Dark Mind Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 God I have horrible timing ;). I mean, what were the chances???... Wow... Quote
Dark Mind Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 At my last job I made a little wireless cart that the warehouse used to enter inventory. It was a no frills desktop box and flatscreen monitor with a bar code printer. The whole thing ran on a single 400 CCA 12V car battery connected to a 500W inverter. It was used 8 to 10 hours a day and connected to a trickle charger at night. We never had trouble making it through the day. A deep cycle marine battery would last much longer than this even. OTOH, if I rebuilt it today I'd use a notebook. You could run it for days on a single charge.;) I wish I had a background in Electronics/Engineering so that this would make sense. Ahh well, someday... By the way, I knew C1ay took 7 minutes to reply to that post because I checked his last activity in his profile and saw the "Replying to thread: What batteries would power a home PC ?" and thought I'd wait and see what he'd say. Just in case any of you thought I was stalking him or something ;). Then I got impatient and showed I was awaiting his response (7minutes later) right when he replied ;). Bad timing... Quote
C1ay Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 ;) I wish I had a background in Electronics/Engineering so that this would make sense. It's not that complicated. A desktop needs 120V or 240V AC power. A small inverter converts the DC from a battery to the needed voltage for 120V or 240V appliances. It's basically the way a UPS works, ie you have a battery on continuos charge and an inverter to supply power to your equipment. If the power goes out it only kills the battery charger while the connected equipment continues to run off of the battery. Quote
Turtle Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 ___Some other clarifications on C1ay's post about the little cart. CCA refers to Cold Cranking Amps, & applies to batteries intended for starting combustion engines. These batteries have an internal design that delivers a large amount of current all at once & reliably in cold weather. This 'internal design' is in regard to the arrangement & patterning of the lead arrays submerged in the acid. In general these batteries perform poorly for continuous use and/or deep discharge.___The marine batteries C1ay mentioned also go by the term deep-cell batteries & they have an internal design that optimizes them for long steady use & deep (complete) discharge. These batteries have ratings in Amp Hours, not CCA. (I don't know any simple conversion). So a deep-cell 100 amp hour 12 volt battery will power a 1 amp load for 100 hours. Most of the inverters draw about 1/2 amp for their own circuitry. Now use watts = amps * volts equation to figure out how long you can run a given piece of equipment on a given battery before needing recharging.___I believe these deep cell batteries found their "marine battery" tag because they find considerable application in 12 volt trolling motor use. ;) Quote
Dark Mind Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 Gracias. Much appreciated clarification C1ay and Turtle. Quote
alexander Posted July 27, 2005 Report Posted July 27, 2005 ok, so my next question will be, why not use a laptop and come up with power for that? Oh and yes, i should have mentioned marine batteries, i thought about them yesterday before i went to bed (around 12:30, but I gotta be at work at 7am, so i chose sleep), Optima is pretty good, they guarantee 50 amp hours on their deep cycle marine 12 volt batteries, but you can custom order those to be made for anything you want to, size, voltage, capacity, amperage... Oh and Turtle, I'm pretty sure you are right about the "marine battery" tag thing... Quote
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