Backup Power

[Kens Bees]

I was home having tree removal done today. Long story short, a portion of a tree hit the power lines and I was without power for about two hours. Which got me thinking about last years power outages and how I thought being prepared was a great idea and blah blah blah...

I put the watt meter on a return pump and single powerhead in each of my tanks and totaled it up to about 50 watts. I think flow would be the biggest issue, not lights or even heat.

One plan is to get an inverter; DC batteries into AC to run these pumps. Ideally the inverter will have an auto switch for when power goes out and comes back on and a built in trickle charger to keep the battery(s) full. Even fancier would be a solar panel to keep them charged, but that's plain crazy talk.

A very fuzzy calculation I can find is (10 X Battery Ah)/wattage will give you the usable life of the battery. So, 10 times an 80Ah battery, divided by 50 watts SHOULD allow me to power those pumps for 16 hours. Or, a 120Ah battery would last 24 hours. It seems a little simplistic to me, and probably is. I also don't have a good idea of what size inverter I'd need.

Has anybody tried this approach before, successfully? Am I missing key inputs or using a bad equation to figure it out? Electrically challenged I am.

 

[BiGGiePauls33]

Search up Telegraham

https://www.youtube.com/c/telegraham/videos

 

[chadfish]

I was about to make a battery backup and then bought a 6KWH generator.

The cost was almost the same.

The limiting factor for me was the relay. Sure my system only pulls like 6amps, but that’s at 115V = 690W, but that’s 58amps at only 12 V. So you need to find a relay that can handle 60amps.

Gen set was easier

 

[chadfish]

I was about to make a battery backup and then bought a 6KWH generator.

The cost was almost the same.

The limiting factor for me was the relay. Sure my system only pulls like 6amps, but that’s at 115V = 690W, but that’s 58amps at only 12 V. So you need to find a relay that can handle 60amps.

Gen set was easier

Of course if you want it to be manual, then you can skip the relay and just hook the inverter up when the power goes off. I was building an automated system that would turn on when the power went out.