The simplest approach would be to have a UPS than can run all of the
stuff, then during an outage merely unplug it from the dead wall
outlet and plug it into an inverter powered from the appropriate battery bank.
thanks
JK
At 03:02 PM 9/29/2017, you wrote:
>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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