In article , Harold & Susan Vordos says...

It won't take you long to figure out how bad that idea is. What's the
wattage of a refrigerator, even a small one? Do the math and discover how
much amperage you'd have to pull from your battery to run the refrigerator.
Battery life would be very short.

The idea would be to a) run the truck at some speed above
idle, to b) supply 12 volts to a large inverter, so that
c) the refrigerator could run for a half hour, every
few hours or so. Kind of a stop-gap measure, I know.

The downside on this is, in the event of a large scale
power failure, it might be better to have the gas in the
truck instead of keeping the food cold.

The other trouble I see with generator units is, gas
powered ones have the fuel go stale. I would be planning
on eliminating that problem by using the fresh fuel in
'all those motorcycles' (wife's phrase) in the garage.

Keep the generator tank and carb empty until needed, then
simply tie into a fuel petcock on one of the bikes. I've
heard too many recent stories about generators that don't
on account of the carb being gummed up when it's needed.

The other possibility is the neighbor who inherited the
local radio station backup generator. They had a military
surplus willys go-devil motor that was mated to an Onan
generator. It's in quite rough shape and would need a
motor re-build and a maybe a generator re-wind. Plus
I would have to convince him to part with it, somehow.

But a nice 3 or 5 kW Honda unit is going for around
$2K or so right now. If I invested in the long term
strategy I might be able to have something in a shed
by the garage that would run the entire neighborhood.

But then again, do I really *want* something like that??

:^)

Jim

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