It doesn't take a global disaster for you to have a serious 110-volt problem. Virtually all of us have had it, and will again. Examples? About 20 years ago, my Texas kin huddled in a cyclone cellar while the infamous Lubbock tornado juggernauted overhead, dismantling most of their house in the process. In the center of a modern city, they and many others went without electricity for daysunnecessarily. That's what I mean by the 110-volt problem; it wouldn't be so much of one if we didn't unthinkingly depend so much on public utilities. Twice, in Oregon, winds and ice storms have left us bereft of house current for a day or soyet we scarcely missed it.
There are ways to lessen that panicky feeling when your lights all wink out at once, your stereo groans to a halt and your coffee maker cools. First, you could get used to doing without; lots of folks do. Or you could assemble camping gear where you can find it in the dark, for use when house current fails. Or pile in the car and drive to a friend'sweather permittingif your friend hasn't lost all his volts, too. We don't rely on this option because our place is reachable only by roller-coaster roads, and tire chains don't always keep us headed in the right direction during the worst weather.
Many people recommend home-generated electricity and, oddly enough, a few of us even have it! If you invest in a turbine or wind-generator system, you're talking about a lot of time and money. It's an excellent idea, but most of us probably won't do it. Then there's the emergency engine-driven alternator; they start at about $400 surplus, but usually cost several thousand. I can testify that they take up a lot of space, require maintenance, make noise, burp carbon monoxide and heat, and don't always work properly. The last time our power lines petered out, we didn't even start our two-kilowatt unit because we had a handier solution to an evening's inconvenience. We've dubbed it the 12-volt solution.
If you've ever converted a van into a camper, you may have guessed what I'm suggesting. The solution involves the family car. Naturally, you can't run a washer and dryer, or a microwave oven, off your standard auto batterybut it's astonishing how many amenities you can have if you don't overdo it. We've all seen 12-volt gadgets that plug into a car's cigarette-lighter socket. But have you noticed the extension cords for them? If you can't buy 12-volt auto extension cords locally, you can order them. Or you can sometimes buy male and female receptacles and attach them to standard 16-gauge insulated wiring of the sort normally used for household extension cords. It's best to avoid wiring thinner (with a higher number) than 1-gauge, because the thinner the wire, the greater your line lossesespecially using direct current. Ten-gauge would be ideal, though costly, if you're cobbling up your own.
Those line losses needn't be great if you're using your car battery for things like low-amperage lights and radios with 12-volt adapters. Even here you can get cute with energy savings. A fluorescent lamp provides more light than most incandescents of the same power. You should buy your accessories with amperage ratings in mind.
But just how varied are those accessories? Very! A partial list of our 12-volt plug-ins includes:
Accessory
|
Approximate Amps
|
Small magnet-backed trouble light
|
less than 0.5
|
Fluorescent two-tube reading lamp
|
0.4
|
High-intensity map light
|
0.2
|
Powerful spotlight
|
2.1
|
Coffee maker
|
7 to 10
|
Tape recorder(small, with adaptor)
|
less than 0.5
|
Radio (small, with adaptor)
|
less than 0.4
|
Vacuum cleaner(powerful canister type)
|
about 10
|
Sparkplug sandblaster(motor-driven)
|
1.5
|
Electric fan (small)
|
0.5
|
Air pump (160-psi capacity)
|
3.5
|
Hand calculator (with adaptor)
|
0.1
|
Ask a friend who owns a camper; probably you'll discover even more accessories that'll run on 12 volts. What if you wanted to rig an emergency fluid pump? It might pump gasoline from one tank to another, or water from a brook up to your radiator. The pump delivers about two gallons per minute, a pretty respectable volumebut it must be primed and won't push water uphill very far. For higher pressure, but a somewhat lower volume, you could use an electric fuel pump. After all, an electric automotive fuel pump was designed to run on 12 volts.
Your camper-owning friend might also introduce you to the inverter or voltage converter, which converts battery voltage to a level compatible with your household voltage, though it's likely to be fairly expensive. But his eyes are likely to gleam when he tells you about the auxiliary-battery idea. Many recreational vehicles have a second hefty battery which doubles the electrical-storage capacity in your car. Your alternator recharges them both, which works the alternator a bit harder. The auxiliary battery should be installed with a "battery isolator," a solid-state device that'll withstand a 500-amp surge and is available for under $20. The battery-isolator wiring is very simple; just don't install it in a high-temperature location. The gadget directs the alternator's output to whichever battery has the lowest charge and, better still, prevents the discharge of the main battery while you're draining power from the auxiliary. The cost of this whole auxiliary-battery system runs about $60 to $70, which is very near the total cost of all the accessories we've accumulated.
Do you own a word processor? Whether it's portable or not, check for an adaptor that converts it to 12 volts DC. If it's portable, chances are it can be converted easily.
With this array of gadgets you could find your power lines down some evening before having friends over and barely break stride. You can vacuum the living room, update the family records on your computer, make coffee, listen to weather reports, warm the baby's bottle, clean the sparkplug on your lawnmower for the heck of it and then entertain your friends with tape cassettes and mood lightall using the 12-volt solution. You'd be smart to minimize use of heating elements, but the point is that you have a lot of options available.
So let's pretend your house current has gone belly-up temporarily, and your cars are near the house. The first thing to do is route your 12-volt extension cord(s) from the car through the nearest window. If your cars aren't near enough, see if you can push one of them within a dozen feet of a window. Don't start your car up with its battery to bring it nearer unless you have to, because starting the engine is a tremendous drain on the battery. (Car batteries could be a mere one-third the size they are, if it weren't for the huge jolt it takes to start a cold engine!)
On the other hand, you could start the car up and keep it idling for an hour or so, letting its alternator resupply the battery. Many cars will overheat if left idling very long, so monitor your engine's temperature if you're running it as an emergency-power plant. Since you might forget, perhaps you'd do better by just keeping tabs on the amount of amperage your 12-volt accessories are all using together.
Often the amperage rating is printed on the accessorybut all too often it isn't. The table in this article was compiled with the aid of a multi-tester, and can be used as a very rough estimate of the amperage drains you can expect. You'll find that any accessory which works primarily by generating heat, such as a curling iron, bottle warmer, coffee maker, etc., will use up lots more amperage than a gadget that produces a modest light, or runs a small motor. Big motors and spotlights make medium to heavy demands on your battery. If you intend to run several accessories off the same lighter socket, you'd better know where its fuse is and have a spare. Ask a mechanic if your lighter-socket wiring can handle a somewhat higher fuse rating. Most fuses are literally two-bit itemsunless you're one shy! I've been known to bridge a blown fuse with a piece of wirebut not to recommend it to anybody.
You'll surely want to run more than one device at a time, which can be done any of several ways. You could run extension cords from more than one car; run several extensions from the same car; or jury-rig a multiple-outlet from a single extension. Since few cars are factory-equipped with more than one lighter socket, you might have an extra socket or two installed. Or you can buy an extra socket with its own beefy little clips, and clip those leads directly onto the battery terminals.
I'm still searching for a commercial 12-volt extension cord with multiple "female" socket outlets. Meanwhile, I cobbled one together. If you're in doubt about how to wire the sockets in parallel, ask your mechanicor perhaps he'll do it himself for a fiver.
After discussing how you do it, maybe I'd better caution you how not to overdo it. Most recent car batteries carry a four-year guarantee and, when new, will survive a drain of 25 amps for around an hour without damage from excessive discharge. (But many a socket fuse will blow before you reach that rate of discharge!) With a six-year guarantee, a new heftier battery will let you draw that many amps for upward of an hour and a half without damage from excessive discharge. But whatever accessories you run off your car batterywithout the engine and its alternator runningif they draw 20 amps for an hour, or 10 amps for 2 hours, you're in danger of overdoing it. You mustn't wait until your electric fan stops, or your reading lamp dims to a glow, because when low-amp accessories perform poorly you're running out of juice.
Soon after you detect a significant drop in performance of your accessories, unplug everything. Let the battery rest; it will regain some of its charge by itself. Or, if you're sure the car will start with very little cranking, make one attempt to start the engine and let its alternator revive the battery. You could even re-attach a low-amperage accessory or two once the engine's running. For that matter, there's a plug-in gadget that reads your battery's charge within broad limits and could let you monitor the drain you've laid on it. I use one, but I'm not sure it's a better monitor than the brightness of an incandescent bulb.
Finally, there's good news about the prices and the bulk of these accessories. Most accessories are priced right for a modest (even chintzy!) birthday or holiday gift. And they're compact enough that you can store them all in an apple crate. That means you can store them in your car, in case you develop a problem on the road. For years, I've chosen such gadgets and bought a half-dozen of them every Novemberfor each of my close kin with a car. One by one, usually in highway emergencies, most of 'em have experienced a problem which dissolved with the 12-volt solution.
If you think you can't even consider the idea of going without electricity for a week, good news: backup generators are now easier to come by. So are solar panels. Meanwhile, the reliable old car battery is still as good a backup as it was when I first wrote about the 12-volt solution. Keep an eye open for special applications of backup power. The South Africans have recently begun to market a clever windup radio-and-flashlight unit that might interest you. A full rewind of its husky coil spring will give you a half-hour of radio or reading light; no plug, no batteries, just elbow grease.
If you intend to store fuel, store it outside but not in thin polyethylene containers that let fuel sweat through tiny pores. Become familiar with all your neighbors, and draw a rough map that shows each dwelling with the appropriate names and telephone numbers. Each neighbor needs a copy. In my locale during this decade, sharp-eyed neighbors have averted trouble by calling others about a fire, a prowler, dog packs, and black ice on a steep street. For those of us who live close to others, a sense of community will alleviate some of our problems. It works best if we've given our future adequate forethoughtwhich was the whole idea behind this new edition.