Three weeks ago, a suicidal squirrel (or "Rocky the Frying
Squirrel") tested his electrical "mettle" on the power feed
to our street, and lost. We were without power for a few
hours, until PGE diagnosed and fixed the blown fuse.
We were involuntarily reminded that the cordless POTS
phones in our house are powered by wall warts. We lost
landline phone service until I plugged in an ancient
princess phone from a basement junkbox, so we could call
PGE (using caller ID to verify the outage location).
The grid will become increasingly unreliable in coming
decades; it wasn't designed for intermittent "alternative
energy", electric car charging, and squirrels frightened
by climate change predictions. It could be ... but "why
not" is a whole 'nother rant.
Anywhoo, the bottom line is that we will be on battery
power and generator backup more often in the future, and
it is prudent to prepare. For example, alternative power
strategies for essential wall-wart-powered devices, like
the cordless phones, the firewall computer, and the
wireless access point.
Most of the wall warts are 12V or less; the phone base
sets are 7.5V *DC*. Chinese suppliers on ebay sell
little 3 amp LM2596S step-down ("buck") converter boards
for less than $1 ... and a longish delivery time. I
plan to put a 12V marine battery in an unused fireplace
(to vent hydrogen, if any) and distribute (fused!) 12V
power to a few places in the house.
I will replace the essential wall warts with properly
adjusted step-down converters. Then the phones and
the wireless power will keep running for a few hours
while the battery discharges. For extended outages
(and we had a two week outage a decade ago) I'll fire
up the kilowatt Honda portable generator. That won't
power motor startup on our older refrigerator and
freezer, but we will replace those soon. I presume
we can find refrigerators with "low inrush current"
soft-start electronic motor controllers; I expect those
have been developed for off-grid solar homesteading.
In any case, relevant to PLUG, I have a bag of these
buck converters to play with, which might be useful for
powering your low-power computer gizzies after Oregon
plunges into darkness. Or powering them in your gas
guzzling car(*). Let's schedule a play date here for
fooling with them; contact me via email.
Keith
(*) visions of the Personal Telco 500, a high speed
automobile race where the lead car with the access point
races around the track, while distracted drivers race
behind it with their laptops, debugging and uploading
kernel patches; Indy Indie networking! :-)
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
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