On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:01:45 -0400, Jim Elbrecht
wrote:

bob haller wrote:
-snip-

A inverter is a wonderful thing, just connect to your car battery and
let engine idle. for a 100 bucks you can get a thousand watt inverter,
for lights, radio and a tv if the load isnt too heavy

I agree. Before the storm I noticed that the State[?] had chained a
generator tot he pole at a very busy intersection.

Seems to me that was a waste of a generator that could have been
better used somewhere else.

You could hide a battery, but that thing was just screaming 'steal
me!'.

A battery is a lot more reliable left unattended.
But 40 lbs of gas produces something like a hundred times as much
energy as a 40 lb battery.

you could swap out batteries faster than you can refuel a generator.
But you will do it 10 times as often

seems like a good marine battery would last longer than a tank of gas-
and would cost 1/5 of the generator. [this was a 5K or so generator.]

Nope - not even close. A 200AH battery - that's a pretty big one -
will provide 2400 watts for less than an hour. A 2500 Va generator
will run about 4 hours on a 2 1/2 gallon (imperial) (lets say 3 gallon
US) gas tank. Or about 8 hours at half load. The Hyundai 6500 we
rented for the insurance office holds 6 US gallons and will run 14
hours at 1/2 load according to the manual.. Battery vs generator is
not even CLOSE to a fair fight.

Am I all wrong here? Do traffic lights need more juice than an
inverter could supply? [granted there are 8 lights at the
intersection, but they are LED-- plus the switching equipment]

Jim
The inverter could likely run the lights for about 2 or 3 hours. A
Honda 200 inverter generator could do that on half a gallon or so of
gasoline