If he's willing to buy the right UPS, of course it can be done. From a practical standpoint, I think he wants to use a typical UPS that's cord/plug connected and that you plug loads into. And I agree, no code compliant way to take a house light circuit and put it into that.
Lots of jury-rigged possibilities
NEC covers that too.
NEC covers that too.
Jimmie,
It is highly unlikely that your lights are on circuits by themselves. They probably share circuits with clocks, battery chargers, TV's, computers, and other devices that draw power also. Your total load is probably much higher than 100 watts, even if you don't factor in your major appliances.
However, even if your total load is below 100 watts, you would need to isolate those circuits from your main electrical panel so you could power them from a UPS. This would require opening up your breaker panel, installing a new panel for the supported circuits, and supply power from the UPS. Essentially, you would have to follow all the same rules as if you were powering from a backup generator. This is a lot of work and expense just to power your lights during a power outage.
Unless you're planning to go off the grid or something, power outages are usually rare events. It's better to just have emergency lighting for the few occasions the power goes out.
I have a couple of these LED power failure lights:
They simply plug into a wall outlet so they are always fully charged. If the power goes out, they come on automatically so we can safely move around the house after things go dark. If needed, they can be unplugged from the wall and carried around like a flashlight. They supposedly provide light over 8 hours, but I've never left them on that long to know if that is accurate.
If the power goes out for more than few minutes, the power failure lights provide light so that I can get my LED lantern:
This is a great little lantern that is rated for 40-90 hours of light depending on the brightness level. I've never left ours on more than a few hours, but it works well.
Usually, when the power goes out we light some candles and turn off the bright LED lights. Build a fire in the woodstove to stay warm, turn on a small battery powered radio, open a bottle of wine, and it becomes a romantic evening with the wife. :) We actually look forward to power outages. :)
In the last 20+ years, we have only had a couple extended outages that lasted more than a few hours. Both were in the middle of winter, so we bagged up the food in our refrigerator and put it outside where it was already cold. If you have raccoons or other critters, you might want to use a cooler or something you could tie shut. It worked well to keep our food safe despite an outage that lasted more than a day.
I do have a small Cyberpower UPS for my computer:
If the power goes out I can run my computer and monitor about an hour before I have to shut down. That's long enough to cover the vast majority of short outages we do have. It's nice not to lose everything I'm working on if the power blips off for 2 minutes.
Hope this helps!
Anthony Watson
They keep trying to upgrade my processor.
And your UPS would run this for at least TWO years.
My UPS would run a vacuum tube computer for zero seconds!
That's a good point. But he could unplug or not turn on those other devices during a power failure. However it would probably be easy to miss something and have it drain the UPS.
That's one way to do it. But for most newer panels there are lockout kits avaiable so you don't need a separate panel. It's just a slide that prevents the main breaker and a double pole breaker in the first slot from being on at the same time. The alternate power source gets connected to that breaker. Then you can choose what to power by using the regular breakers.
Essentially, you would have to follow all the same rules as if
Agree.
This is a lot of work and
Agree. If I was going to that much work, I'd want to power more than just some lights. For some lights, you could just plug some extension cords and floor lamps into the UPS, plus a couple LED lanterns, I would think.
I have those too.
Hmmm, Is your light only on one circuit throughout the house? I just have emergency rechargeable light pack located on every level in the house. And candle sticks/match box for back up. In the past 43 years since we relocated here total power outage was may be ~5 hours top. I think that is pretty good record.
Under your description, then it would not be functioning as a UPS, but instead as a manual backup power supply.
Correct. Hydrogen and oxygen emission while charging.
Must use VRLA battery.
Who needs those wimpy arse vacuum tubes. A real man works with these...
These are water-cooled PA tubes for Loran transmitters. Filament current
300A at 12.7V. Plate voltage 15,000 VDC. Output power 1.5MW.When they went bad we hollowed them out, wired them for 120AC and made 25 lb desk lamps out of them.
The only problem with the ferro is poor efficiency. The ferro was like a little "micro-furnace".
I sold Best UPs equipment for many years.
Why change the battery to charge it??? Best Power had their "UBS" systems - "Unlimited Battery System" - a DC generator super-charger system that ran many police and emergency service dispatch systems through hurricanes, earthquakes, blizards, and anything else you could throw at them.
Not necessarilly true. Only "dual conversion" UPS work that way - and that is just the high end of the UPS spectrum.
My finished basement runs about 75 watts. The kitchen is about 45 or
We could quite easily manage on less than 100 watts of LED at a time.
And he needs a "hard wire" UPS. Cannot connect a "plug in" UPS permanently to house wiring and meet code.
I guess they didn't come up with a transistor to replace that one
Section please?
We have installed industrial shop lights hanging from chain that have a cord and plug so the fixtures can be replaced/moved. Granted it was individual lights and not the feed for many lights, but I don't see any safety issue.
Anita Snugsnatch
Buy a UPS that supports external battery packs and you are all set - but they are NOT 12 volt units. Some are 24, some 36, and some 42 or
48 or more The external battery (extended run) units usually are higher voltage than the self-contained.My powerware Prestige 1000 is 48 volts - 4X12 volt batteries, and the prestige 1000EXT is 60 volts - 5X12 volts. The external packs "generally" have their own chrging system.
10 minutes on internal battery, 42 with external pack at rated load.
Not true. There are UPS units designed for exactly this application that are hardwired into the house circuitry.
They did, but it was many years after I worked on them. The timing equipment had _just_ gone solid state when I started working on it but the transmitters were still vacuum tube.
In fact, when my class finished basic ET school, the guys that were going on to Loran school were split into 2 groups: those that were going to stations with vacuum tube timing equipment and those that were going to stations that had been upgraded. I got lucky. The techs at LorSta Sylt Germany were upgrading the equipment while I was going to school in NYC to learn how to work on it. By the time I got to Sylt the old equipment was in the hallway and the new equipment had just gone on air.
As it turned out, I enjoyed working on the old transmitters more than the new timing equipment so I spent most of my time in the transmitter building, a quarter mile from the main station. At all Loran stations the transmitter building, which was at the base of the tower, was always placed as far from the main station as the tower was high. Even though the towers were guyed to spin straight down if they failed, they still placed them where they couldn't reach main station if they ever fell over sideways.
The thing about the old transmitters is that they constantly needed preventative maintenance and when they broke you actually had to troubleshoot them instead of just swapping out circuit boards. There was always something to do and you got to play with high voltage and real tools. Besides, the station officers were mostly afraid of the high voltage so they left us alone when we were out there.
My favorite troubleshooting time was when we had to find the cause of an arc inside the transmitter. The transmitters had metal plates covering various sections and sometimes they would arc internally where we couldn't see what was going on.
We would remove the metal plates, turn off the lights in the transmitter building, and run the power supply up to the normal 15KV operating voltage. If it didn't arc soon enough for our liking, we'd run it up to 20KV, wait a little while then run it up to 25KV. At that voltage, anything that was going to arc usually did - and with authority. Even though you knew it was coming, it still scared the crap out of you.
Weren't those 4CX1000 tubes?
Oy vay, is it NOT kosher. He asked if there was a way to do with that would not use a transfer switch AND would be "inspectable." No way, Jose. I got a whole bunch of Philips' "Stumble Lights" from a wholesaler a few years back. They are 4 LED units with motion and ambient light detectors that run off a 9VDC wall wart. To make them work during a power failure I removed the wall warts and now they are all connected to a deep discharge, 80Ah wheelchair battery. Because they draw so little power on standby they can (and have) run for days when the main power has failed.
Fortunately, the long wire runs back to the main battery drop the voltage almost exactly enough to run at 9VDC. As you walk through the house, even in a total power failure, the Stumble lights sense motion and light up the way. They've saved a lot of banged up knees and worse. Installed their precursor (strings of LED lights) after I forgot I had left a big, black stereo speaker on the floor and broke my toe on it one night.
Agreed. While we can't be exactly sure of his intentions, the parameters he set (using existing gear, no transfer switch and being code-compliant) seem impossible to fulfill. At least not without an UPS the size of which I have never seen and not even then because it would still need a transfer switch.
You could easily wire in 12VDC LED lights throughout the house on low voltag e wiring for far less than such a massive UPS would cost. They would be far more efficient because there would be no losses from taking a battery, creating 110VAC from it and then powering LEDs that transform that AC back into DC. As someone else pointed out, backfeeding the grid like that would not be a good idea nor would the UPS last very long. Jimmie has a good idea, it just has to be implemented in parallel with the existing lighting, not using the existing lighting.
Jimmie
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We have similar problem with stand by lighting. We use an always on inverter as a continuous feed to the lighting. The inverter is on a triple stage flow charge and deep cycle batteries. Capacity is at least a week mostly because of the available deep cycle batteries. Side benifit I can rub the TV and radio as needed withou noticable loss of capacity. The batteries are located in the garage so push come to shove I can top off/recharge with the car.
Deep cycle golf cart batteries are cheap if you feel the need to run the fridge and/or a microwave.
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