Last Wednesday witnessed the worst tornado outbreak in Alabama in history. As many as 66 tornaods were reported state wide. Every electrical transmission line into Huntsville was destroyed. That night, I went to storage and picked up my 6500 watt gen set. I huddled down and watched the stroms track across my region, and listened to the reports of wide spread damage. It didnt' take long for the gen to run low on fuel, and there wasn't any available in the valley. Down to my last two gallons, which would last about 3 hours, I decided to change things up a little to try to streach out the remaining fuel for the duration of the outage ( 4 days ). I took the battery out of my truck and connected an inverter to run my radio, charge up phone and flashlights and run some low voltage lighting. I was able to run everything and only used the gen set to recharge the truck battery for about 1/2 hour each morning ( while I plugged in my coffee maker, which was a little too much load for the 700 watt inverter. ) The lights came back on last night, but I was able to find 5 gl of gas just in case. The inverter worked great, even though it was only a cheap Harbor Freight Tool product. On the last day, I plugged in a small 12V electric cooler, which put a surprisingly large load on the battery. Here is the usage breakdown:
Battery, invertor, radio : 300mA
Battery, 12V lighting : 700mA
Battery, 12V cooler : 4A
Since I have no gas service in the mountains where I live, I had to cook over an open fire pit, also had my camp stove but I was trying to save on the special fuel I use for it. I have pleanty of wood in the forrest around here. All I can say it, "A country boy can survive"
The battery voltage didn't go below about 11.9V, that is until I plugged in the cooler. During charging, it took 40A for about 10 minutes before the current started to come down. I would charge it until the voltage reached about 14V or so, and the current dropped off to about 15A. I thought getting the last charge would be inefficient in terms of the fuel usage.
Here is a pic of the battery, charger, inverter and coffee pot I rigged up.
Battery, invertor, radio : 300mA
Battery, 12V lighting : 700mA
Battery, 12V cooler : 4A
Since I have no gas service in the mountains where I live, I had to cook over an open fire pit, also had my camp stove but I was trying to save on the special fuel I use for it. I have pleanty of wood in the forrest around here. All I can say it, "A country boy can survive"
The battery voltage didn't go below about 11.9V, that is until I plugged in the cooler. During charging, it took 40A for about 10 minutes before the current started to come down. I would charge it until the voltage reached about 14V or so, and the current dropped off to about 15A. I thought getting the last charge would be inefficient in terms of the fuel usage.
Here is a pic of the battery, charger, inverter and coffee pot I rigged up.