Laptop Powered From Car Cigarette socket

Maplin do a couple of laptop power supply car adaptors:

Pass.

The best way is a special power supply designed for your laptop. The slightly less better way is to simply buy a 100W inverter, and plug your laptop PSU into this.

It depends. Laser printers can use up to a kilowatt of power, which isn't practical for most inverters, certainly not the cigar lighter socket.

Inkjets mainly 20W or so, so could share the above inverter. If using them at the same time often, I'd go up to 150W or so rating.

This will drain the car battery in about 3-5 hours, so a secondary battery, or having the engine running may be a better option.

You could really do with a DC to DC converter with a 19v output - but assuming that you're going to use the laptop's mains power supply, you'll need an inverter to generate mains from 12v. You'll need something in the region of 75 watts or more which, allowing for inefficiency, will draw something like 7 or 8 amps from the cigar lighter socket. Best not to do it for more than a couple of hours without running the engine. If you want to run a printer as well, you'll need a bigger inverter - which will use even more current. You'll have to work out what you need from the printer's power requirements - and then check whether the socket can deliver sufficient current.

For occasional use, they're just the biz - I keep one in the glove box for laptop/camera and cordless power tool charging.

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"Mark Trueman" wrote;

If you go down the 12 to 240 volt inverter route be aware that if it is a higher wattage model the current drain on the wiring to the cigarette lighter can blow the fuse on that circuit and in the worse case scenario could melt the wiring to the cigarette lighter socket.

For ~£20 IIRC I bought a "Universal" Laptop car power supply on ebay (new) made by "Trust". Only used it a couple of times, but no problems, definitely fit my Compaq, Toshibas and a Vaio.

I bought this,

Thanks for the help

Mark

I've used something like

Peter

Only if an inappropriate fuse has been fitted?