Is anyone running their UPS(Battery Backup) on car batteries?

[Harvey Schneider]

With batteries, it's the surface of the plates that generates the power. So the more surface area you have, the more surge power you are able to get. Thinner plates means that you can fit more plates in the same volume, equaling more surface area. However, when you discharge the battery, the surface of the plates sulfate. So thinner plates get destroyed faster. On a car, you rarely discharge more than 10% of the total energy out of the battery, so there is very little sulfation happening. On a deep cycle battery the thicker plates can withstand the sulfation much better, so they are not damaged quickly.

Deep cycles are made to discharge down much further, but can still be easily damaged if you discharge more than 50% of the energy out too often. That's why the recommended cut-off voltage on a deep cycle is usually 10.5-11V. If you stay above that, you should be able to keep your battery in good condition for quite a while.

I checked Wikipedia, You're right;

"The structural difference between deep cycle batteries and cranking batteries is in the lead battery plates. Deep cycle battery plates have thicker active plates, with higher-density active paste material and thicker separators. Alloys used for the plates in a deep cycle battery may contain more antimony than starting batteries.[3] The thicker battery plates resist corrosion through extended charge and discharge cycles."

 

[briansol]

$35 a day in fuel is absurd... get a small 1000 watt jobber in pure sine. run your stove, some lights, swap the frige on and off with something else.
sip less than a gallon a day.

 

[flhpi]

On second thought, don't play around with lead acid batteries unless you plan on spending a few weeks learning about the technology in order to do it safely.

Thought I would jump in this discussion and make a suggestion with my limited knowledge about inverters and batteries. After reading up on all the info I have come to the conclusion that I don't know enough about either. I will stick to my little generator and make the kids fill the wood box as I tell them it builds character. There is a lot of good info I am learning about. I will sit back and try to learn without getting confused.

 

[boomhour]

http://www.rvupgradestore.com/Lifan-Energy-Storm-Inverter-Generator-p/55-1964.htm

How about this, no oil filter, will have to change oil every 25 hours or so, Honda and Yamaha are the same, I believe, only down side I see. Should be able to run stove as well as a fridge, try changing important lighting over to l.e.d. Or this gen with an inverter two deep cycle batteries,12 volt side of gen will keep batteries up leaving the rest for fridge, t.v. and maybe even a water pump or sewage pump. The battery pictured is what my stove came with and will run 4 hours on stage 3 maybe 5 or 6 on stage 1, standard car battery will push into 24 hours.

 

[Harvey Schneider]

Should be able to run stove as well as a fridge,

Running a fridge, or for that matter any kind of pump on an inverter or a marginally sized generator is a challenge. The start up surge of a pump motor is something to be reckoned with. My 280 W refrigerator stalled my 1000 W sine inverter when the compressor kicked on. It took a 5KW continuous 10KW peak inverter to run my well pump that is only rated at 3/4 HP. 3/4 HP is only about 500W continuous with an anticipated start surge for a motor being about 20x the 10KW peak inverter barely makes it and the two 100Ahr batteries in parallel droop to about 11V (conductors the diameter of my thumb).

 

[Madcodger]

$35 a day in fuel is absurd... get a small 1000 watt jobber in pure sine. run your stove, some lights, swap the frige on and off with something else.
sip less than a gallon a day.

A long reply here, but it might give other entrepreneurs or telecommuters who need to stay "up and running" some ideas. Just skip it if you don't care to read it...

A 1000 watt gennie and a couple of extension cords or a little transfer switch is fine if you want to just rough out the occassional outage in suburbia when you come home from work, but it doesn't quite cut it for all of us. I don't know where you go to work every day, but I go down two floors to my office. Between that and the house, there are two pellet stoves, two fridges, a well and a septic system with pumps. We actually live not that far out from "civilization", but it is on a road with only 7 houses on it, and when you hear about "only a few homes still without power" there's a good chance we're one of them. And if I'm not working, I'm not generating revenue - and that's a bad thing I try to avoid.

My backup system with the batteries and $35 in daily fuel cost during an outage means that the gigabit router and switches, connected to the FIOS interface and its tiny little battery, never loses power, even with us pumping lots of data through it each day and during loss of utility power, generator startup, refueling, etc. That's important because if it does lose power it will become a brick until it reconnects with Verizon, and that can take hours or, if they're having problems, longer (they are on battery and generator setup similar to my own, just much bigger, and have never gone down - really like those FIOS folks). See part about not generating revenue, much less potential client dissatisfaction, and you start to get the picture.

My system allows me to spend less than 5 minutes firing up the gennie and switching over to that for power (and again, without the computers or internet connection going down) but without the cost of an automatic generator, which would require installation of a large propane tank. It also makes sure critical systems keep chugging along even if power goes out while we're sleeping, I can handle 8000 watts continuous, 12000 peak (surge), although we rarely approach either but are far more than the 1000 watts mentioned. Refueling is done in the evening from reserve tanks, so if I start with a full tank in the gennie I can go 4 days without power and before I need to go out for fuel, and I suppose then I could access the gas in the cars if necessary and go just over a week. Gas is treated with stabilizer and moved out to cars and equipment each spring and fall if not used. And we also retain the ability to take nice hot showers, watch TV, and generally go about our lives without missing a beat and having a 15 second commute, all for $35 a day IF the power goes out.

So it ain't all that absurd, and it simply thrashes my lifestyle prior to figuring this out somewhere in mid-career. Best $35 I ever spent, when it's needed!

 

[briansol]

Have you considered that perhaps your workstation is not ideal? If power is down beyond your street, good chance the fios line will be too... their switches/etc require power.

When I lose power, I pop open the mobile hotspot app on my rooted android phone (read: not paying verizon a fee to do it) and my laptop is back online instantly over LTE both devices require next to no power.

If he phones are dead, all bets are off anyway.

 

[Madcodger]

Have you considered that perhaps your workstation is not ideal? If power is down beyond your street, good chance the fios line will be too... their switches/etc require power.

Similar setup in two houses over past six years, and it's never happened. Both houses are/were automated (also on backup) and one thing it does is ping an external server every 15 minutes to check for connectivity. If none is found it begins a routine that looks for the problem, flags it when it's found so we know what happened, and attempts a reset (powers down the router and brings it back online, etc.). I've had bad switches, bad routers, and bad network cards but never a bad FIOS connection. Their reliability has been rather amazing, actually.

You're right that the connection can go down, but fiber operates differently than cable and there is much less chance it will happen. We have good friends who live within range of our wifi signal if they go to one part of their house and when their cable goes down (they use a different, non-fiber provider) our guest network is their backup if they need to send files or check email. We were without electricity for four days twice over the last 3 years and never lost connectivity, even with the VOIP phones. And sometimes I need to transfer several gigs of data back and forth with clients. It would be difficult to do that with my phone, but this "not ideal" setup doesn't seem to break a sweat.

I'm really not trying to argue, but wanted to note for those who have similar needs that with some planning and skills you can acquire (I don't even work in tech, and did everything except the transfer switch myself), it is possible to achieve a reasonably high level of self-sufficiency for a few days, if necessary. You obviously don't need it, and that's fine. But calling a system "absurd" is just a bit much.