On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 12:47:44 +0000, PoP wrote:

But so what? The likelihood is that it will rarely if ever go into
deep discharge! Most power outages last only a short time (an hour
or two), which the car battery can easily hold out for.

Try telling that to the last few people to be reconnected 48hrs after
any major storm... I expect there will be a few down south on tues/wed
without power after Mondays storm (if it happens, something will but
how big?)

Power outages might only last an hour two at your location but up here
they are either a second or so as the auto recloser resets but if that
locks out then the power will be off for 5 or 6 hours. Say 1/2 an hour
for the supply company to get enough reports to indicate it is their
problem, 1 1/2 hours to get the engineers out of bed and drive in and
a couple of hours to find and fix the fault.

If your car battery is being deeply discharged by the UPS
arrangement then my guess is that there's some sort of major
disruption to the power grid connecting to your property - and you'd
be sorting that out as the critical issue

Personally I'm not going anywhere near the 11kV distribution. If my
incomer is dead I get on the phone, couple of minets job done. B-)

- not fannying around trying to find a battery that is friendly
towards being deeply discharged.

No you'd start with a battery capable of handling repeated deep
discharges. I'd like something like Mr Firth has recently outlined,
especially the wind turbine part but I'd also like to put the whole
house on it all the time thus reduce consumption from the grid or even
sell back...

--
Cheers
Dave. pam is missing e-mail