Whole house "battery" wiring/power...

How about getting rid of all those batteries in various devices in the home and connecting the battery connections to one central battery?

That is to run separate wires when wiring a home and these would carry say

12 volts DC. There would be a central large battery and battery charger like the type used in a computer UPS.

Then at each electronic gizmo which needs a battery, use a "battery eliminator" along with a voltage regulator to supply it with the correct voltage. And plug this into a nearby 12 volts DC "outlet".

This could provide battery power to smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, HVAC thermostat, security system, clocks, digital thermometers, computer UPS, phone answering machine, etc.

Then only ONE battery to worry about...

A 9 volt battery eliminator picture...

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Reply to
Bill
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Single point of failure. Probably not a good idea.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

If I am not mistaken, at low (12v) voltages, there is substantial voltage loss in longer cable runs. Also, many DC devices operate on other voltages, like 9V, 6V, 19V, 20V, etc. There is also not a universal DC power outlet, unless you think of the car lighter type plug, but I've seen other outlets in airplanes, etc.

So all in all I don't think it is feasible.

Reply to
MikeB

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Reply to
WW

That URL resized my Firefox Browser window! Not cool.

Reply to
MikeB

picture...

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That means my camera, TV remote controls and many other items would revert to "wired", each with a wire running to a plug!!!!!!!! No way!!!!!!!!

Reply to
EXT

You need lots of copper.

Now lets see - there's my torch, my mobile 'phone, my camera, the remote controls for our TV, VCR, HDD recorder, CD recorder, digibox....

Not sure I want those hard-wired to a central battery >-|

The only other battery operated devices I can think of are the smoke and CO2 alarms. Not worth the effort.

Reply to
Stuart

When I was thinking about this, I was going to put a bank of inexpensive (relatively) car/truck batteries in a dedicated vented area out behind my workshop and potentially move to 24VDC rather than 12 due to the losses involved in low-voltage DC appls over any kind of distance (initially testing just for the workshop, and if successful wiring the house, too).

Charging / supplemental power could be via all sorts of means, of course.

The problem is that you'll either have the inefficiency of running DC-DC convertors all over the place, or in hacking your devices to better match them to the available power (lots of stuff does the regulation on-board rather than in the wall-wart).

Personally I was thinking along the lines of doing it to power some of the lighting and things like my laptop which can be easily adapted, but it wouldn't be possible to completely switch off the AC supply at present

- but maybe one day there'll be a standard for low-voltage DC outlets and devices will be available that'll just use them.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules

feds should mandate a wall wort standard, the wide variety of them clogging the landfills is very wasteful. all wall wart devices could be designed to accept a standard voltage.,....... same for a cell phone charger standard to cut down on trash

Reply to
bob haller

One for cell phones is happening - see:

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Reply to
Jules

Hmm, I generally use batteries for *PORTABLE* devices. The stuff that sits in one place is all AC operated. I think your idea needs work.

Reply to
krw

His idea may need work, but I still have plenty non portable things with battery power or battery backup. Both thermostats have AA cells. My light timer and clock radio use batteries for backup. Telephone memory has 4 cells, a caller ID unit has a 9V. Some of those items have plug in adapters, some don't. I have one smoke/co detector that is battery operated, the others are had wired.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

That is the way I have been thinking. The green people call all these wall warts "vampires". These days they are getting standardized to 5v, simply to have USB port compatibility. I am thinking the same way as the OP about some DC distribution but it is wall warts I want to get rid of. I already got rid of several around my PCs by porting out voltages from the power supply when they would work. I think if you had 5v and 12v available, you could get rid of a lot of warts.

Reply to
gfretwell

There is already a trend, in the free market. Lets encourage them (as consumers). The last thing the USA needs is more federal regulation.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

That is another interesting idea!

Many "wall warts" provide DC to all these electronic gizmos. So perhaps connect these to the DC system - do away with the "wall warts".

So the central battery would provide battery backup AND DC power to electronic gizmos (instead of using wall warts).

This could help to solve another problem which is voltage surges. The "whole house" DC electronic power supply in the home could be well protected from voltage surges, thus you don't need surge protectors at every outlet where an electronic device is plugged in.

Also these electronic gizmos would continue to work during power outages.

As to voltage drop, make the main supply 24 volts DC if necessary. That should give you over 12 volts DC at the end of the line.

Reply to
Bill

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It would be just as cost effective to put the power supplies inside the devices and make them all AC. We are already wired for that. They can still use batteries for portability or back up. I hate those frigging power boxes you get with every god damn thing you buy.

Reply to
Van Chocstraw

Most have none ;maybe an old clock radio.

Nope. None here. Both powered off the heat pumps. It doesn't take much of a battery to keep a clock going. A button cell should last the life of the clock.

See above. You bought junk.

Wired is a requirement now.

Reply to
krw

One problem whigh you might ecounter when powering devices from one DC power supply: Ground loop. If you feed everythign with one power supply, is is very asy to get noise problems to system if those parts were originally designed t work with their wall warts what provide isolated power. Then worst case would be if one equipment would have - side grounded to case and other one + connected to case...

There are whole house surge protectors that plug to main electrical panel. The DC power distribution system on the other hand could have it's own surges when things are plugged in and out...

24V distributed around and locally converted to 12V or whatever needed is a working idea. A suitable switch mode power supply circuit could do that (and provide isolation if needed). The problem here is that you need that small converter box near the outlet.. not much different from small switch mode type wall wart in size. If you plan to hide those things inside wall electrical box, then it would not be much different than having the wall warts hidden somewhere inside the wall (many same problems).
Reply to
Tomi Holger Engdahl

Indeed. Many things have proprietary wall warts anyway, with ferrite stubs (like my turntable/RIAA preamp compo, each came with its own 16 V wall wart;the preamp, a Cambridge Audio

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540 PP moving magnet preamp, 16 V with a ferrit stub, the turntable, a Pro-ject
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)Debut III with a physically (and probably electrically) same 16 V wall wart, with the same male jack, but without a ferrit stub). The only place I've seen that has a dc grid, is a 300 MW steam power station, fossil fired with brown coal, but I have forgotten the details, since it's been 15 years or so. It's in Kozani, west macedonia (not the country, province of Greece). They needed it for the excitation circuits of the main alternators. While large AC trasformers have a very high efficiency (99% at full load) wall warts have a much lower, 50% IIRC. And if they're DC/DC it needs more advanced technology. Not mentioning needing probably #4 wires for the DC grid of a residence....

Reply to
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios

Remember that 9 volts will loose voltage in a short run. By the time you get it trough a wire from one end of the house to another, you might be down to 7 volts and that might not work too well.

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Reply to
sligoNoSPAMjoe

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