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I'm working in West Africa and our house isn't on the electricity grid, so we're run entirely off a diesel generator. We don't run the genny all day due to fuel costs, so maybe half the daylight hours we have no electricity in the house. For most things that's not an issue, but having to schedule Internet use around when the engine is running is kind of annoying. The modem/router just draws from two sockets of 240 power, so it can't be pulling much juice. Is there some standard device we can buy and plug into the wall that will just draw off the excess current when the generator is running (while letting power flow through it to the modem/router), and then when we cut the generator it has enough stored energy to run the wireless for eight hours or so? Is there a particular term for that kind of device? It'd also be useful for when we later have employees in apartments that are on the grid since the city grid goes down all the time too.
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Oct 24, 2015 12:34
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adorai posted:Sounds like a plain old UPS to me. Most Uninterrupted Power Sources just run for a couple minutes so you can fire up a backup power source though, right? We're looking for something that we can use for hours at a time so we're not burning up gallons of diesel for the primary purpose of keeping two sockets powered for the wireless.
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Oct 24, 2015 15:32
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I'm a little leery of cobbling together marine batteries and inverters since I'm not really a tech guy, though it's something we can keep in mind, or have a Liberian electrician install/ground/safety for us.quote:An APC smart ups 750 could probably run a wrt54g (I just picked a common router) for something like 10 hours without any additional power input. It would probably be more than that in the real world, but I did some very quick back of the napkin math. Ixian posted:That kind of use case plus environmental conditions (I imagine this isn't in a temp/humidity controlled environment, right?) would kill off most off the shelf UPS's, no question. How long they would last is hard to say but I would guess not nearly as long as they are meant to I really like the idea of that APC SMT750, and at US$250 that would totally pay for itself pretty quickly. Spare batteries are $60 though, so I guess it'd be a question of how long the batteries can survive. If a couple months totally worth it, if weeks probably not. I ran the idea by the boss and he was totally on board if it looks to be break-even or better. Yeah, no temp or humidity control, though our house has pretty heavy walls and stays reasonably cool, and though this place is hella humid in the Rainy season, we're just about to start the six-month Dry season so the problem would at least be a little down the road. We have partial access to Embassy mail, so I could have one sent to a friend in the US off Amazon and shipped over in our next care package. Anyone have any major warnings against that idea, other than that the batteries just might not last too long? quote:What about that Tesla thing? The Tesla house battery is what put the idea in my head, but at $3500 it's a little pricey for our current purposes, though in the future if prices come down and our needs get stronger it could be a great option. There's some long explanation for why more expats don't have solar here that I'm not totally clear on, so I can ask around a little about that. There's certainly plenty of sun. And for our purposes even a really small solar array would give enough juice to run two outlets I'd expect.
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Oct 28, 2015 17:15
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