On about the third day a neighbor came over and asked to use the toilet, there's had frozen over again. Evidently they had been pouring antifreeze in the toilet to keep it from freezing and had just run out!
Stuff that matters.
then use a DC to AC converter.
Need to do some math, along with getting an over night battery recharger. But several of these should do.
See this article, seems that car batteries are typically rated in hundreds of amp hours (100 to 500), so two or three might do the job.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The temperatures in the UK are not extreme. If your house gets cold that quickly, I would suggest to upgrade your isolation material. Or you could always use some blankets to keep you (and ..your computers) warm.
My .02 euro
And people, as anyone knows who has seen "The Matrix", are a great source of power. Have a few kids, wire 'em up to your PC, and you're online forever.
How about a small gasoline motor (lawnmower etc) to run an automotive alternator then connecting the alternator to a power inverter? These items would be cheap, and it should provide enough current.
Being a poor college student, I found that an Intel PC can be a great way to save on a heater. How's how you do it. You buy a stock Dell PC, put as many 7200 RPM hdds as you can into it, upgrade the video card and leave it on 24/7 with the windows closed. Voi la, not only do you have a fairly good computer, but you have a central heating system for at least a bed room on the cheap!
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
A friend of my brother and I lives way the hell out in the woods, and the power at his house is less then reliable, actually it's a joke.
In the spring when it is really wet it has been known for hime to have the power go out for 1+ hour stretches more the 2 or 3 times a week!
We decided to build him a borg ups, nothing more thena standard (large) ups, 1000 watt, and a bank of deep cycle battaries.
The true test came one night when he was typing away at his cimputer with the rest of the lights in the house off, just him, his computer, and the lamp (all plugged into the ups).
He was busy, coding away when he suddenly realized the ups was beeping and noticed that there was no other power on in the house, by consulting a closk he determined that he had had his lamp, computer and monitor running off the ups for the previous 4 hours.
The configuration was just the standard battaries in the ups + 5-26 amp/hr 12v gelcell deepcycle batteries
Please note, do not modify your ups unless you are actually qualified to be modding your ups (although some do have plugs on back for this kind of stuff)
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
We have a surplus of power, for now.
What power interruptions? I think you are talking rubbish. If you aren't, then the press are. We are in a first world country with a decent infrastructure and it is extremely unlikely that we will have mass powercuts. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere and are supplied by one overhead power line, make sure your computer is on a UPS and stop worrying about it.
A latent existence
Just curious, how did you stay warm during previous winters?
[o]_O
Having lived through 3 hurricains in 6 weeks, after Charlie my wife made me buy a generator, best purchase I made in years ( besides that new G5 17" imac). The only generator available was a huge 12000 watt unit for like $2000. I bought it anyway, more is better right. Well we were outa power for like 10 days total, but I had the genny running and was able to power the whole house, including the A/C. Man i loved watching Lord of the Rings in the a/c, on my entertainment center, while my neighbors were trying to find out when the next shipment of ice was coming into the area. Just Kidding, I had my neighbors over to the house alot. Then we went through the other 2, needless to say that genny is hard wired into the house pannel now.
What about a methane-based power generation? (either a fuel-cell or retrofitted gas generator)
...well...u'r backside.
Some farmers already use them. They extract the methane from manure from their livestock as the manure is prepped for fertilizer use (they need to let it "rest" before they can use it as fertilizer). The extracted and captured methane is typically fed into a retrofitted generator. It's called Bio-Methane
In some cities, they extract it from sewage. So if u have a septic system, you might be able to collect methane from
And don't forget to invite Cowboy Neal when u have a mexican food BBQ. He goes wild with the beans.
I know how hard it is to keep warm in the winter, in fact me and my boyfriend Sean had the power fail in our San Francisco love nest last winter and it was dreadfully cold while we waited for things to be restored.
;-)
Luckily, we had each other to keep warm with, so after a while things sort of worked themselves out
As for the computers and other powered devices in your house, I would recommend getting a gas-powered generator. These are popular with my friends in North Carolina who have to deal with hurricanes and the power outages they bring, and they seem like a sensible enough solution, i.e. they are readily available at most hardware stores (at least here in the U.S.). Plus they are ready to use and don't require any sort of electrical engineering knowledge to use safely (unlike some idiot here who recommended hooking up a bunch of deep cycling marine batteries in series, LOL!).
If you really want to geek it out, get a biiiig gas turbine and fire that sucker up when you need power. Nothing says "I have power!" like the high-pitched scream of a jet engine.
Electric motors, such as the one your furnace uses to circulate hot air, take a lot of starting current. Take the current your fan motor uses to run and multiply by three. ie. If you have a 1/3 hp blower motor, your inverter or generator should be rated at one hp. In this case your inverter should be rated at 1 kW.
I have (in cool Canada) a setup with a battery and inverter. If the power fails, I run a cable out to the car to charge the battery.
The UK doesnt get that cold, why on earth do you need to keep the heating running? Get some proper insulation, seriously I put the heating on for a couple of hours a day in January if it's particularly cold.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but check out Home power magazine. Many things that a good hacker can adapt. They are most US based, so they won't cover some UK issues. (US is 60 hz)
Just watch the politics, there are very many publications more extreme on the "left". Interesting in other words, but don't believe everything they write.
There was guy in my class who lived out in the countryside. Short power outages occurred frequently due to snow on the powerlines. Their solution was to get a diesel generator and an AC/DC power trip switch/convertor.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
You were last a 1st world country in 1968.
Killed any Irish lately?
How about a UPS farm of cheap noname 600VA UPSes without computer connectivity logic? For example, get some MGE NOVA or PICO.
Solar voltaics can provide backup, as can a micro-chp station. This old article talks about micro-chp, but basically when you are heating your house you get 1kW/h of free electricity. Connect this to a fuel cell, and when you are producing excess electricity then you store it up in hydrogen. When you burst it can be taken directly from the fuel cell without paying the national grid. Use white LEDs for lighting, a VIA mini-itx for your server, and your electricity bills will be only for your cooking and heating.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
If space isn't a huge issue, you could consider using water tanks for their thermal mass. If you keep the house heated most of the time, the water temperature will stay constant even if it's not directly heated. If the power goes out, the water's thermal mass will slow down the cooling process considerably. Ditto the heating, if your power goes out in the summer.
Always a godfather; never a god. -Gore Vidal
My computers at full load generate enough heat to warm up my room.
Each year during winter I migrate from a PPC chip system to an Intel based system for greater warmth. In summer, I return to the cooler PPC. Just like whales.
Seriously, you probably should investigate a natural gas generator, talk to a good electrician, and be prepared to combat a plethora of zoning (or similar in the UK) restrictions. Alternativly you could reinforce the floors of your house and consider lead-acid batteries but many of these solutions are solar oriented and not ideal for the UK in winter.
It's not easy being green.
I'm not saying that all of Canada is colder than everywhere else, but in the Ottawa / Montreal area, there have been a couple of good power outages in the past few years... A quick google for "ice storm ottawa power alternatives" or "ice storm montreal power alternatives" should give you lots of ideas... In 1998, in the winter, almost a million people went without power for about a week...
Platform independent bug tracking software
We've still got millions of tons of coal underground.
That should keep us going for a few winters.
If your gas furnace's blower and exhaust fans run on electricity, which I'm pretty sure they do, you're not going to get more than a minute or two out of a UPS. Those big fans push a lot of air and draw a lot of power. If you're really worried about staying warm, get a propane space heater and a 20lb tank. It will be enough to keep a room or two warm for a couple days.
GEt some cha-cheap UPS's and go to walmart and stock up on car batteries. Aside from having to water them every so often its a cheap and reliable solution.
adventure-today.com
One of those mythical creatures called a Woman.
My low emission wood burning fireplace insert gets installed next Thursday, replacing the useless natural gas fireplace that has sat unused since we bought the house. Finally, I have an excuse to get a chainsaw - most importantly, an excuse that my wife will accept. At the low low cost of $2,500 installed.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
I recently obtained three deep cycle batteries, about 1.5 years old for cheap because a client upgraded to a backup generator, for like $50.
I went to the local mega-mart and bought a 500-watt UPS for %49. ($89, $40 rebate) Then, I yanked out the dinky battery inside, and wired in the three deep-cycle batteries with 12-gauge wire, wiring the three batteries in parallel. I had to buy some brackets and stuff to do this.
I now have nearly 24 hours of UPS time for my sensitive computer equipment, at a total cost of near $150!
Helpful, too, since we're slowly remodelling our home, and I can now shut off the power to the house without disturbing anything.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Get a small radiant gas fireplace with one of those barbeque-style starter buttons. Alternatively, although a little extreme, sort out your woodburning fireplace.
It seems with the low sun angle, and the cloud cover you would expect there, solar energy would not be such a good idea. Did I miss a technology update somewhere ?
What keeps me going is my inertia.
If your alternator in your car is strong enough, and purchase a high wattage inverter for your car, you can use it to power about 1kW to 2kW depending on your setup. I keep a small inverter in my car just incase the power goes out and need to use something for emergency. Another option, would be to get a small used diesel generator that powers much more. You can get a few on eBay for around $500.
considering I overclocked my CPU some more since my room is getting colder now. It was down to 70F, so I turn the CPU up some more..
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Agreed about AC and DC, but here is one thing to keep in mind.
If you run an incandesent bulb off DC it will work just fine, and probably last a VERY long time compared to how long it "should" last.
I thought the UK ran at 240 volts, not 250. I thought South Africa was the only country that ran 250. I though most of Europe was 220 and Europe and the UK were going to unify their standards at 230. Anyone care to comment? BTW, Japan runs at 100 (the lowest, 250 is the highest) and I think Trinidad runs 110 (the USA does NOT, see below).
Of course the USA used to be 110 volts, but is now 120 volts, but so many Americans still don't know that. It actually causes problems with old tube radios.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I strongly suggest you NOT try to back-up your HVAC system unless you expect the electric to be down for extended periods of time (several days); if you do, you'll almost certainly want a generator. Your furnace isn't simply electrically controlled, the fans are electrically powered, and fan motors will pull a lot of amps when they start up. Unless you have a beefy and expensive UPS it won't be able to handle the load, and if you're going to pay that much, you might as well get a generator. It'll run a lot longer than a UPS (unless you have a closet full of batteries), and you'll have the added benefit of being able to run your computers off it and charge their UPSes back up.
You live in the UK, which tends to not have enough sun to make photovoltaic worthwhile. Either you need a positively huge array (and the one in the picture on the website you link to looks like it fairly covers all available space on the roof) or you need lots of sun and Britain just doesn't have that.
Your best (but polluting) source of electricity is a honda generator. You can buy them all over and I'd imagine a DIY outlet will have a few models to choose from. One member here mentions that he did quite well after a hurricane with one. Do not ever run one indoors. They create carbon monoxide so their exhaust needs to be away from the house so that it cannot seep in through a window, vent or other entrance.
You will need a UPS with a generator if you are running a computer, but you don't need one for equipment that may be shut off and restarted, like fans, washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc. You need enough battery life to be able to survive a power outage until you can get the generator running. So if your computer needs to run all of the time, make sure your battery will last long enough for you to wake up, put on clothes and go tend to the generator.
Insulation and sealing are the best non-polluting way to increase heat -- and you will save money on heating fuel all winter, so it pays for itself.
The more insulation you have in your walls and on the roof, the better you are. Be sure there is an air pocket that runs up your eaves on your roof so that you don't get mold on your rafters and shingles and you're all set. You want to add to your "R-Value" in such a way so that you can keep enough home heat inside to keep warm in any full-day power outage.
The homes I've visited in England have tended to be fairly drafty as compared to US homes. So look at your doors and windows and make sure they seal well when you close them. Windows ought to be double-pane windows, which hold in heat four times better than single-pane.
I don't necessarily recommend that you keep up the electricity lifestyle during a power outage. Turn off your computer, unless you need it for work. Use hurricane lanterns and "Coleman" white gas lanters with mantles to light up your home (they'll also add heat but not as efficiently, perhaps, as a real heater). Run up your heater on your generator until it is quite warm inside and then shut it off until things cool down just under bearable temperatures. Don't open any windows to moderate the heat and keep things sealed up as best you can. Don't use the television, save to get information about the power emergency (a radio is usually better anyway for up-to-the-moment information anyway). Run your generator sparingly.
And talk to your local MP and ask why your area is so ill-served with electricity. Ask if his district is not one of second-class citizenry if your power goes out as often as is predicted. Gather your friends and neighbors to help him think more clearly (if he sees you as a voting bloc, he'll think clearly) about the need to introduce a change in the system.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
You can run a gas furnace off of the heat generated from the pilot light using a thermopile and a millivolt controller gas valve. I have heated my house this way in the middle of winter over a 3 day ice storm blackout.
It must be a hot water system. Just open all of the zone valves and eventually the whole system will heat up to the furnace temperature via convection in the pipes. The furnace will cycle between its low and high temperature, even with no power except the thermopile.
This is a standard type of system in the US. Not sure about the UK.
See http://hearth.com/what/gas/howgasworks.html for info on millivolt gas systems.
For heat using a portable or wall mounted catalytic heater that uses natural gas or propane will do the trick. It has no fan/motor, so it needs no electric power to heat a room. I've heated a medium sized two story house with two of these during power outages with snow on the ground.
For your computers an alternative to a generator would be a combination of deep cycle batteries (car batteries are NOT good for this application), and battery charger, and an inverter (to convert low volt DC back to high volt AC). Make sure the inverter is safe for electronic devices, since not all of them are. This isn't really cheaper than a low end generator, but will be kinder to your electronic devices. Some 12v lighting would reduce the load your inverter would have to carry allowing you to purchase a smaller unit.
A better place to find answers to this question would be a news group that covers the topic in question.
Porn might keep you warm in the winter, if you're making it.
(I'm not affiliated with Xantrex.)
For the best inverters I know of, use Xantrex.
Get a bank of 12V batteries, like marine, or car batteries, and run it through something like this, or pop for the integrated solution like this.
Also take a look at those neat solar arrays.
A very close associate of mine uses Xantrex's Trace inverters with a system of LP gas generators, solar arrays, and battery banks to provide power to an off-grid site on a barrier island. When the sun shines (a lot of the time) the solar keeps the batteries charged. The inverter powers the camp from the bateries, and if someone plugs in a hair-dryer (or the sun doesn't shine for a few days) the inverter can turn on the generator to boost the juice, and refresh the batteries. The tricky part is regulating the temerature on the batterie bank. If it gets too hot, it'll "boil" the batteries and they won't be for shit until you fill 'em with distilled water and say a prayer.
mod up.
backup heating doesn't have to be the furnace... unless you got some very important stuff there in which case you should have a generator anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
http://www.sunmachine.de/english/index_y.html
Not in full production yet but should be in a year or so. Once it is it'll be possible to have your own solar power station in your back garden.
35% efficient at converting heat into electricity and the rest of the heat is used for central heating and hot water giving an overall efficiency of 90% or so. If not enough sun, it can switch to gas powered generation.
Will it compete with a cheap petrol generator? Not in the short term. In the long term, it supplies electricity to the grid as well as heating the house, so not only does it reduce your bills, it actually earns some cash.
Deleted
This can't be happening. It is a common phenomenon among developing countries!
A co-worker had seen the exact same thing happen in his last job.
I'm not familiar with what "VRLA" means, but unless the battery is sealed gel-type and rated for deep discharge and repeated cycling, I'd wouldn't use it.
Get your facts right. I don't know what coverage you're reading (the tabloid papers I suspect) but there is no power supply crisis forcast for this winter.
What has been commented on is our increasing reliance on imported power from the continent, and coupled with the decommissiong of several major nuclear power plants over the next decade if we don't act now there could be problems in the future. I don't think UPS'ing your heating system is necessary just yet :)
"But the government said the outlook for power supplies this winter was good and accused the union of "scaremongering""
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3751810.stm
...also produce heat, as do power-hungry computers. I've actually lived with a roommate who would leave the window open during the winter because otherwise the computers and/or his body made things too hot. (He was a big guy.) Larger buildings, however, need more heat.
There was someone in another thread who pointed out the danger of exploding batteries, so I figure I should mention what is probably common sense, but still.
Make sure that any internal-combustion generator you run is either outside or has the exhaust safely directed outdoors.
It is not uncommon to hear stories of entire families killed when a portable generator was run indoors without proper ventilation.
Go for the generator; don't think you would need any thing as big as the link you provided. I have a similar setup at home I live in a rural Area and often lose power, my generator kicks on Automatically when the power goes out and switches the mains out so as not to back feed on to the utility company, and also for my protection when the power is restored. As a backup to this I also have UPS at each box works great With the added benefit of heat hot water and TV
There are many things that can cut power besides just rolling blackouts like ice storms, gale-force winds, terrorism, coal-miners strike, fire, accidents, etc.
Sure, these things may happen once in a while, but trust me, you'll be jumping up and down for joy knowing you have electricy while others go without. It really is the only sure way of having a decent amount of power for long periods. Batteries just won't go very far. Let me relate my experience to you.
The recent hurricanes in Florida kept me with out power a total of 5 days. It was hell. No hot water. No refrigeration. No computer. No fan to keep cool. Not being able to sleep in the heat without a fan, I bought an 300 watt inverter to turn 12vdc into 120vac and power the fan.
Now this is a large fan, but consumes power at the rate of 90 watts. I also had two car batteries. Now you might guess I could drive this fan for days and days on a couple of car batteries.
Do the math:
90 watts = 90 Joules/second
1 car battery stores about 2 megaJoules and I had two.
4 MJ@ 90 J/s = a little over 12 hours.
It didn't make it nearly that far, since the batteries failed to maintain the 12vdc needed for the inverter over the range of the discharge.
So doing the math in your case:
4 amps * 250 volts * 0.71 (this is ac afterall) = 710 watts (assuming you can find an inverter that will deliver at least 710 watts)
710 J/s * 3600 s/h * 8 h = 20448000 Joules.
Each battery gives you about 2MJ, so you'll need at least 10 in parallel to power the inverter for 8 hours.
10 batteries here in the USA are about $500.
You can buy a 5000 watt generator for slighty more money.
Each gallon of diesel used will deliver about 15 MJ of electrical energy. So less than 1.5 gallons of fuel will give you the power you need for 8 hours.
Sounds like the generator is an easy win since it can deliver much more power than any affordable inverter (about $50 for 600 watt).
I think I have the math right. I'm sure someone will let me know if I'm gotten something wrong.
I've heard about a thing you put in your house, that is made of metal, is hollow and you put pieces of wood in it. Then you light the wood on fire. It's been rumoured to work, it may even keep you warm.
Franklin stove.
Why does it have to be some bragging rights geek solution?
OK, you are happy with the grid most of the time and only need 8 hours reserve? This is what you need:
Properly sized battery bank.
charger/controller
inverter
some places have the last two as one unit, especially if your only input is AC grid juice.
--that's it. Your inverter is where you get your juice to run what you want. This deal is just a much larger UPS you get in separate chunks and put together yourself. The wiring is not difficult. You will probably have to custom construct the battery bank containment box based on what you decide to get for batteries and how many of them. This box needs to be sealed and VENTED to the outside with a 24/7 fan. A computer box fan is sufficient and you want it to PUSH through, not pull through.
Batteries are a big variable, in size, voltage, storage capacity and cost. dollars for doughnuts,amp hours to amp hours, usually generic electric forklift traction batteries are the cheapest, available at your nearest forklift dealer. heavy, large, need a little home brew egyptian engineering skills to move them around and get them in place though.. Next up, what you will see pushed at the solar dealers, etc, anything that has "solar" stamped on it. Usually very large 6 volters. At even higher ends they sell individual cell 2 volters. big tall heavy suckers, but hold a lot. These are a premium, although there are several good names out there that have that. Usually Crown battery or Rolls/Surrette or Trojan are considered pretty decent brands for home use. . another is just generic locally aquirred Golf cart storage batteries (lot of brands out there)at 3 cells, 6 volts apiece, pretty common, small enough to arrange and move individually by yourself, and easy to configure into whatever voltage you want using series/parallel connections starting at your most basic 2 batteries giving you a standard 12VDC storage solution with a series connection. That is the smallest you want to go.
24VDC for the bank input and output is a nice common alternate energy industry standard nowadays, and most places that carry such gear will have the charger/controllers and inverters available to handle that voltage. 12VDC is used in small applications. Some people go up to 48VDC. The advantage of the higher voltages comes from a variety of things, but saving on wiring is one of them, use only pure copper everywhere, no aluminum, never, evil mojo.
This is not enough info to get you to do it, but enough to investigate further based on your exact details and your budget. Basically you just want a larger UPS that can run your critical stuff overnight. It will be large enough to always be able to run some of your stuff constantly, as it will only be grid electric supplied, once your grid juice is poofed, you'll be on batteries-without the annoying screech screech. A nice inline voltmeter is a good idea, and some rigs keep temp sensors attached to the batts to help adjust the charging cycle, which is in several stages. Some have serial port connectors for even more geek fun (they might have usb now too, haven't looked lately) All that stuff will come with the paperwork with your charger/controller and inverter.
I would also suggest a desulphator/conditioner for the battery banks themselves to keep them cleaner, but that is optional, but I will say they work quite well and you can milk the flooded lead acid or gel cels out many more years for very cheap bucks compared to replacing them early. Flooded lead acid are not that hard to deal with, every so often needs topping off in the cells with distilled water. Not hard, use usual brains when dealing with batteries and turn the dang doo dads off while you are doing it. I personally don't like gels except for a few limited applications, and they are also a lot more expensive for what you get.
What is also nice about this system is that you COULD later on if you get more enthused incorporate solar PV or a fuel genny or perhaps a windcharger into the mix pretty easily. "Planned Upgradeability" is a good thing.
In Soviet Russia, solar cells cover snow!
A 1500 watt generator here in the states is really too small to keep the vital systems in the house going (the icebox, a few lights, heating systems (on gas or oil only), plus the well pump, a TV and a computer or two.
Here is how energy requirements stack up for minimum comfort and survivability in a typical house. These are rough estimates YMMV.
Lights: 75 - 100 watts Incadescent each (try compact flourescents at 20 watts each)
19" Solid State TV: 125 watts
Desktop computer with 17 inch CRT Monitor: 300 watts
Microwave Oven: 1200 watts
Oil Burner/Air Handler/Heater Controls 500-1000 watts
Well Pump: 500 watts
Refrigerator: 500 Watts
In this case, it will take a bare minimum of 4 Kw to keep a couple of lights on, heat up some instant oatmeal or canned ravioli, and run the well and the heating system. Of course, this will leave you with cold water, and you better not turn on too many lights, use the stove or any heating appliances.
I was able to piece together and get running a broken 2500 watt generator last fall for about $100 in parts. Hurricane Isabel took out my power for 3 days, and afterwards for months there were power failures whenever the wind blew more than 25 MPH. I figured I could power my TV, computer, a couple of lights, and the fridge, and get a fire going in the fireplace to keep warm. I ran the generator several times last fall, including 12 hours one evening after high winds took out the lines (again).
In reality, the UPS for my computer didn't get along well at all with the generator, and constantly cut in and out as the voltage sagged whenever the fridge cut on. The engine labored hard whenever the fridge cut on, which brings up another important point: Whenever a motor starts, it can draw up to several times its steady-state load, so you must figure in a decent margin of extra capacity when sizing your generator. Not for all expected surge loads simaltaneously, but enough to handle your expected load, plus the surge load of the largest motor you plan to start. In practical terms, the smallest generator that can really keep a home running even without electric heat, washing clothes, cooking on an electric range, elecrically heating hot water, etc. is in the range of about 7.5 KW. Also, if you live in the states, if you want to run any major systems on generator (air handlers, well pumps, heat pumps, etc, remember that these systems often use 240 Volts, rather than 120.
My experience on that windy and chilly night was still better than shivering in the dark without even a radio to keep me company, but it was still a major hassle running extension cords to lights, major appliances, and so on. It was also a major hassle attending to the generator to fill it with gas and check the oil every couple of hours, which meant going outside into pitch blackness and arctic chill to tend to the generator, and to load up on firewood.
My Dad OTOH, was in the generator business before he retired, and was able to get his hands on a used and broken 40 KW Onan diesel generator that he was able to repair. Now retired and living in an out of the way corner of rural Virginia, his generator has had to deal with power outages for up to two weeks at a time after severe ice storms and hurricanes knocked out power. The generator has enough power to run the entire 2200 square foot house, even the heat pump and central airconditioning. With the entire community of 7 houses on a community well however, nobody had water. During an extended power outage, this became a major problem, especially since most of the residents are retirees. Solution: Run 1,000 feet of underground cable from my dad's generator to the pump.
Cost of running the generator during the summer cooling season: About $300 a week for fuel
Chillin in front of the big screen while the neighbors are sweltering in the dark: Priceless
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That's probably less than it would cost you to add a SINGLE additional battery to your system.
Here's how: Find yourself an old "horizontal" style lawnmower engine (anything over 2HP will do) and a car alternator - the bigger the better. Put a pully on each, string a V-belt between them and bolt them down to a thick piece of plywood or better, some sort of metal frame. Using the wire from a set of old booster-cables, hook the output from the alternator (which should be outside, of course) through the nearest convenient window (or drill a hole in the wall) and across your UPS battery (making sure it is the CORRECT POLARITY). When the power goes out for more than 20 minutes, go outside and start up the engine for practically unlimited runtime.
Even with a small car alternator, this rig will easily give you 12 volts at fifty amps. If you use a larger alternator, like the kind you would find on a truck, you can get 12 volts at up to a HUNDRED amps (= 1,200 watts).
I once put a system like this together for fun for under $50.00 CDN, ($30.00 for a beat-up old engine in the local bargain-finder and $20.00 for an alternator from the local scrapyard.) This is significantly less expensive than buying even a single extra battery, which would cost about $80.00. The thing would run for HOURS before needing refueling, and if I wanted longer runtime I could have just added a bigger gas tank.
Now, before you pack up your wrenches and head down to the local scrapyard, there is something you need to check: Does your UPS use a single large 12-volt battery, or does it use two smaller 12-volt batteries in SERIES for a total of 24-volts? If your system has two 12-volt batteries in series, you're going to need a 24-volt alternator. Where do you get a 24 volt alternator? Well, most Land Rover vehicles have 24-volt alternators, as would practically any kind of emergency vehicle, most military vehicles, and many large trucks. So, if you need a 24-volt alternator and can't find a Land Rover at your local wreckers, head to an INDUSTRIAL vehicle scrapyard.
For the load you initially described, (250 volts @ 4 amps = 1,000 watts at continuous use) you would need a sustained power INPUT of about 1,200 watts. Note however, that in reality you will probably NOT need 1,000 watts continuous output as your furnace blower will be cycling on and off as will the other loads in your house. The UPS's battery will cover the extra load when everything IS running and recharge from the alternator when it ISN'T. This means you can likely get by with a smaller alternator.
Overall, the solution I have described is ugly, noisy, and isn't likely to last through more than 100 hours of use. But it's also cheap, light (compared to a battery), easy to hook into the UPS, quite reliable, and works great if you only need a few hours of additional electrical power. If you're mechanically inclined, this is the cheapest and most effective solution I can think of.
If you're really keen on the whole batteries/UPS/alternator modding-it-to-run-on-practically-any-source-of-pow er thing or just want even more reasons why trying to run it off solar power would be a terrible idea (at least where you live), I did a really interesting writeup on this for an anti-landmine technology competition a few years back. We made the whole reference design that we came up with effectively "open-source", so feel free to use it as you please. You can have a look at that here: http://www.intellicharge.ca/Downloads/Downloads.ht m The server has pretty serious bandwidth so it should be relatively /. resistant, but please don't rack up our hosting bill by downloading the full 1200dpi 114 MEG "print resolution" version unless you have good
Learn to attach it to your homes powers system.
These things can experience drift, so be sure to keep anything that needs stable power plugged into your ups.
How long do you expect these outages to be?
The answer to that question will determine the answer to your question. If it is more then a few hours, I would seriously think of a generator.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would suggest building something which draws off of a car battery. And I wouldn't spend a whole lot of money on that. I'd build it so that it can run an hour on battery power.
And then I would make sure that I could recharge the battery with the car. Assuming that you have a gas station within 30 minutes of driving you can sustain this indefinitely.
But that will be terribly inefficient and it will pollute you say? Well, you are right. But it isn't like it will be used often. Maybe never. But in a crisis situation it would work. And it would be cheap.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
In my house the computer room is always the warmest room in the house. If it starts getting chilly in there I just boot up the rsync box and back up my mp3s.
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
coleman gas lanterns or stoves or heaters that run on liquid coleman fuel or unleaded gasoline "white gas" are not recommended for indoor use. You'll kill yourself with CO buildup as they are sucking O2 out of the air. They will even tell you that on the box. The propane fired ones are a lot cleaner and safer to burn indoors, and even then you should have some windows cracked. You can get adapters for around 10$ that will let you attach them to a 20 lb refillable tank instead of the expensive 1lb throw aways they come with.
Generators are covered in depth in uk.diy
The big problems are that generators create spikes which can kill modern electronics in things like CH, and that the generator as it stands doesn't have a 'true' earth like your house does. If you are doing this properly, then the generator itself should be earthed.
To power the whole house, you'd need a switch over, though a fly lead to individual items is ok.
Using a leisure battery and invertor seems better, but most cheap invertors don't produce a true sine wave. Will the CH run with a poorly formed wave without damage?
Personally I'm thinking of getting some gas heaters/lanterns/solid fuel camping stoves.
There is no way you will need a backup heating system to survive 8 hours. You building has a certain heat capacity and in 8 hours this heat will not fall with more than a couple degrees. So unless you open the windows, it won't get that cold.
;-P)
Ofcourse the exact speed will differ with the heat capacity of the building and the difference in inside and outside temperature. In addition a serious heat leak can cause the inside air temperature to fall faster than the building temperature. (In most contries with actual winter this is a serious mis-construction.)
In a typical norwegian wooden house with inside temparature 20C and outside temperature -30C (as cold as it gets in the inland) you will get ca 5C
lower temperature (building, not air) in the first 24 hours without heating. In Britain the temperature difference of a cold winter day will be half this, but probably also the building will be somewhat porer insulated. (However brick buildings have a tremendious spesific heat capacity in the material...)
In my current house (timber case from 1926 with inside insulation and outside panel.) given -20C outside and 20C inside, I could probably last for 5 days without heating before loosing 10C. (But in this house run steadily with 0C ouside (like it is right now) with no other heating than myself and my computer unless I open a window. (55m apartment ¼-part) I have nothing but electric heating.
On a side-note. At work (A University) we are systematicly connecting the cooling systems for computer rooms to the heating systems for the buildings so that more than essentially all of the power used to run and cool the computers gets reused to heat the building. This has been standard in all new public buildings for some time, but now we are fixing the old server rooms.
In addition if your computer is running, and is a p4 or athlon there is no way it will be colder than the approved operating temperatures inside the case. And in practice your computer will survive temperatures way below spec unless you have very gets condensation of undercooled air inside the case, (ie you get a -30C computer and boots it up in a warm bathroom. Only an overclocker will ever do something this stupid
VRLA is Valve Regulated Lead Acid...VRLA is better than a sealed lead acid precisely because it will NOT explode- it will vent if charged too fast.
VRLA is a teensy bit different from a standard gel cell in terms of charge profile, but they're close enough that it shouldn't matter much; I think the float voltage is typically lower. HOWEVER, you DO need to make sure you match specifications ( and not just "12v", get the specs sheet and look at the charge, float, etc voltages), and be aware that VRLAs are not particularly fond of heat; adding a tiny fan to the UPS enclosure would probably be a swell idea anyway as the buggers tend to run hot.
The REALLY thorough will check the charge current from the UPS. UPS makers are under pressure to get the battery charged back up quickly, and they may push the limits of the battery's charge current. It's generally C/20 where C = A/Hr capacity; ie a 20Ahr battery should not be charged faster than 1A continuous (a brief peak charge might be OK, and if so, will be specified in current and duration). Charging too fast will cause gassing, overheating- and past a certain point, like many other batteries, lead acid batteries of any type can go into thermal runaway, which is not pretty.
Adding in extra batteries into a UPS not designed for expansion will be trouble, on the charging side of the equation. If you've ever had a completely dead car battery and tried to charge it with a charger, you know what I'm talking about- the voltage drop is so great, the battery practically acts like a short and will cause the charger to overload. The same thing could happen with a UPS. A good sign is if there are battery expansion packs available for your UPS; use that as a guide for sizing.
Oh, and by the way, you may want to consider adjusting your UPS to use the proper float voltage (not for the faint of heart, but possible on some UPS's without soldering), and again, installing a low-speed fan to move some air through the thing and keep everything cool. Many UPS vendors coughAPCcough set their float voltages too high and thus cook the batteries, and the elevated temperatures don't help either; that all makes for a nice revenue stream, as they charge a fortune for replacement packs(which are almost always made up of standard-size batteries, and thus available much more cheaply if you're the enterprising type). Properly maintained lead-acid batteries should last almost a decade- yet most UPS batteries die within a matter of 2-3 years. It's pathetic, considering how much lead is in them and how most people probably don't dispose of the UPS's or the batteries properly.
Please help metamoderate.
remove heatsink
I'm surprised at how many people suggested the use of batteries and an inverter. The ammount of batteries that you need to provide 8hours of 250v at 4amp would occupy an entire garage. It would be a magnitude cheaper to just buy a gas/diesel generator.
For God's sake, be careful if you use propane or any other type of heater that is not intended for indoor use. Burning propane generates carbon monoxide, which is deadly and odorless, so make sure that the heater you use is properly vented. New York City just passed a law requiring all residences to have carbon monoxide detectors, following the deaths of three women from co poisoning due to a faulty flue. A search of a newspaper database for propane heater carbon monoxie poisoning turned up 327 articles. Remember that in 1994, tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis died from a faulty heater.
That's what I did, and my computers and me are staying nice and warm.
get a propane space heater and a 20lb tank
Don't do this. Catalytic propane space heaters are meant to be used in open, well-ventilated areas, like outdoors. Used in enclosed spaces, a dangerous level of CO2 can build, which can be potentially lethal. This is especially dangerous in an outage situation, where you're likely to huddle in a smaller, well insulated room and close the doors.
Your best bet for an emergency heat source is a fireplace. Wood is good, but propane is simpler to operate, easier to install, and lower maintenace. It's safer than a space heater because it vents exhaust gases outside and the tank (usually larger than 20lb) is stored outside your home. Some models have a fan to use convective heating, making them more efficient. This fan is usually small and lower power, suitable for a reasonably sized UPS.
It may cost a little more, but you also gain the aesthetic benefits of having a fireplace to use anytime, whereas the space heater is often an ugly looking contraption.
The only way to generate that much power is with a internal combustion engine or a very large flywheel (1000 pounds or so). Such large flywheel systems are commercially available, but not something you could easily install by yourself.
Actually, typical residential service in the US is 240V split-phase; the distribution transformer is center-tapped, and the center tap is grounded to serve as the neutral. Phase-to-neutral is 120, phase-to-phase is 240. Heavy-draw appliances, such as large air conditioners, electric ovens, dryers, etc. are usually run on 240.
Another system uses two of three phases on a 208V three-phase supply; phase-to-neutral is still 120. This is normally only found in apartments and commercial buildings.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I remember seeing this before on the wire, and it looked like a pretty good idea. If you could get a couple of them, it would do a nice job.
D =1 9&Year=2003&NewsID=587
http://www.britishgasnews.co.uk/index.asp?PageI
...having been without power last year for 3 days in the Great Willamette Valley Snowstorm of 2003, it's not that bad of a deal.
We happened to have a propane stove that looks like a wood stove in our living room. Lucky for us, it's got a pilot light. So the fan didn't help blow heat out.
We bought a couple of rolls of plastic, and sealed off the living room. Not air-tight seal, but just enough to stop the convectional airflow.
The rest of the house got down to ~40 degs F, but we could keep the living room at 70 degs F no problem. All 4 of us (wife, me, two kids) slept on the fold-out bed in the living room. Wel, we lived in that room for 3 days, actually.
The big problem would have been if the water association had lost power. Ya need water for the toilet, as well as to drink, and to keep a faucet or two dripping, to keep the pipes from freezing.
So we had to toss the contents of our refrigerator and freezers. That was a $200 bummer, but...
Why three days? We're on a spur of a spur that has about 8 houses on it. We're VERY low on the power company's fix-it priority list, probably at the bottom.
What did we do for food? Ate out for dinner, but we probably could have bought a camp stove or fired up the barby if we wanted to. But McMinnville is only 10 miles away, too.
Strange going to bed at 5pm, because there's nothing else to do, really.
I live in Western Australia. After reading people's post, all I can say is: Wow Here, even during the coldest day of winter you don't have to worry about the cold much at all. We don't have to worry about emergency power for our heaters and piping freezing. Certainly puts things in perspective when I complain about it being 'cold'. (When its 10 degC) :)
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
If you use one of those in an enclosed space you're likely to die of carbon monoxide poisoning!
Like a bic lighter? If your talking about a typical gas heater the only electrical element I know of would be the igniter.
I'd save the money for another rainy day project.
Quack, quack.
There are conversion kits to make gasoline- (excuse me, petrol-) powered generators run on natural gas.
"Insanely expensive" might simply mean "well built". The bottom of the market for generators is notorious for falling apart quickly. I've seen liquid-fuel generators just as expensive as the ones for natural gas.
replace all your computers with Athlon XP boxes. if your heater cuts out, the computers will keep the house warm.
I live in the sticks, sometimes the power goes out for several days at a time (not many people on this power line == low priority + hard to get to), and I also want something to keep the basics going, like the thermostat, a few lights, gas stove igniters, and of course the computers. I have a 10kw Generac Guardian, bought it from Home Depot several years ago for $3000 including automatic transfer switch. It kicks in after about 30 seconds. The computers have UPSs to cover that time, there is also a UPS for the answering machines and DVD/VCR/CD, since I'd just as soon not have them get jiggy in that 30 seconds.
I built a small foundation and shed for the generator to keep snow from covering the vents, but it coems with a semi-attractive rain cover, looks as good as any a/c unit. Mine runs off propane but it can be easily switched to natural gas. Not quiet, but you can talk next to it.
Infuriate left and right
Finally something on slashdot that I know something about. We went through a major ice storm here(Oklahoma) about 3 years ago. If heat is what you are concerned with get a gas catalytic heater in the 20k to 30k btu range. We had one on hand still in the box and hooked it up and lit it about the time the juice went off. We expected to keep a couple of rooms warm but were pleasantly surprised to find that it kept the whole house toasty for the 2 weeks we were with out utility electricity. Make sure you figure a way to hook it up to your gas service beforehand. We used an airhose tee'd into the line going to the furnace. It won't pass anyone's code but if you get in this kind of shape the authorities will have their hands full with other things. The heater is pretty clean burning but there is no flue so you need to go outside once in awhile just to make sure you change some air. We did eventually borrow a generator from family living outside the blackout zone. Neighbors bought generators by the hundreds. Most got 5KW models. They were able to run part of the house at a time - freezer and refrigerator and some lights or furnace and some lights when that was a priority. 10KW should let you live quite comfortably. The generator we borrowed ran off the PTO of a tractor and was 13 KW. We didn't run the furnace but kept using the catalytic heater. That way we could shut off the generator part of the time and still keep warm. The generator was an older model that had brushes and the lights flickered some but some of the more modern brushless ones flickered too. The only appliance that seemed to take exception to it was the microwave oven. When we tried to use it it sounded like it would come off the shelf so it stayed parked for the duration. Real electronics mostly run on rectified DC internally so the flicker gets filtered out. Had no trouble whatsoever with any of those things. People warned that months down the road troubles could arise but we have seen nothing that seems related to the outage. The heater we had was around $150US and the 5KW generators were $500 to $600. I don't think I would consider trying to do what you suggest with batteries. Both heater and generator will cost almost nothing in maintenance if you never use them but batteries will go bad no matter what. You know your situation best. There was at least on fatality from CO from a generator during the time we were blacked out, so that is something to be aware of. Some of the generators developed carburator icing problems when run for hours on end. They really weren't made for quite that kind of service but there were few if any outright failures. redsilo
A couple of P4 Extreme Editions should keep your house (and manybe your neighbor's too!) nice and toasty while the funace is out.
I'm not sure of the cost of generators over in the UK but I have a decent sized (15000w) generator that I got very cheaply from a close friend. You can get a 5000w generator for well under $1000USD.
Transfer switches monitor the incoming power and automatically switch to generator when the power is interrupted (and vice versa when the power is restored). The panel I bought was about $1500 but again, it all depends on amperage, voltage and pole configuration. Best of luck to you.
Why not just buy.... 1) Cheap indoor-safe propane heater. Fuel is sort of cheap and easy to store. You can just heat the rooms you need. I don't know were you live but I doubt in 8 hours your house would loose that much temperature that it would be dangerous maybe just chilly. 2) A small gas generator for other electrical items. You don't need to store as much fuel as you would only run a fridge, etc. Done for $200-500
First, get a labtop with a powercord you can plug into your cigarette lighter.
Then, if the power goes, make your car your home. It has heat, power, radio, and if your lucky maybe even a dvd player!
It's amazing where they turn up, under loads of crap in garages & back sheds, even though they've been legislated out of existence.
Just keep a bottle of kero in the garage & you'll be right.
Or just do what lazy tight arses like I do & save on the heating bill by using a duna, a pair of traky dak's under one's jeans, with a AU$7 flannalette shirt from Woolies up top, with a baggy sloppy Joe ontop of it graced by a old M65 jacket with a custom made Alpaca pile lining buttoned inside it (including the hood).
Combined with the fact that all the light sockets at home have either 5, 8 or 11 watt flouro globes in them & on most nights I only have two 5 watters going, my quarterlly electricity bills never get over AU$70, & that's with the telly & the computer on 15 hours a day or more..
I'm getted a handed-down gas-stove in about a month, then I'll replace the electric hot-water heater with a instantaneous gas one, then hopefully my electricty bill will get under AU$40 a quarter.
Of course getting a Kelpie to keep one's feet warm while in bed or on the couch helps alot.
I live in a early Victorian sandstone row-house in inner-city Sydney & I have visitors from Europe & North America that are so spoilt by central heating they think my home is the coldest house they've ever experianced. Wait till they've experianced how cold old rural Australian weatherboard houses with pressed metal ceilings can get on winter nights, especially when the lead windows are missing the odd bit here or there.
What solutions do you recommend?
Move to some place warmer.
But it's extremly rare to find anything made for any voltage between 220v & 250 that doesn't work or cause problems.
Really other than things made for the US & other weird places, everthing made to run on mains for the last 50 years is to designed to run on any voltage between 220v & 250v wihtout a hiccup.
You can charge the batteries with your car in a pinch.
You're talking about 4 amps at 250 V, over a period of 8 hours. That's 1000 watts for eight hours, or 8 kilowatt hours. However, this doesn't cater for the power factor -- if your house has a power factor of 0.8, for example, batteries capable of providing that current for that period of time will run your house for about six and a half hours. So you'll need to bring up the batteries to 10 kilowatt hours to compensate -- either that, or (if it's an inductive load) buy a whopping great big bank of capacitors to bring the power factor back up to a reasonable level.
Umm you got it backwards.. Lets go to the facts..
Starting with some glossary terms..
Volts = Electrical pressure
Amps = Electrical current
Watts = Power
VoltAmps = Volts * Amps
Vars = Volts Amps Reactive.
Power Factor = Percent of Volt Amps that are Power scaled 0-1.
What's it mean?
If you drop a Capacitor on an AC line, it will draw current but not get hot unless it's not designed for the voltage, current, or polarity.
The current is said to be reactive. All of the current measured in VA is not Watts. The power Factor is zero. Volts * amps * power factor = watts. Most inverters don't like a highly reactive load. This may dammage it.
A light bulb gets hot. It is not an inductor or capacitor.. It has a power factor of 1. Volts * amps * power factor = Watts.
A furnace motor may have a power factor of 0.8. If it drew 4 amps at 250 volts it's VA = 4*250 or 1000VA. The actual power draw in watts is 80% of tthe VA. Remember power = Volts * Amps * Power Factor or 250 * 4 * 0.8 = 800 Watts.
So in the above example in the parant, the load draws 800 watts. If it draws it for 8 hours, that's 6.4 KWH not 10 KWH.
Remember that inverters don't like reactive loads. The inverter may take the reactive power and dump it as heat depending on the design. That's 200 watts of reactive power. You also need to scale for conversion consumption. The inverter uses power. It is not a lossless process.
If you run large reactive loads, save your inverter by looking into doing some power factor correction.
With a reactive load such as a transformer or motor, the current lags the voltage. In a capacitive load such as a noise filter, current leads the voltage. It is possible to correct reactive load problems with lamp ballasts, motors and transformers by adding capacitors to the line. You want a capacitor that has the same VAR rating as the load you are trying to correct. In the above example, we have a reactive component of 200 watts. (800 true watts subtracted from the 1000 VA leaves the reactive component of 200 watts reactive) Adding 200 watts capacitive reactance will cancel out the inductive reactance load. This will reduce the load on the inverter. Now it sees a 800 VA load, not a 1000 VA load. Now the inverter sees a power factor corrected to 1. The motor still draws 1000 VA but now gets the 200 VA reactive component from the capacitor, not the inverter.
I hope I didn't loose too many in the dry discussion of what a VAR is.
Anyway, this is the reason on some power poles, you may see a bank of capacitors. It is used to correct power factor and reduce the amprage load on a substation.
The truth shall set you free!
I can't personally vouch for them but they've been advertised on WTOP here in washington dc for a couple years now and I know someone that uses one for his entire office building.
Site is a little thin on details, and I doubt they do installs outside the wash dc area, but you could probably order one.
Oh yeah, the link. http://www.bannerbackup.com/
It seems as if the subject has changed suddenly and there is still no answer to your question...
Let's see if I can give it a go:
There is not really enough information to make a good suggestion.
Typical UPS's won't help keep the heat on. A good UPS that can handle the motor load and last for more than an hour would be very expensive.
Solar does not seem to be good for the UK, unless you happen to be in a very sunny place.
A standby generator may be good, provided the local council doesn't get their fingers in it.
Wind power may be cost effective if there is enough wind but again, it may really annoy the council and neighbours may also take offence.
If you can hide a quiet generator, it may be the better way to go. It can be wired into the house with a cutover switch. It can run for days and you can keep it filled with diesel, petrol or LPG or whatever gas you wish to use.
Research and study is needed on your part, or you can hire a consultant to do the work.
Here are some places to start checking:
Home Power Magazine
Re-Focus Magazine
Renewable Energy World Magazine
Might help to get hard copies of such magazines.
There should be lots of stuff on Yahoo.
There are books on solar and wind power at amazon, ranging from 10 to 60 quid or so.
Some Celebrity: Homer, Is it true in your home town you can't drink the water?
Homer: We've got a saying back at home, if its brown drink it down, if its black send it back.
1. Run SETI@Home
2. Run Folding@Home
3. Run a Counter-Strike Source Listening Server
4. disconnect the fans
5. pry the CPU heat sink off
What is the purpose of warming the PCs, They like the cold.
I'm no expert, but i'd say in your part of the world, a generator would probably be the best decision. With solar power, you'd have to have a very large array of batteries with a long initial charging time. If your power is out during the winter, chances are there's not too much sun happening either, therefore your battery bank would be discharging to power house, and would be recharging very little, if at all. A decent sized generator on the other hand... Just hook it up to your electrical panel, and when the power cuts, this starts automatically. Check out Generac brand, my boss (electrician) swears by them.
I do grant you that solar panels are expensive. But it could be a worthwhile expense.
My approach is that everything that I want to keep running when the power goes out should run from either 12V or 24V. I have a 24VDC system. Two 12V batteries in series for 24V, and a third 12V battery which is kept charged by a DC/DC converter. (This was mostly because I had surplus batteries; 12V alone would be fine for many purposes. My earlier attempt was with a pair of 6V golf-cart batteries in series. These are capable of storing a lot of energy, and they last a long time if well taken care of, but they do consume water.) The 24V system is charged by a pair of large solar panels on the roof, which I got used on ebay. I'm a little underwhelmed though with the current that I'm getting out of them, so suggest you should get new ones with the best efficiency you can find. Today I was getting a peak of 3 amps charge current. That's only 72 watts, and it is not providing that much all day long, either. Consequently my "secondary" grid-powered battery charger is providing most of the charging. I have 2 computers running on batteries now, and together they draw about 4 amps continuously from the 24V supply. One is an Athlon with an Orion 24V ATX power supply, and the other is a fanless Epia 600, supposedly low power, but it is drawing a bit over 2 amps off the 12V supply (which translates to a bit over 1 amp off the 24V supply). The Epia has one of these, which gives me the flexibility to run from either voltage.
CRTs are line-powered but LCDs typically run from a lower voltage. Right now I have two big CRTs for my main system and they are power hogs, and generate a lot of heat. Some day I will upgrade, and I think it's possible to find LCDs which have wall-wart power supplies rather than built-in. I would bet some of them are 12V too. So then I will be set - I could do any kind of computing I like even during a power outage. A laptop is also a good solution, but those usually charge from less standard voltages, like 16 or 18. It's unfortunate.
12V lighting is easy, because RVers use so much of it. You can find 12V fluorescent lights, halogen track lights (but that's kindof wasteful), LED lights etc. In an extended power outage I would turn off one or both of the computers, and then the 24V battery would keep the 12V battery charged, and I could have lighting indefinitely as the solar panels charge the 24V battery every day. The kitchen has a drop ceiling with several 4' grid-powered fluorescent lights already. I added a 2' 12V powered RV light. It is well hidden above the translucent ceiling panels, and provides enough light to get by.
For my computer rack I made a panel with efficient switching DC/DC converters that supply 5V and 3.3V as well, for things that would otherwise have been powered by inefficient "wall wart" power supplies. Just consolidating all of those to a single source should save a lot of power. The panel has a bunch of these connectors. I use red & black for 12V, blue & black for 24V, orange & black for 5V and yellow & black for 3.3V. (I debated about whether to follow the PC power supply color convention, but the ham radio guys have already chosen red for 12V, and that doesn't match.) I plan to use brown for any other odd voltage that I may need later; I notice a lot of things running from 7.5V, for instance (hubs and scanners and stuff like that). I used some panel-mount holders like these to mount them on a rack panel. If you don't want to make your own p
Some APC UPS units have an external connector normally used for disconnecting the built-in battery for safe shipping or in case of fire. By replacing the internal battery with a wire-loop, the external connector can be used to conveniently hook up large batteries. (Watch the polarity!)
The SmartUPS 1400 model pictured is a 24 volt system, so 2 serially connected deep-cycle lead acid batteries must be used.
ups1
ups2
This setup worked great during the recent hurricanes and power outages in Florida. It kept my laptop, cell phones and flashlights charged during the outages, the longest of which was about 5 days. During prolonged outages you would want to turn the UPS off, and only run it for an hour a day or so to charge smaller devices, check the news, etc.
For 1+ kW for 8 hours a small petrol generator would be your best solution.
This is a good idea, or better yet get one rated for natural gas and hook it into your residential supply. In any case, make sure you have one that is rated for indoor useage, which generally means it contains an oxygen sensor for auto shutoff. A battery powered CO detector would also be useful (with or withou the space heater). We have a 5 panel (6K, 18K, or 26K BTU) ceramic propane heater tied into our house supply and it can produce more than enough heat to keep most of the downstairs (approx 950 sq. ft.) cozy with 20 degree temps outside. Based on your requirements, this is also probably the most cost effective solution.
I've replaced all of the heating type appliances in my house with their natural gas counterparts. Gas log in the fireplace requires no electricity or venting, and the gas hot water tank has a pilot light and thermocoulple. Gas range top burners work with no power if I can find a match, but not the oven. I can cook, shower, and hang out in the living room by the fireplace if the electricity goes out. Power outages aren't usually long where I live (Seattle area), but my biggest worry when it happens is getting bored, not cold. If I had your UPS I wouldn't be bored, assuming whatever took out the power didn't also kill the cable internet.
There are propane heaters you can run off a small tank if natural gas isn't available in your area or you just need to cover this need on a tight budget. You do have to be aware of their oxygen consumption (open a door now and then, sleep with a window open), but gas burns pretty clean.
curiouser and
Your car is a self-contained habitation module. Given a supply of dead dinosaurs, it'll produce plenty of heat and electricity. Here's how to get them out of the car and into your house. I haven't actually set this up yet but I've been considering it for a long time. Give a think to this plan:
The electricity is pretty simple. Your stock alternator produces 14 volts DC at somewhere between 50 and 100 amps. After derating for alternator heating, and inverter losses, figure about 500 watts of useful continuous power, with momentary surge capacity of at least 2kW. Inverters that produce more than 100 watts or so should be wired straight in.
For the heat, you'll need a way to circulate the engine's coolant into the house and back. Pick up a "radiator flush" kit at the auto store. It's a set of tee fittings that install inline with the radiator hoses, and have threads for garden hoses to screw on. Pick up a radiator from the junkyard, and a bunch of hose that can handle the temperature and pressure involved. Plumb your new radiator in parallel with the existing one.
After filling the whole mess with coolant, doublecheck all your hoseclamps and start 'er up. As the engine heats up, the thermostat will open and both radiators should get warm. If you need to divert more flow to the external one, try pinching or adding a valve to one of the hoses. Put a small fan on your in-house radiator and voila!
Now the only problem is that Murphy's law guarantees a power failure will happen when your tank is almost empty. Diesel keeps well, but gasoline turns to varnish after a few months in storage, so if you're going to keep a few gallons in a spare can, change it out regularly.
(Please note: Make damn sure all your hoses and fittings can handle the temperatures and pressures involved. Check the coolant level after the bubbles work out. Keep an eye on engine temp if you choose to restrict the hose, and pay special attention if the engine's radiator fan comes on, which probably indicates inadequate coolant flow. Provide adequate airflow over the inverter's heatsink. Don't touch wiring with your hands covered in coolant. I'm not responsible if you blow yourself up.)
If you want to minimise disruptions, you run critical things via the UPS (that's why it's called UnInterruptible), and for longer outages feed the UPS from a generator.
BUT many UPSs won't do it; they'll see the irregular waveform from the generator and say "that seems dodgy, better just run off battery until it's better".
Some UPSs can take it - they'll run or charge off irregular power just fine, but they cost more. Check with the manufacturer.
Also, some explicitly support battery expansion units.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Does anyone know of a UPS system designed to/capable of taking advantage of standard 12v car/marine batteries. They are much bigger than your standard UPS battery and yet they are relatively cheap to buy and replace because they are manufactured in volume and stocked in stores. I'd like to see something designed to sit on top of one of these and provide UPS functionality.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Price maybe sligthly too expensive, it will produce excessive energy for your needs, handling of used fuel maybe dangerous, BUT you are going to last a LOT longer than anyone else if there is power outage;) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1504564.stm
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
...just remove the cooler and disipator :)
drmad
Replace the UPS battery with a car battery. Cost: ~ UKP30 for a 60AH battery (a cheap brand is OK because huge current capacity is not required). This will allow you to run a computer for a few hours, without braking the bank. However, you are talking about 1KW power consumption for 8 hours - I think the only solution is, indeed, a small generator. If you could drop the power requirement to a quarter, then a car-battery UPS solution would become practical (with maybe two or three batteries). dny
Just buy a pack of candles and matches. Battery powered heating must be one of the most ineffective solutions possible. The few hours of heating you could possibly get would not make much difference. it's not like your house temperature will drop instatly when the power goes off. If it does you really need better insulation.
The cheapest solution is to go around, find and buy used diesel power generator.
Put it into a garage or cellar, connect exhaust pipes to outside, and finally get an electrician to connect it to house grid.
Ok - they are big and noisy when started, but I've seen such solution and it works better than anything on led batteries, which tend to go down in really cold weather.
Migrate south
It looks like APC "hard-coded" the designed runtime into the UPS's firmware, so the thing shuts off after X minutes at a given load, regardless of the charge left on the battery. The system does this even after putting it through the runtime calibration routine.
I haven't tried this on my SmartUPS 1400 yet (maybe APC has gotten around the issue in this model), but if you have a SmartUPS 1000 you may want to think twice before heading out to pick up a stack of deep-cycle batteries.
I mean, really. Who in their right mind would want to put up with a winter like that if they don't have to.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
I am not so sure it will not work. For my heater I need electricity for the small computer that controls the thing and for a small electrical pump (50W) that pumps the warm water through the house.
8 hours, that's about an average sleep period. So here's the plan: The power cuts out, quickly go to sleep. (brush your teeth first :)
Wake up 8 hours later, the power is back on and you'd never know the difference.
(besides the pool of water under your freezer!)
To avoid the freezer problem you collect a few nuts beforehand, then leave the freezer off all winter.
Then you could go all the way and live in a tree!
(Man I have all the best ideas)
-Mike Whitehurst www.mike-whitehurst.co.uk
Is why i read slashdot...
First off, 4 amps is quite a lot of current. That makes 960 watts - what do you have switched on? Go around the house and see what you can unplug- unscrew a few redundant lightbulbs, immersion heaters etc.
The second thing is that in a built up area, a generator is something you can't afford to have. Especially for a long outage (or on Christmas Day), the noise, fumes, light or radio interference will attract neighbours who will inevitably hand you an extension lead with a load that will stall the jenny. When that happens, they will simply not accept it's their fault and beg you to unplug your own house instead... for the sake of their children... and you won't get any money from them, of course.
In case of civil unrest you may face worse from passers by for being perceived as a "have."
It's better to go without along with everybody else than make yourself the local target.
(Disclaimer--do thas at your own risk. If you burn something up, it's your own damn fault)
Or get yourself a Toyota Prius hybrid.
Here is what I did with mine: I bought a 700W inverter and wired it to the small 12V battery used to "start"* the car. I can then let the car "run"** indefinitely and it will supply my loads quite nicely.
The 270V system maintains the 12V battery charge and supplies the inverter through the hybrid electrical system. The system will automatically cycle the engine on and off to maintain the battery charge and keep the engine/exhaust system warm.
If you want something bigger, get yourself a big (and I mean BIG) UPS. APC I know makes really big ones, up to 15KW at least if I remember right. How well they work on inductive loads remains to be seen. I tried putting an air conditioner on a big UPS once (the air conditioner was maybe 1/4 the total capacity of the UPS), and it didn't like the inductive load on start-up for some reason. Maybe the starting surge, I don't know.
Come to think of it, if you lost power in a winter storm, you don't need to keep food cold in a reefer--just put it outside. It's COLD outside, remember? Keep the freezer stuff outside in a cooler. Keep refrigerated food in a cooler too--but in this case, it's to keep it from freezing; periodically bring the cooler inside to let it warm up a bit.
*I say "start" the car because the 12V has only one job when starting the engine: energize the relay that brings the larger 270V battery online, which uses the motor-generator to start the engine when required.
**I say "run" because most of the time, the engine won't be running. The car spends most of it's idle time, and even a good portion of actually moving time in the city, with the engine off.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Actually the nominal voltage is 230V (-6%+10% see here for the official notes) but nothing actually changed, so whenever I have checked the voltage it has been 239 or 240volts. However there is nothing to say that further away from a substation it may not be lower, or due to other factors, that's the beauty of tolerences.
:)
Europe changed from 220V to 230V (-10%+6%) so now we're nominally on the same, but appliances still have to be built to handle 220-240Vac
I used to have a free-standing wood stove in the living room for situations like this. A large screen TV forced it's removal. The wood stove was an amazingly efficient heater. It even had fans and a thermostat, so it would really belch the heat out. If you have the space and the ability to properly vent it, it's a great option.
Last year, we picked up a 5.5kw generator and two Kerosene heaters for the "winter issues". I do power the regular propane heat during the day, but I don't like leaving the generator running overnight. Cheap generators (Tecumseh / Briggs engines) aren't designed for continuous use... so the kerosene heaters provide warmth and an interesting glow overnight.
Kerosene can be stored almost indefinitely if you keep it in an airtight container and away from direct sunlight.
Kerosene heaters *really* stink. It seems the bulk of the odor occurs when the heaters are first lit, and when extinguished. If the odor is offensive (it will be) just light and extinguish the heater outside.
We bought an RV a couple of months ago, and it's entirely self-contained. I suspect we'll just venture to the camper on the next winter outage.
Good luck.
-Steve
I used to work (well, sometimes it was work, mostly it was sitting on my ass) in the computer lab at the business school at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. It was a building which had recently been remodelled, and the room it was in was originally part of a larger room...the thermostat for which was in the office next door. Consequently we had the temperature of a room with 30+ computers in it being controlled from a room with two.
There was nothing else we could do but leave a window open.
At in 50 below weather, on the ground outside that window, there was green grass.
Just think of the energy we were wasting. Apparantly this sort of thing (contractors not including things that were in the contract, like ventilation controls for that room) happens a lot.
Recommend moving to a country that can afford to heat itself in the winter or head south to a warmer climate. Recommend US or Japan.
You don't say enough about where you live to get a proper answer.
:)
If you live South of Newcastle, stop worrying. Get some blankets or plan to spend those terrifying few hours without power in the pub.
If you live in a town, and have no garden, then clearly all this talk about petrol generators is out of the question.
If you live in a remote cottage, get a coal or oil fired stove, it's in keeping
NB, The questioner probably confused a lot of Americans with his wording. What most British homes (including his) have is Natural Gas fired central heating: i.e. the hissy stuff that burns with a blue flame, not petroleum spirit/gasoline. Usually a single natural gas boiler heats water which is both used for hot water, and pumped through radiators (by an electric pump) thoughout the home.
Electric storage heaters, hot air systems, electric bar fires, oil heaters etc. are all also used, but radiators fed hot water from gas boilers is by far the most common in the UK.
... why do you think he would buy one intented for outdoor use?
there are now heaters with wide arrays of safety trips(in - case it is too close to wall, case there isn't enough oxygen, case it falls over, case it gets too warm.. ).
buying cheap used shit.. well you get what you pay for.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Re-nationalise the power grid...
UPS batteries themselves are usually not deep-cycle, so you may end up replacing them after drawing them down heavilly several times. The solar array idea (with deep-cycle batteries) may end up being quite economical in the long run as they will be useful even if power is up (and then sun is too). Of course, the UPS's will still have their value to protect the most sensitive electronics (computers, entertainment/A-V centers), especially if your alternate source of power takes a long time switching ovber (relatively speaking, fractions of a second).
If you live in the UK then talk to Powergen about getting a micro-chp (Combined Heat and Power) generator. Normal gas water heaters are very inefficient. The micro-chp appliance captures that waste energy using a Sterling engine, and provides it as electricity. If you have your heating on, you should get 1kW of free electricity.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I tried some of the new flourescent bulbs, after being unimpressed with the ones I tried a few years ago. The old ones took a few minutes to get to full brightness, especially when it was cool in the room.
The new ones (with QuickStart Technology, according to the package) fire up almost as quickly as an incandescent bulb. I bought a 5 pack for 10 USD. I'll be replacing my 60 watt bulbs with these as they burn out, using only 14 watts! The light is a much brighter white than the sickly yellow glow they produced several years ago.
The only down side is that I have to find a way to dispose of them when they finally die in 10 years -- they contain mercury.. so I can't just throw them out.
Most gas furnaces require power to drive the fan, and a little power to turn on the valve for the gas (controlled by the thermostat).
During the prolonged power outage during the ice storm of 1998 in eastern Canada, we fixed up a workable solution. Roughly 24V DC from sealed lead-acid batteries was enough to switch the valve, and the hooked the fan up to a bicycle. A few minutes of peddling on the bike would heat the house several degrees, and the peddler similarly. A bit more detail is contained in one of the articles in Stories from the Ice Storm.
That being said, this may not be possible with modern furnaces. Also, your house, unless very poorly insulated, will stay warm enough to live for 8 hours. (Then again, my "very poorly insulated" might be your "adequately insulated".)
To be exact most houses in Europe are connected using 400V three phase current, neutral point to one of the phases is 400/(2*sin(pi/3)) =~ 230V.
Jan
Winter before last, a nasty ice storm took down countless power lines across the state of Michigan. I was in a similar situation as the original poster: nat.-gas-powered hot-water furnace but with an electric pump. Temperatures were in the teens Fahrenheit (say, -10C) but for the first day or so, all I needed to keep comfy in my house was to add a sweater. (By the end of the third day, when my power finally came back on, I was wearing a couple t-shirts, a couple shirts, the sweater, a coat, sweatpants under my jeans, and a wooly hat.)
Afterward, I did invest in a 1000W inverter-type petrol-powered generator. Between ice, wind, lightning, the occasional suicidal squirrel, and general flakiness of the local grid, I lose electricity for a few hours at least once a year, and I make some of my living from being on the internet, so it was worth it. It provides just enough juice to keep my mail/web server online, and to power a lamp, radio, or laptop, as needed. It puts out a pretty smooth current (I run it through the UPS anyway) and with the power-throttling enabled (so it slows down to produce only as much power as you're drawing) it'll run for several hours on a single tank of petrol. It's makes a bit of noise, but not really bad, especially it being outside and with the door closed.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
4A * 250V = 1kVA
So, you need a 1kVA inverter of effeciency "e", a charger, and 8kwh/e bank of batteries. I'd get at least a 1.5kVA rated inverter unless you've already padded your requirements. I don't like to run any equipment at full rated load unless I really trust the vendor. Yeah, it'll work. But it won't last.
Just googling around, I see you can buy a 1.5kVA inverter for £210.60.
Another company has a 2kVA continuous inverter for £529.45. I have no idea if these vendors are reliable. The one specifies "power", but I didn't see "peak" (aka "starting") or "continuous" (aka "rated") power. More investigation of this one is indicated prior to purchase. The other seems to be the UK version of our JC Whitney. But I guess you can get some idea of cost here.
So, we've spec'ed the inverter at somewhere between £250 & £550. Oh, yeah--there's a 1kVA inverter on the speedydelivery site for about 1/2 of the 2kVA one.
If their effeciency ratings are to be believed, (85%), you'll need a little under 5kWH of energy from your batteries. That's a little over 200 amp-hours at 24V.
This guy has a lead acid battery page, discussing some issues pertinent to your application. If he's to be trusted (haven't confirmed his recommendations; spend some time with Google before you buy...), you want:
Deep Cycle Batteries
Only discharge down to 1/2 capacity
Keep discharge current as low as possible
Which means to buy about 400A*H of 24V deep cycle (marine) lead acid batteries. Or 12V pairs in series. Buy 800A*H if you use 12V. I have no idea what batteries cost in the UK. Wire your 24V batteries in parallel. If you put 12V batteries together in series, call that a 24V battery, and forget that it's 2 boxes. If you don't understand this, talk to somebody who does. Boiling sulfuric acid solution and battery shrapnel are dangerous.
I did find a price over here for an "interstate" (a well known US battery mfr) USRM-8D. Each of these has about 189A*H capacity at 25A or 132A*H capacity at 75A. They're 12V, so you'll want 800AH.
Running your system at 1kVA and 85% effeciency, you'll be drawing just under 50A from your battery bank. Wiring 2 (series) sets of 2 batteries in parallel, each battery will see 25A draw. It's up to you if you want 2 or 3 sets of batteries. You're a little short of 800A*H, but we've already doubled the size of the battery bank to increase battery life. I would only buy 4 of these. Over here, you're looking at $189.95 ea. If the only difference is currency conversion, you're looking at about £400, or £200 if you don't care about battery life and are willing to lose power a little earlier than 8 hours.
These guys have a charger for about £60. That seems kind of high to me, but I don't live in the UK, so ???
Alright...So, the battery solution is now looking something like £500 to £1000, depending on the decisions you make above (big vs little inverter; big vs little battery bank). +VAT, but that's a wash, since you haven't specified budget.
Generator: Again, we're looking at only 1kW. The smallest generator I can find (ignoring cutesy satchel-types that cost 10* as much) is 5kw. I looked for UK generator prices and found none. Best I can do is give you some typical prices from Amazon. I recently did a whole lot of research on these units (read last paragraph). There are basically 4 classes of generators I've seen:
Cheapest one you can buy a
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
If I believed everything I read in the papers I should be dead right now after being hit by a terrorist nuclear bomb, after already catching anthrax and smallpox, and being run over by a flood of millions of Albanian gypsies.
Guess what really happened, zip.
The will be no major power cuts in the UK this winter, just as there hasn't been every other winter. "No power cuts hit uk" doesn't make a great headline.
Get a 12" x 18" piece of 3/16" steel plate, screw in 2x6s to levate it off the ground, bolt on the motor and alternator. You'll need a 5" pulley for the motor shaft (a few more bucks at the junkyard) and then you are good to go.
Fire up the engine and you've got somewhere between 700 - 1400 watts at 14 VDC. Use this to power an invertor (a cheap modified square wave unit is just fine for PC switching power supplies) to get 240 VAC.
I've got a system like this and it works great. Total cost of parts was about $50, and I already had the invertor. I'm currently working on adding a microcontroller to replace the dumb regulator in the alternator, and then I'll be replacing the mechanical governor on the engine with a stepper motor on the throttle, so then the engine can be throttled down to the minimum RPMs needed to meet demand. (No, it's not profitable once you factor in the time spent, but this is what I do for FUN!)
-p.
Why are there so many people afraid of a power interruption. I haven't seen such thing in decades. I can remember one or two interruptions in my childhood. But since then, there where no interruptions. At least none by a failing power grid.
Well I don't live in the UK, things might be different there than on the continent.
Most electronics devices have an internal power supply that converts whatever AC high voltage (100 V to 250 V) to 12 VDC or 5 VDC or a combination.
I guess if you only need to power a few devices that you can hire an electronic technitian to modify the power supplies so that they can be fed with 12 VDC from a car or truck battery directly.
12 VDC to 110/220 VAC converters are not difficult to find. They can give you 400 W for about 8 hours depending on the battery array you're using. The only problem here is that the conversion consumes part of the energy itself.
So, it's best to modify the appliances to feed from 12 VDC directly.
If you'd like to see a picture of a 12 VDC to 120 VAC converter you can take a look at this. This links to a spanish site (Venezuela).
1.) Sounds like a good excuss to load up your household with a lot of alcohol...
2.) Have a fireplace added to your house.
3.) You can buy/rent a big Propane tank and buy a heater that does not require electricity.
Buy a diesel generator. They are not that expensive. The only problem is that they are REALLY noisy.
Central heating systems in the UK tend to use a gas boiler, fed from the main of a big bastard propane tank outside, to heat water to go either round the house and through radiators and/or heat up hot water via a heat exchanger.
The things you have to power would be the boiler itself [which will have valves etc and possibly an extractor fan], the pump for the heating circuit and valves for the heating circuit. Plus the control box.
The load isnt huge, but its not small either and nicely inductive.
At a place where I worked many years ago there was a funny incident involving a UPS. A car had crashed into a power pole one morning, taking down the company's VAXCluster for a day. The battery in the UPS was bad, or had not been checked or something, at any rate it didn't do its job, so the systems went down hard. Some update processes were running at the time, and some data got screwed up. The UPS would have been unable to keep the company going all day anyway even if it had worked. After a fairly painful data recovery effort, the Ops people decided to have a backup generator installed on the roof.
They scheduled an after-work demo for this new toy and some VPs showed up. Somebody threw a switch or pulled out a big plug or something, I really don't know what, to simulate a power failure. The UPS kicked in as planned, then the generator was supposed to start up. The clock ticked away. No sound from the roof. Wow, that new generator's quiet, isn't it. Isn't it? No. The generator didn't start, because nobody turned it on! They spent 10 minutes figuring this out. Meanwhile the UPS ran out of juice, and down went everything again. It wasn't a disaster this time, just highly embarrassing.
Moral: any power backup is only as good as its ON switch.
What made it funny was that this particular Ops staff was an especially officious bunch, who saw their role largely as protecting the company's valuable systems and data from irresponsible programmers who didn't understand change control. They wouldn't even take a form from your hand, you had to put it in their special in-basket, and they'd find something to do for a minute or two before picking it up and looking at it. It's always perversely amusing to see such hall-monitor types trip over their own shoelaces.
A lot of people in Alaska speak highly of Monitor heaters. You can run them on oil, kerosene, natural gas, propane, or whatever. I think they are also popular in New England and probably Canada. As an aside, the power company in Fairbanks, Alaska, built the largest battery in the world (claimed). It floats on line and will run the CITY AND SURROUNDING AREA through general power outages. Alaska is not on the national grid. Fairbanks receives power only from local generators and some plants to the south of us. The battery (called BESS) took two years to build and cost a bunch, but it seems to work.
A friend of mine moved to North Pole AK a decade or so ago; I think she's now in Florida or somewhere else in the lower 49.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you really want to get confused, exchange watts and VARs in some critical calculation. And don't try to build anything based on the results, okay?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Has anyone ever daisy-chained UPSes together? What happens when the power goes out? Does the bottom one just charge the one above it until the top one is dead, or does the house explode or anything like that?
Buy a dual processor AMD motherboard and connect the heat sink to the box.
Its not like as soon as the power goes out your house instantly freezes.
Are you telling me that the alternator will burn out due to increased amp draw from a charging battery (and headlights and blower motor)?
Your reasoning is sound, and your facts regarding the increased draw are all fine and dandy.
The fuse on the line from alternator to battery. What is that for then?
I mean, you mentioned that the voltage comming out of an alternator is pretty constant across RPMs, but then you go on to say that if voltage drops amperage will increase (to provide the power.)
Stories of people with burned out electrical systems after a jump start do nothing to prove that their charging pratices caused the burnouts. Many batteries die (and require a jumpstart) due to a failing charging system. To say that the battery failure caused the charging system failure is to put the cart before the ox.
It follows that battery failures that happen at night are more likely to be caused by a weak (or malfunctioning) charging system than battery failures that happen during the day. As you pointed out, nighttime is when the highest load is placed on the system and when you are most likely to first see symptoms of a weak charging system.
The trick is to set the UPS to run "until batteries are out". The built-in prediction of remaining run-time will not tell the truth. Even after running their "test cycle" feature to determine the actual run-time. Stupid firmware obviously.
The battery voltage will be reported correctly however, so if you connect the UPS to a computer using the smart-cable, the host software can still (theoretically) determine the true remaining run-time.
I wouldn't spend a great deal of time worrying about Radon. After we paid for radon testing at our house, my wife did some research on this issue as a part of her graduate work.
The posted limit for radon is 4 pCi/L. This was determined by the EPA because most homes could have the leve reduced to that level or less, not because that level was shown to be a safe exposure level!
The results that show correlation between Radon and cancer were created by a study of uranium miners! Would you expect radiation issues for people who work in uranium mines?
http://proliberty.com/observer/20020205.htm
You can make your own decision, and I have no doubt that in general radiation is bad for people, but i'm not about to spend a bunch of $$ to 'fix' any future house that has radon. There's nothing to indicate that spending that cash, or teting the house, for that matter, will help maintain my family's health. I think it's a scam.
Regards,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
That "radium" is not a radioactive compound. Those luminous dials are produced by a special paint, I used to know its composition, but I forgot it. It used to be described in my high-school chemistry book.
Actually, until the 1950s or so, yeah, luminous dials really *did* use radium to excite the fluorescent compounds. Grab a geiger counter and go to an antique shop if you don't believe me.
What's worse is that the women (primarily women) who used to paint the faces would often be in the habit of twirling the brush into a point on their tongues. Lots of bone cancer ensued 10+ years later.
No matter what, *do not* scrape the paint off an old luminous-face clock or gauge. If dust gets into your lungs, you're playing with cancer - lots of massive He nuclei with 3.2E-19 coulombs on each; great for causing genetic damage in delicate lung tissue. Leave it alone.
A better bet to build a nuclear-powered small device would be to gut an ionizing smoke detector for the Am-241. Maybe a nuclear-powered Casio FX-991MS calculator to take to engineering classes? Again, be careful - after all, it's only you who'll get hurt. Wash your hands. Handle the stuff outside where there's good ventilation to counter the dust. Remember that cancer is usually a slow and painful death.
(Re: the calculator. In my first year of engineering, a buddy of mine was in mechanical. He had a tiny little working model steam engine, powered off alcohol. Yanked the batteries from his calculator and asked me (electrical) to come up with a generator/rectifier/regulator setup for him. Tiny little hobby motor, bridge of low-drop germanium 1N34 diodes, and a zener regulator mounted right onto the back of the motor. He fuelled up the steam engine with vodka and brought it to our first-year calculus exam. Unfortunately, he spent more time tinkering with the wick on the alcohol burner than actually writing the exam, and dropped out that year.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
But notice he needs 32Ah at 240V. Your battery is presumably at 12V; you will need 240/12*32=640 Ah of capacity. So 6 of those batteries, in parallel. Perhaps more to compensate for inefficiencies in the inverter.
I think the theoretical limit on the efficiency of the inverter would be sqrt(2), because if you're cutting the DC up into a sinewave with an RMS value, you're doing the inverse of RMS-->peak rectification. ie., lots of power is wasted in resistive loads of MOSFETs. Of course, that's if you're wanting a real sinewave; I doubt if most inverters actually do that, likewise, I doubt most inverters would actually achieve a practical efficiency near this.
Thoughts:
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Wood pellet stoves are an alternative way to heat a home. The stoves use wood pellets, which look exactly like rabbit food, and are made out of dried recycled compressed sawdust from lumber mills that otherwise ends up in landfills.
Because the stoves are so efficient, there is almost no smoke or creosote produced, in fact the exhaust is barely even hot so the stove doesn't need a masonry chimney and can be installed anywhere a tin metal liner can be put in, either directly into the roof, or sideways out a wall. They can be stand-alone stoves on legs in the corner of a room, or chimney inserts using an existing chimney. Unlike wood stoves, pellet stoves work well in urban environments because of little exhaust and no need for a chimney and can be installed in any room.
The stoves require electricity to run so if you loose power it won't work, which is a notable drawback, although there are solutions such as a generator or battery back up. I personally have a long extension cord to an inverter in my car in the driveway in case of a heating emergency. The pellet stoves also make noise with the blower fan and turning augur, this has become less an issue with more recent stove technology which is significantly quieter.