how best to get electricity for emergency prepareness

[Mike Painter]

Yup--and the lowest drain on resources:
http://www.google.com/images?q=crank+radio
..
..
Yup. Others have mentioned white gas stoves and charcoal grills
and again I point to the lowest drain on resources:
http://www.google.com/images?q=solar-cooker+parabolic
..
..
I also like Joerg's suggestion of trying a day off the grid
to see what you really NEED.

That helps but you would miss a lot if you're not out in the country and it
can take a while adjusting to living in such a situation. There is too much
light from the street lights and neighbors to find out how much you can see
outside if ther are no lights and your eyes can adjust.

From living over a year on a beach I found it takes most people about the
length of their vacation to "get it".

There are also some things that you probably would not find out about.
The newer glow paper and powders are incredible and make having a battery
powered UV light worth the effort if they can't sit in the sun during the
day. You can read by them for up to an hour and they will last all night as
a guide.
They get put on my flashlights and light switches and would mark the path to
the out house in a real emergency.

 

[A. Jacobs]

Please tell me more about alternators? Does it use gasoline? It gives out
AC?

 

[A. Jacobs]

Hello A. Jacobs,

Care to give us a first name? Arthur or Art


Buy a car adaptor. Then you can charge from 12V.

Which kind? My IBM Thinkpad uses 10.8V 4Ah battery, the charger uses 110V to
give 16VDC 4.5A. What kind of car adaptor do you recommend?

 

[A. Jacobs]

generators: you mean gasoline or diesel generators? What kind, what power
rating, what brand?

 

[[email protected]]

We wish to prepare for emergency - such as power outage because of
earthquake or hurricane or flood.

When power goes out we want:
1. lighting - battery powered florescent lights seem to be best?
2. phone - charge cell phone battery and direct line phone
3. laptop computer battery charging
4. get to watch TV - may be off the air when cable goes out. So TV tuner for
the laptop computer
5. Microwave to cook simple stuff or boil water.

How can we get power source from - car battery?
Any small and simple electric generator to charge the car battery?
12VDC to 115AC convert? 400 watt sufficient?

This is what we come up with in our meeting of brain storming.
The biggest discussion were about the spoiled food in refrigerators.
Your comments and suggestions please.

We wish to prepare for emergency - such as power outage because of
earthquake or hurricane or flood.

When power goes out we want:
1. lighting - battery powered florescent lights seem to be best?
2. phone - charge cell phone battery and direct line phone
3. laptop computer battery charging
4. get to watch TV - may be off the air when cable goes out. So TV tuner for
the laptop computer
5. Microwave to cook simple stuff or boil water.

How can we get power source from - car battery?
Any small and simple electric generator to charge the car battery?
12VDC to 115AC convert? 400 watt sufficient?

This is what we come up with in our meeting of brain storming.
The biggest discussion were about the spoiled food in refrigerators.
Your comments and suggestions please.

For God's sake .... just go to Home Depot and buy a Coleman
6250 watt generator for $499-$599 and you'll be able to
watch TV, keep the refrigerator running and you can read
and use the computer. Don't make this so complicated! If
you run out of gas, syphon it from your car.

KM

 

[Ignoramus26409]

For God's sake .... just go to Home Depot and buy a Coleman
6250 watt generator for $499-$599 and you'll be able to
watch TV, keep the refrigerator running and you can read
and use the computer. Don't make this so complicated! If
you run out of gas, syphon it from your car.

until the inevitable moment when that POS generator breaks at the
worst moment..

i

 

[James Beck]

until the inevitable moment when that POS generator breaks at the
worst moment..

i

Naturally, it won't break when it is not running.

Keep the unit maintained and keep up with a regular test routine and it
is certainly better than no generator at all.

Jim

 

[Ignoramus26409]

Naturally, it won't break when it is not running.

Keep the unit maintained and keep up with a regular test routine and it
is certainly better than no generator at all.

You are right, it is better than no generator, but, unfortunately, not
reliable and not as usable. These cheap generators are designed to
look good, that's about all. The cheap parts in them normally fail
after a few hundred hours.

I had a generator like that at some point and hated every minute of
owning it. It was a 4 kW diesel powered Coleman generator. Impossible
to start in cold weather and enormously loud. All attempts to quiet it
down failed.

I sold the POS and am glad that I did. Now I have an old but
relatively little used 1800 RPM Onan diesel generator. The difference
is night and day.

http://igor.chudov.com/tmp/onan/Diesel/

I had to restore it a bit, but that was easy. No engine rebuild etc,
just some control parts.

i

 

[James Beck]

You are right, it is better than no generator, but, unfortunately, not
reliable and not as usable. These cheap generators are designed to
look good, that's about all. The cheap parts in them normally fail
after a few hundred hours.

I had a generator like that at some point and hated every minute of
owning it. It was a 4 kW diesel powered Coleman generator. Impossible
to start in cold weather and enormously loud. All attempts to quiet it
down failed.

I sold the POS and am glad that I did. Now I have an old but
relatively little used 1800 RPM Onan diesel generator. The difference
is night and day.

http://igor.chudov.com/tmp/onan/Diesel/

I had to restore it a bit, but that was easy. No engine rebuild etc,
just some control parts.

i

Oh, you definitely get what you pay for.
These days, if you have paid less than $800/5kW you probably bought a
light duty unit.

We had a V-Twin Onan 11kW gasoline unit that was used for 4 months out
of the year just about 24hrs (depends on when we wanted the A/C) a day 7
days a week for 15 years. Keep up with the PM schedule and they would
go forever. In fact, the only reason I don't have it now is because it
was stolen. Other than the battery going dead in the off season I can't
remember the unit being ACTUALLY broken, although hand cranking that guy
was NOT fun, but it did have a hand crank.

Fortunately my current unit only has to hold us over for the 7 or so
days each winter that our ice storms take down the lines.

For the average homeowner that has to deal with a day or two without
power, every other year or so, a Coleman would probably do. A nice
brushless generator with a decent engine is all most people would ever
need.

Jim

 

[Ignoramus26409]

Please tell me more about alternators? Does it use gasoline? It gives out
AC?

I am confused a little about your question. Alternators convert
mechanical power into electrical power. They do not use gasoline or
diesel, they run off a car belt that spins their rotors. They are
installed on gasoline and diesel vehicles and also on dedicated
electrical generators.

There are all kinds of beefed up alternators that are sold as drop in
replacement for stock car alternators, to achieve higher output.

Check out ebay item 7995481840 for one example.

They produce 12V and claim to have high amperage capability. They
could be used with larger 12V inverters.

i


--

 

[Peter Bennett]

Please tell me more about alternators? Does it use gasoline? It gives out
AC?

In this case, an alternator is the device on your car engine that
recharges the battery.

Honda, Yamaha, and others make generators of various sizes that will
produce 120 V AC - these are driven by gasoline or diesel engines.

 

[Joerg]

Hello A. Jacobs,

Which kind? My IBM Thinkpad uses 10.8V 4Ah battery, the charger uses 110V to
give 16VDC 4.5A. What kind of car adaptor do you recommend?

Don't know from the top of my head. New laptops use up to 20V and
companies like Dell sell adaptors that have little switch mode DC/DC
converters in there. I believe I had also seen these at Walmart or Best
Buy. They didn't list my laptop so I didn't buy one.

It is similar to buying a trailer hitch or oil filter, they listed the
compatible laptop models on the box. The adaptor has to fit the model of
your laptop. The safe bet here would be to buy it from IBM. After all,
some batteries can explode if something goes wrong with the charging
process.

Beware: A full laptop re-charge takes a considerable chunk of energy
from the average car battery. If you overdo it the engine might not turn
over anymore on a cold day.

Regards, Joerg

 

[Ignoramus26409]

Oh, you definitely get what you pay for.
These days, if you have paid less than $800/5kW you probably bought a
light duty unit.

and light duty means "we hope that the consumer does not run it within
the warranty period"

We had a V-Twin Onan 11kW gasoline unit that was used for 4 months out
of the year just about 24hrs (depends on when we wanted the A/C) a day 7
days a week for 15 years. Keep up with the PM schedule and they would
go forever. In fact, the only reason I don't have it now is because it
was stolen. Other than the battery going dead in the off season I can't
remember the unit being ACTUALLY broken, although hand cranking that guy
was NOT fun, but it did have a hand crank.

Sounds great!

Fortunately my current unit only has to hold us over for the 7 or so
days each winter that our ice storms take down the lines.

For the average homeowner that has to deal with a day or two without
power, every other year or so, a Coleman would probably do. A nice
brushless generator with a decent engine is all most people would ever
need.

if they work at all. For instance, if I bought the previous grnerator
during summer, I would not know that it was not startable in winter,
until winter.

i

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Naturally, it won't break when it is not running.

Keep the unit maintained and keep up with a regular test routine and it
is certainly better than no generator at all.

Jim

And don't run it with no load.

 

[Jim Yanik]

That is not true. Looters loot and trash their own neighborhoods
first. Much was written about that, especially in regards to Rodney
King riots. Living far from ghettos is a great start. Hoping that
ghetto residents would loot somewhere else, and choosing to live
there, would be a poor choice.

i

I suspect that in NOLA,poor and better-off neighborhoods are not all that
far apart,and the same in other US cities. The very wealthy can afford
security,passive (big walls,gates,cameras)and active(armed guards),that
middle-class cannot.

Besides,they may be known or recognized in their own neighborhoods.

 

[Jim Yanik]

In this case, an alternator is the device on your car engine that
recharges the battery.

Honda, Yamaha, and others make generators of various sizes that will
produce 120 V AC - these are driven by gasoline or diesel engines.

The term "generator" when used for home emergency power sources only means
"generating electricity";just like the "generators" at your local power
plant,they actually are alternators,making AC power,not DC.

 

[Notan]

And don't run it with no load.

Is that the same as "Don't run it without a load?"

I'm sorry, but illiteracy just confuses the crap out of me.

Notan

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Do you guys in the US know about the clockwork radio ? Doesn't even need
batteries.

http://www.britannia.com/newsbits/radio.html

Graham

They are available in a lot of stores around here. My 70+ year old
dad bought one last year. On the other hand I have a Sony SRF-49 AM/FM
walkman with a belt clip that will run over 24 hours on a single AA cell
on the AM band. It came with decent headphones, but I keep a set of non
amplified computer speakers in my emergency kit so that it can be used
as a table radio. I have 24 new AA alkaline cells in the kit, so I am
set for three weeks. I have a Radio Shack DX-375 AM/FM/Shortwave
digitally tuned radio that uses a pair of "C" cells. I have a weeks
worth of batteries for it in the kit, along with four flashlights and a
couple weeks worth of "D" cells. The rest of the kit is my medicine and
medical supplies.

Toss in a bag of clothes, a folding chair and a couple pillows and
I'm ready to leave for the shelter.

 

[Richard Crowley]

Which kind? My IBM Thinkpad uses 10.8V 4Ah battery,
the charger uses 110V to give 16VDC 4.5A. What kind
of car adaptor do you recommend?

I got 1,600,000 hits when I Googled for: thinkpad car adapter

It would be hard to go wrong with a name-brand IBM (Lenovo)
one, but there are likely many 3rd party clones available.

 

[Richard Crowley]

generators: you mean gasoline or diesel generators?

Yes, internal combustion engine powered.

What kind, what power rating, what brand?

Impossible to answer absent ANY details about your situation.