Some do modified..others do true sine. The better ones do true sine.
Now the big question is...what will you be running from it? Lights and heaters and electric skillets simply dont care what you feed it. Your laptop..that might be different.
Some will do fine. Universal Motors dont care. Motors with poles..may or may not. Running an electric motor from an inverter is a waste of time in most cases however. Better to simply run em from a far less expensive genset.
Gunner
-- "President Obama is not going to lose. He will be re-elected. It is those of you who have these grand fantasies of that pip-squeak Romney actually having a chance at winning the election that will have to wake up to reality the day after the election. I hear there is plenty of room in the rest of the world where you can reside and establish new citizenship. Kirby Grant,
Actually..you are better off snagging the complete front end from a Honda, or other small car, pulling the engine, mounting it on a stand and adding a set of pulleys and a gen head.
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As an example. A regular automotive small engine will simply idle and drive that gen head quite nicely. Anything bigger than 20 hp will be more than enough. Hell..a motorcycle engine from a 450cc or bigger should drive it nicely
Gunner
-- "President Obama is not going to lose. He will be re-elected. It is those of you who have these grand fantasies of that pip-squeak Romney actually having a chance at winning the election that will have to wake up to reality the day after the election. I hear there is plenty of room in the rest of the world where you can reside and establish new citizenship. Kirby Grant,
Actually, I've use MSW inverters exclusively to run all my computers at one time with no discernable problems, until one PS died. That was many months after I began the experiment. "switching power supplies" seem to be OK with MSW as an input, at least for Emergency Purposes.
If you can set up the pulleys correctly to get a small liquid cooled engine to run at 1800rpm and spin the generator at 3600rpm, you will wind up with a very quiet, reliable genset. A heavy flywheel could help but I suspect the mass of the armature would be enough to keep power output steady. I installed a lot of generators in homes and businesses back in the 90's after a major storm upset the power grid in my area and my favorite gensets and the ones that had the fewest problems were those that had liquid cooled engines running at 1800rpm. The 3600rpm gensets with air cooled engines are called "screamers" by my suppliers. Yes, I know all about insulated sound dampening enclosures. ^_^
You Limeys did a pretty good job cleaning up The Thames. Perhaps you could share your superior knowledge with us poor ignorant colonists about keeping our environment in pristine condition and the practice of good personal hygiene? Maybe you could train some dentists for us too? ^_^
Had something similar at the last place i worked. No power out to the barn where we stored the trucks and eq, so I rigged up a piece like this (without the inverter), and strung up 12v bulbs around the place so i could see what i was doing in the early morning hours. (i opened and got the trucks ready to go out)
I have been running a desktop PC in my car for 12 years as an MP3 player, off of the cheapest inverter I could find. It has been fine. The switcher power supply in a PC doesn't care what the wave looks like. The first thing it does is make ~150VDC out of the input power chop it up into a 20kz square wave and feed a toroid transformer to make the 3.3, 5 and 12v the PC needs.
If you have a job that requires that you stay on the beach, they will have a safe place where you will be staying. Usually they evacuate everyone and bring the critical workers back after the storm. If you are really critical, they can't afford you to be dead.
I've never understood the attraction of those things. They put out lousy light and are a pain to use. Batteries today last 10 years on the shelf. Why not just buy batteries and rotate them every few years so your BOB always has fresh ones? I don't think the apocalypse will be longer then the battery shelf life and if it is you'll have more things to worry about then whether you stockpiled batteries versus used a crank lantern.
I like the palm phaser lights, they don't give me carpal tunnel syndrome, too badly.
You're right, that some good batteries and a LED light or two make sense. NiMH cells and solar charge also make sense.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
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I've never understood the attraction of those things. They put out lousy light and are a pain to use. Batteries today last 10 years on the shelf. Why not just buy batteries and rotate them every few years so your BOB always has fresh ones? I don't think the apocalypse will be longer then the battery shelf life and if it is you'll have more things to worry about then whether you stockpiled batteries versus used a crank lantern.
They will last a few years until you use them. Then you are down to no more than a few tens of hours at best.
I assume you are in the home repair group, not the survival group. Stromin' hangs out here and just cross posts to other assorted groups when he wants some extra attention, so my reply was really to my group.
A BOB (bug out bag) should have several levels. At least preps in general should. Technically, in it's original meaning, a BOB is just to support you while you get to a pre-planed safe place. A three day or week long hike if everything else fails and then it's used up and it's done it's job.
The term BOB has come to mean a lot of different things to different people. Let's talk preps in general and then I'll say that I apply as much of that to the BOB as practical.
I think in terms of three time frames. Short duration, a few days, the classic BOB. Besides it's classical use for bugout, mine is also a three day bag - ride out a storm or power burp where you are. Or maybe just give you amenities if a chemical spill makes you evacuate for a day or two. What you say about flashlights and batteries are perfectly good in that situation.
Second level is long duration. Things are going to recover but it's going to be a long slog before it does. For that I have long burning candles in a windproof lantern (google "UCO candle lantern") which will give me a few weeks of light if carefully Sheppard.
The third level is the forever bugout. It ain't coming back, deal with it. No more batteries, no more candles. At least not until you get something going to make them. Still need light. Take more if you can; you should have your retreat stocked, but s*** happens.
Technology was a great tool in the beginning. Now it's useless. No fuel, nothing with a predictable and limited use life is still available. Sure the wind up will wear out if it doesn't break. But once a particular design/specimen is tested and proven, the odds are it will work without input for a very long time. If you settle down at night and live by the sun, you only need a little light and for short periods. The windup is one solution.
Another is a small solar panel with rechargeable batteries and a small led light bar. That's good until the batteries won't charge anymore, which can easily be years with good quality rechargeables.
Every thing in a BOB should be multiple use and there should be multiple ways to fill each need. If things have truly hit the fan, you want belt and suspenders and a length of stout cordage too.
Your assessment of possible risks and ours are different. So be it. The odds are diminishingly small. You have decided to take the risk, some won't.
And yes, we would have a great many things to worry about. Isn't it nice to have the obvious covered so you can get on with it?
With a small automotive engine..you can simply idle it at 700 rpms and have no requirement to drive it at 1800 rpm
Gunner
-- "President Obama is not going to lose. He will be re-elected. It is those of you who have these grand fantasies of that pip-squeak Romney actually having a chance at winning the election that will have to wake up to reality the day after the election. I hear there is plenty of room in the rest of the world where you can reside and establish new citizenship. Kirby Grant,
Speaking from experience, the UCO candle lantern will also give you a hell of a mess to clean up if you leave it in your pack inside a vehicle in the summer.
When you write "small", are you referring to a small block V8? The 10kw Generac units I installed had a 4 cyl Turkish Fiat liquid cooled engine running at 1800rpm. That speed gives 60 cycle AC power from a 4 pole generator. The 2 pole generators run at 3600 rpm. The 1800rpm speed lets the genset respond well to changes in power demand and electric motor start loads. I think it takes something like 1.5hp per kw to run a genset so a good sized engine would be needed to get that kind of power at idle speed. O_o
Im thinking more along the lines of a Pinto engine or similar. When one simply changes the pulley sizes...an idling engine can spin a genny at 1800 rpm easily. How many hp is the typical small engine out of a Saturn or Pinto or similar?
the little 1.9l Saturn engine is 85hp out of the box. At idle...how long will it run on 5 gallons of fuel? 10-15 hours or more?
And they can be had very very cheaply out of wrecks and other sources. A buddy of mine built one using the HF 10kw gennhead and a Pinto engine. It runs for days on a 20 gallon gas tank. At something like
800 rpm
Gunner
Gunner
-- "President Obama is not going to lose. He will be re-elected. It is those of you who have these grand fantasies of that pip-squeak Romney actually having a chance at winning the election that will have to wake up to reality the day after the election. I hear there is plenty of room in the rest of the world where you can reside and establish new citizenship. Kirby Grant,
What is he using for a speed governor to keep the frequency stable? I know there are a lot om OEM parts used to control idle speed on modern vehicle engines that could be used to make your own governor. The HF generator could be directly coupled to a small engine running at 3600rpm using a Lovejoy coupling. The specs call for 16hp for full output so I'm wondering if you could couple it to the existing pulleys on a small 4cyl auto engine keeping the bell housing, flywheel and starter to make things easier. Of course many modern vehicle engines don't have a simple ignition system with a distributor and coil, so what could you do there. I know an old Pinto engine didn't have an ECU but a simple, possibly electronic ignition with distributor and a carb which would make for a easy conversion to a stationary engine. My old
89 Dodge van has an engine control computer and TBI which could be used to build a stationary engine for a generator but I'm wondering about the new super whiz bang computer controlled engines of today's vehicles? O_o
Most of the cleanup happened spontaneously when certain industries disappeared. Over the last twenty years there has been major improvements/upgrades to sewage treatment plants.
There are still major problems when there is heavy rain, in some areas the surface water and sewage is in common drains
I wonder how long the land will remain toxic. I've always said, radiation doesn't scare me because it's easy to detect but toxic chemical pollution is not readily detectable. O_o
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