On Sun, 15 Sep 2019 07:12:46 -0400, 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?
They virtually ALL run on battery - ALL THE TIME. No extension cord
going up and down the stairs to get pinched or damaged