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Power outages and GENERATORS

J

JerseyWendy

hayabusa2003 said:
Wow Wendy, you must live down the block from me :) Funny thing is I haven't had any power outages all week.

What are you looking to run during these power outages? I've been thinking about getting a UPS unit to run a few tunze's, and maybe my return pump and skimmer. They have 1000+watt units available that will provide power to computer equipment for a few hours, so I would think tunze's being 8watts, my skimmer is 18watts, and my return pump is 70watts...would be a cheaper and automatic alternative to a full blown gas powered generator.
Click to expand...

No kidding, where are you? I know during our last outage on Sunday (during the Giants game, of course), our neighbor (corner house) had power, but everyone on my street and over was out. As was Petco according to Jonathan. A royal pain in the hiny.

Honestly, I want to be able to run my return pump and skimmer during prolonged outages. The Vortechs will be on their own backups, and the lights can stay off. My return sucks up 290 Watts, but I have no clue how much my skimmer uses, it's run by 2 x Sicce PSK-2500 Pumps.

Yesterday Alex "won" this: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOIBSAA:US:11&Item=380072297367
He thinks that ought to run my stuff for a while, but I have my doubts. Still want to look into generators, and I think the Honda Model sounded quite promising.
 
H

hayabusa2003

I'm in oak glenn too, near the corner of starlight and snowdrift.

That looks like a really nice UPS. The only thing I'd suggest is to test it out on a cheaper pump first, like a maxijet or mag-7. I've read some people saying they had issues with running their powerheads/pumps on certain UPS systems...something to do with the DC to AC conversion. I guess some UPS's are better at it than others (something to do with the sine wave output for A/C..too electrical for me to understand).
 
A

alex93se

Motors(aquarium pumps) generally don't work well with standard UPS. You need to find a UPS that outputs "true" or "pure" sine waves. That's the key to using a computer UPS for battery backup. The standard ones will only run the pumps for a short period of time and could damage the pump in the long haul.
 
J

JerseyWendy

hayabusa, we ARE neighbors, lol. I'm on Petal Patch Trail, like 1/2 mile from you.

We're getting that APS so that it'll hopefully give me enough time to get the future generator up and running. :)
 
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