An emergency light I didn't ralize I had

   I'm in town on the grid and we rarely have power outages.  But the
other morning when it was still dark we had a thunderstorm and the power
was out about for 45 minutes.   I was using a flashlight to get around
and it dawned on me to put a CFL in a reflector type clip on light and
plug it into the computer APC.  This provided plenty of light for the
room until the power came back on.

 

     That is a good plan as long as all of your power outages are short.  Most
of those household UPS units have pretty small batteries.  I did the same thing
a few years ago following a tropical storm; worked great for about 30 minutes.

Vaughn

 

Just plug it in an invertor ....used both CFL and sodium bulbs.

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Works like a champ.

I've been doing that for years in my mountain home where power outages
can last a week.  Since I turned it from my vacation home to my
primary residence last year, I've been formalizing the architecture.

I'm separating the branch circuits into "vital bus" and "balance of
plant", to use power plant terminology.  The vital bus supplies all
the lighting in the house, all of which are now CF equipped.  When I
built the place I put the overhead lighting and lighting-designated
outlets in each room on a separate branch from the power outlets so
separating out lighting from other stuff is a simple matter of
installing a sub-panel and moving the wires over.

Also on the vital bus is my medium-sized refrigerator and small
freezer.

Feeding the vital bus is a 2KVA computer UPS and a large collection of
deep cycle batteries.  Also connected is a Progressive Dynamics
Intellipower 80 amp smart charger.  The battery bank is large enough
to run all the vital loads for about a day.

I also have a generator.  I haven't installed it permanently, though
the wiring is permanent. Only a few outages last over a day so I rely
on simply rolling it outside and connecting the twist-lock cable and
the control cable (remote electric start.)

The vital loads are connected to the UPS at all times.  When power is
available, the loads run on utility power while the Intellipower
rapidly recharges the bank.  When power fails (or even glitches), the
UPS does a bumpless transfer to battery power.

Now that high power inverters have gotten so cheap I think I'm going
to split off the refrigerator and freezer to its own inverter that
will operate as a 100% UPS (not a standby UPS like the main unit).
That will take some load off the main one and stop the fairly severe
light dimming when the reefers start.  Plus it'll provide a little
more lightning isolation for the reefers.  My decision will hinge on
the overall efficiency figures, as power is fairly high this far back
in the mountains.

I did a similar system in my restaurant for emergency lighting and
EXIT signs.  My experience with those self-contained emergency
lighting and exit signs was not good.  The chargers are crap and dry
out the VRLA batteries in a couple of years.

I installed a computer UPS, some CF lamps strategically placed around
the restaurant and since I make neon, equipped the EXIT signs with
zig-zag white neon and 12 volt-operated high voltage inverters.  All
the wiring is in conduit or BX to keep the fire Marshall happy.

This system has worked extremely well.  The longest outage was
overnight while the utility fixed some traffic wreck damage to a
substation.  The minimal load on the UPS let it last all night.  by
then I had my refrigeration on the generator but no additional
lighting was needed.
---
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
All great things are simple and many can be expressed in single words:
Freedom, Justice, Honor, Duty, Mercy, Hope.  -Churchill

 Neon John wrote:

For the sake of my own research would you be willing to share what you
are using for UPS batteries and about how much they run in price.  I
have a commercial client who simply bypassed their emergency lighting
UPS when the batteries went bad.  I'm fairly sure that they are now in
violation of the cities fire and building codes so I'd like to offer a
proposal to remedy that situation.
--
Tom Horne