Tech Stuff: Electrifying Without A Generator
Mr. L and I are setting up at an auto swap meet in Giddings, Texas, this weekend. Last night, Mr. L says to me, “It’s probably too late, but it would be nice to have a little, quiet generator to power a couple of fans.”
I researched quiet generators on line — Honda seems to be the cream of the crop in this category, but there are others. These are portable power inverter generators, usually generating between 1500 and 2200 watts of power. The Hondas run about $1000, and the Ryobi at The Home Depot seems to be running between $550 and $600. You can get a slightly smaller one that isn’t as quiet for $135, but it has terrible reviews. Mr. L. says, “No, thanks.”
I thought for a minute and said, “I have my APC Back UPS Pro 1000. It looks like it could power a box fan on battery for nearly forever.” That’s a possibility. Then Mr. L says, “We have those portable batteries with the jumper cables on them. I have a 12 volt inverter we could plug in.”
I’m charging one now (still looking for at least one more I know we have), and I’m going to test the theory this weekend. If it works like we think it will, we’ll be able to have cooling fans at the swap meet for no extra cost to us.
Not an encouraging first test. One of the power packs lasted for 11 minutes with the fan on high. The other one wouldn’t even do more than sputter in an attempt to start the fan. I’ll recharge and retry with a smaller fan, but this is not looking promising.
The power pack that couldn’t even start the big fan as been running for an hour on a little oscillating fan. It’s showing signs of flagging, but I’m timing until it can’t push the fan any more.
The power pack ultimately ran for 2 hours. That’s probably good enough for what we need in the heat of the afternoon. Testing on another fan tomorrow.
Today’s experiment involved the same power pack but a different oscillating fan. This one just ran at full power for 1 hour and 58 minutes (uncannily, the same amount of time as yesterday’s fan), but at that time, it quit going full blast and is still turning at a slower speed. We’ll see how much more time it will go before it quits completely.
I’m comfortable that this solution will do what we want it to do on the swap meet grounds.