Me and my colleagues have a number of 2kVA & 4kVA generators that are both classic alternator or inverter designs used when we are out in the wilds.
Typically we have £10k-£20k of expensive and sensitive radio equipment, computers and cooking equipment running from them without issue.
Heating is easy enough. Even a decent UPS could manage that but a fridge or worse still a freezer is a very nasty load from a cold start.
A 2kW generator might be enough. That is an experiment I intend to try.
For now I prefer the solution of simply not opening the freezer door and praying. That works OK for up to 48 hours (after that it is all lost).
Looks like another strong wind storm may be coming in on Wednesday so I will have my Thermos's filled ready this time. I expect there are still plenty more power distribution poles round here just ready to snap.
I feel very sorry for the folk who have spent more than a week now without power and had to listen to endless PR guff about how much Northern Powergrid cares about its customers. One thing is very certain it cares about rewarding its shareholders a hell of a lot more.
I expect you can find kit that won't tolerate anything other than a pure sine wave power but by now they must be becoming increasingly rare.
What really matters is whether the kit is able to cope with a less than ideal power supply waveform. Much modern stuff will cope with a wide range of input voltages and frequencies without any trouble - although it is as well to check the rating plate and not go outside those bounds.
At its crudest one form of pseudo sine wave is little more than a 3:1 ratio rectangular waveform with alternating polarity. That did sometimes distress older kit that was expecting a fairly clean sine wave. ie. ___ ___ _| |_ _| |_ etc |___|
What really matters is how well the PSU converts a crude noisy horrible supply into clean DC for the sensitive electronics. IME most computer PSU's can accept a wide range of voltages, frequencies and waveforms. Mine will run quite happily on 208v which is what gets when another phase has failed. I didn't even notice until I tried to boil the kettle.
I expect some will work happily on an appropriately high DC voltage although I have never actually tried it. The first step is typically to rectify the mains and then chop it at a much higher frequency.
I assure you it was a very real scenario and a damned annoying one at that. The iPhone X would happily charge in the car if it still had enough battery power to say hello and negotiate a charging rate.
It is typical of Apple megalomania.
AFAIK, it can't be a 500mA charger, whether a minimum 1A or 2A is required, I don't know.
I've just met thatbwitha Toshiba mini laptop. It had to be the Toshiba charger, not any USB one
In Canada they used to have solenoid locks. You couldn't get in if the power was off - unless you went and found a key.
It's different with USB C and USB PD but traditional USB power only allows a device 100mA at 5V until it has enumerated with the host. At that point the device has told the host what it is and the host will have loaded the correct software drivers. The power available was then
500mA at 5V and later on that became 2A at 5V. The spec says a device should be able to get to such a charge state after 10mins at 100ma that it could at least enumerate that it was a device in charging and how much current it wanted. Once there was enough to run the software properly it could re-enumerate.I steer clear of the Apple world. I have always found their devices overpriced for what you get and as my job has seen me closely involved in the implementation of phones etc. I know how much they cost to make and refuse to pay the markup Apple devices have.
However, all the phone designs I've seen at low level normally have a small ARM cpu to handle the power management that runs independently of the main apps cpus to enable / disable components to maximise battery life and charging. 10mins at 100ma is enough to put plenty of life into a battery to power such a low power component to get the rapid recharge working.
If every Android phone ever can get itself sorted from dead within
10mins from un-enumurated USB trickle current then there's no reason on Earth that iPhones cannot do the same. The only reason not to do so is a deliberate design choice by Apple. Another reason why I don't want Apple products.
Yes. Properly handled, FaceBook can be very useful.
We have a few candle lanterns, which work very well for carrying around. IIRC, bought at Ikea.
That was the problem. 100mA didn't seem to be enough to ever wake it out of its torpor it just sat there with its legs in the air!
My wife prefers iToys. They are quite nicely designed for the most part.
It had two runs in car of 20 minutes and 40 minutes without showing any signs of being other than an inert brick. First going to the next village to get the newspaper and see if they had power and the second was the following day going much further to get meths from B&Q.
There may well be no reason why they can't I am merely describing what happened (and it couldn't have been at a worse time). My own phone from home barely has enough signal to receive texts in a timely manner normally at home and cannot support internet at all without making a journey to the nearest mast (which then died due to lack of mains).
In practice it didn't make much difference since the Northern Powergrid website contained inaccurate information about our power status :(
Will it start an induction motor which takes near enough its full output on paper?
Quite. And then get all twisted up when one of their 'friends' says something they don't like.
I never cease to be surprised by the number of friends requests I get on FB, from people I only know due to a mutual interest on FB - like say a car make. And the last thing I want is pictures of their kitten. ;-)
I have a couple of dead FB friends whose family still post under his name. Odd, really.
What about USB devices that aren't computerised, like lights and coffee cup warmers?
They must post sum kewl stuf.
Many years ago I questioned the cost of electric guitars and amplifiers to someone involved in manufacturing and selling them.
"Your mistake" he said "Is to think we are selling kit: we are selling
*dreams* and you can't put a price on those".All consumer products are more or less dreams. Even a bar of soap has to have emotional content as well as sodium stearate.
Apple is just another piece of overpriced dreamware. Shiny new thing make everything better etc.
+1, I regularly use my little clone honda inverter generator (the MM Clarkes, I think) for the usual suspects power tools. Things like angle grinders and circular saws run up a little bit slowly, but they do seem to reach full speed and torque.
I've also know some "modified sine wave" inverters fail to drive some tools and items like vacuum cleaners that have a soft start. They work fine on a true sine wave, not the truncated pseudo sine output from some.
That is the problem. The house was built c1880, solid granite with the original huge Victorian sash windows. Yes, it is a difficult house to heat. Due to conservation status, we cannot just add any old secondary double glazing - a friend in a similar house paid 5k per window for his four large front windows to be suitably double glazed. At least the loft is insulated :-)
It is exactly the problem I encountered with my wife's iPhone it would not accept charge from the in car USB socket on a bitterly cold day to an extent where it could negotiate anything other than trickle charging which in something like an hour overall did not get it back to life.
It woke up in about 5 minutes connected to an Apple mains charger.
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