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  • August 20, 2012 at 10:00 PM #20073
    JC
    Participant

    Any recommendations for the novice? Just looking for something that would run a few high velocity fans or a portable air conditioner for my dogs if I was out of town for the day and the power went out. (Found out during our fun little heat wave that my old house gets WAY too hot).

    I think Brookstone makes an idiot proof unit but wondering if there is something less pricey that will do the job. Thanks much!

    August 21, 2012 at 9:55 AM #750608
    spdrun
    Participant

    How about an old netbook ($100 on EBay or less) that’s set up to e-mail you every half hour? Remove the battery. If e-mails stop coming to your mobile, you’ll know it’s time to call your neighbor to check what’s going on. There are also automatic dialers that dial a phone # if power is lost, but they will only work if your phones aren’t dependent on power (i.e. not cable or VoIP).

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/Reliance-Controls-THP201-Phone-Call-Alarm-System-Power-Outage-Freeze-Flood-Alert-/251103664245?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a76f1d875

    Any battery/UPS system under say $500 won’t run an A/C for long. A/C’s draw 10 amps minimum, so 1200W or 100A from a 12V battery. Meaning that assuming a 100% efficient system, a car battery will only run it for about half an hour. Not to mention that the transformer has to be correctly rated, and output waveform needs to be correct to power a motor as opposed to a switching power supply in a server!

    Self-starting generators are also expensive and need to be mounted outside, unless you want to gas your dogs.

    August 21, 2012 at 8:22 PM #750634
    JC
    Participant

    holy moly! i definitely do not want to gas my dogs.

    maybe i need to go with the brookstone portable power supply since it looks like it is easy for anyone to use.

    i am lucky that folks would definitely tell me if there was a power issue, i would just need to have a solution that my petsitter could use to keep fans or some other cooling devicde working for a few hours until the power came back on.

    thank you so much for the input.

    August 21, 2012 at 9:41 PM #750635
    joec
    Participant

    If you need to run A/C units, you’d probably have to get much larger generator as well.

    Anything portable won’t give you much juice, but if you can live with fans, then maybe a smaller generator/inverter will be ok for just that.

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