On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 06:56:14 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, September 15, 2019 at 7:12:56 AM UTC-4, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 14 Sep 2019 23:32:30 -0600, Idlehands
wrote:

On 2019-09-14 6:41 p.m., micky wrote:
The ads for Acorn Stairlifts, the thing you sit on to go upstairs,
refer to having a battery for an electric *shortage*, not electric
outage or failure.

What are they referring to and is this a way to avoid claiming it works
during an outage?

I've never heard of an electric shortage, outside of these commercials.
It sounds like some electricity is getting into the house, maybe 3, 5,
10 amps?, maybe half enough to run the chair and the battery provides
the other half (or less).

A shortage sounds less severe than an outage or failure. If it doesn't
work in an outage and you complain, will they say that it works in a
shortage but they never claimed it worked in an outage?


It's called a brownout.

https://paylesspower.com/blog/what-is-a-brownout/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)

Oh, yeah, that's what they must mean. We haven't had one of those for
decades, so I forgot.

So indeed, they're saying in effect, if there's a power failure, you
can't use this thing. It would seem to me a a big (full-size) backup
battery ought to have enough that they can get upstairs, or downstairs,
at least once or twice, even during a total power failure, like when
snow or a storm knocks down the wires.** So the user can go upstairs
and go to sleep until the power comes back on, or until morning at
least. Even if he has to manually engage some intermediate gear to get
the thing to run, just more slowly, on the battery.

When I have time, I'm going to check the competition. This one doesn't
sound very good.

**(That we *have* had, several times for a couple minutes but 3 or 4
times for a couple hours or more. Once for 3 days. At the end of 3 days
it was getting cold enough in the house so that I had just started
looking for a place to stay (since all my close friends were also
without power) when the power came back on.)

I have a letter right by my desk that Tuesday, power will be off about 6
hours, starting about 9AM. If I were dependant on one of these things,
I'd have to set the alarm to be downstairs before then, or maybe
upstairs so I could sleep some more. Who can plan that far ahead?

Do the people who need it get upstairs also need it to get downstairs?

This is beyond stupid. It seems 99% certain that no manufacturer is going
to put all the cost of a battery into a product like this for "brownouts".
Brownouts are very rare, certainly compared to the power being off.
Once you have that design, it's essentially almost the same thing to
make it so that the damn thing is actually useful, instead of the battery
and added expense being virtually useless. It would be harder to design
something that used the battery as an AC power assist, instead of using
it to just run the thing. I'll wage money you'll find that it uses
a rechargeable battery and it works during power outages.

The company is pretty dumb though, because on their website they don't
talk about the battery, beyond listing a 24V one in the tech specs.


Looking at this thread a little, if brownouts are your issue, get one
of these.

http://gfretwell.com/electrical/Henc%20Variac.jpg
It will give you what you dial in for an output from pretty much
anything you feed it.

BTW
The crude electrical work was what I could do with hand tools and a
battery drill with stuff I had in the shop after Irma.