UPS Power Inverter

[mhurley]

Thanks for a great article Greg. I've been thinking about UPS for a long time and looking at the range of solutions from whole house LP gas systems and down to simple 1 battery backups.

For anyone else looking for specifics on the Tripplite system in Greg's article, I started poking around to find the specifics on them.

They are the Tripplite APS512 (612 and 1012), which associate with their continuous wattage of 120V ouput (500, 600 or 1000). And as Greg said, the length of run-time is limited only by the number of deep cycle batteries you daisy chain on there.

Some quick price shopping and I found the APS1012 for about $350...Then there's the batteries at probably $50-$75 each.

I'll be seriously looking into a system like this now.

Thanks Greg!!!

 

[arrowan54]

you can also use car audio batterys they are alot more money but they take a charge twices as fast and they hold a charge a long time i have run a red top car audio battery in my car which consum well over 2000 watts of power for 6 hours a regular deep cycle batter barly last 1/2 hour although i did pay almost 500 dollars for it but if room be a concern in building something like this then thats the way i would go one battery would be like tying 3 or 4 of the other ones toghether

 

[Greg Hiller]

Mike,

Thanks for posting that. Your info is correct.

Arrowan54,

For most people the speed of recharge is not a big deal, unless you have a lot of blackouts I suppose.

 

[robitreef]

Great article, but I must apologize first for not asking you a question pertaining to the content of your article.

Regarding the tank in your article title avatar (Reefkeeping Basics), Is that a full tank pic of the 400 gallon you mention in the picture directly below it? Where can I get more information about that tank along with some more photos?

 

[Skipper]

Hey robitreef. The photo in the column graphic for "Reefkeeping Basics" was taken many years ago at Fin & Feather. I believe the store was in Connecticut, but I'm not 100% sure. I doubt you'll be able to find much information on it.

 

[Ixthys]

Nice article.

Mike, thanks for doing some of the leg-work.

So for us complete battery-novices, it sounds like the inverter + cables + batteries is all you need, right?

How do you connect the batteries in series and then to the inverter?

Dumb it down as much as you can! I still have to remind myself the house is AC and the batteries are DC....right?!

 

[Greg Hiller]

>So for us complete battery-novices, it sounds like the inverter + cables + batteries is all you need, right?<

Correct.

>How do you connect the batteries in series and then to the inverter?<

Instructions that come with the inverter are easy to follow.

 

[Hobster]

Battery Air Stone

Battery Air Stone

Greg,

Thanks for the great article. I was not aware of the battery air stones that kicked on when the AC power went out. I have a regular battery air stone for a bait bucket. Living in Fl we have lots of power outages and I have a generator for long term but nothing for short term when I am not home.

I am off to Pet Smart (GASP!) to pick up 2 of the Penn Plax B11.
(maybe a sunken treasure chest and diver??) j/k
:thumbsup:

 

[Juck]

Great article thanks.

I'm a cheapwad,,, I already have batteries, a 300w inverter and a trickle charger. Where would I get an autosensing relay doodad? Yes, I know nothing about electronics.

 

[Ixthys]

So I bought a 12v inverter from tripp lite and the manual says that to hook up a 12v inverter, you can connect the batteries in series, but they need to add up to 12v. In other words, two 6v batteries or four 3v or twelve 1v or twentyfour 1/2v (OK, I'm making some of those up).

This, of course, defeats the whole purpose if I can't hook up a zillion 12v batteries and run my tanks for a year!

Anyway, it's friday night and I've been drinking while reading the manual....so did I just misread something??? How do I hook them up?

Thanks!

 

[witfull]

thank you,,,i know my next project~

 

[mhurley]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7355678#post7355678 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Ixthys
So I bought a 12v inverter from tripp lite and the manual says that to hook up a 12v inverter, you can connect the batteries in series, but they need to add up to 12v. In other words, two 6v batteries or four 3v or twelve 1v or twentyfour 1/2v (OK, I'm making some of those up).

That is required when hooking multiple batteries up in series. If you want multiple 12V batteries for longer run-time, you have to hook them up in parallel. The owners manual of the 512 and 1012 that I'm reading says to contact Tripplite for help with parallel set ups. The diagrams in there are only for the series circuits.

 

[Ixthys]

Mike,
Thanks for the reply.

Funny thing you mention calling TrippLite. I called them this morning and asked how to hook up batteries in parallel. They told me they couldn't tell me and that I'd have to hire a professional. I said, "a professional battery-hooker-upper?" They didn't think that was funny...

ANYWAY!... it took a while, but I managed to squeeze a small amount of info out of them. It doesn't sound like rocket science. My take, though I could be wrong, is that you basically hook "+" lead to positive lead on the batteries, same with "-", and then into the respective holes on the triplite. Does that sound correct to you? Any professional battery-hooker-uppers out there???

 

[Greg Hiller]

>I'm a cheapwad,,, I already have batteries, a 300w inverter and a trickle charger. Where would I get an autosensing relay doodad? Yes, I know nothing about electronics.<

Not sure where to get a relay, electronic store I suppose. In the Boston area we have a store called 'You Do It Electronics' where you can pick up all kinds of dodads. Years ago I built a UPS system using a design that a guy had posted on Compuserve's old Fishnet forum. It took a while to find all the parts, and was not trivial to wire. The system worked for a while, but I found that the fairly expensive relay was not very reliable, and I had to keep replacing it. I think that the unit that I describe in the article is a lot easier for most folks to assemble and use.

> My take, though I could be wrong, is that you basically hook "+" lead to positive lead on the batteries, same with "-", and then into the respective holes on the triplite. <

That's how I did it. As long as they are all 12 V batteries you can hook together as many as you like.

 

[skippyreef]

Thanks for the information!!

My main pump runs on just 65 watts of power so this would work great and is cheaper than the 6500.00 generator I just looked at

I love articles like this!!!

Greg ,

Would it be possible to get a top down shot of how you hooked these up as parallel circuits? I would want to run two deep cycle batteries together to run my pump and maybe a Tunze 6100 the total draw would be about 90watts an hour between the two of them. We typically are never out mopre than 6-10 hours unless we have a real major issue here which last happened with the black out in 2001 from New York to Michigan

 

[cgiammarco]

I've got a tripp lite UPS in my attic that i have hooked up to keep my computers running in power outages.... I have two deep cycle marine batteries hooked up to it... To hook the batteries in paralell, just connect one battery to the ups normally, then connect another battery's + terminal to the + terminal on the first battery... same with the - terminal...

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/g_knott/elect27.htm
like picture "B" on that page but the UPS is in place of the lamp

one note that i didn't see anyone post yet... you definitely want to have a fuse or circuit breaker on the battery cables as close to the battery terminal as possibe... The idea is that with thick cables, if there is a short between the + and - cables the battery can possibly explode or something like that... if you're lucky the wire will get really hot and melt the insulation... neither sounded too good to me...

I went to west marine (boating store) and picked up a circuit breaker, some thick wire, terminals that fit the wire and the battery screws, and these rubber 'caps' that fit over the positive battery terminals (so if someone drops something metal over the top of the battery it can't short out across the two posts... I put the whole mess in a plastic tub...

one other thing to keep in mind.. I got the cheapie $55 deep cycle batteries from costco, i had them on this system for a few years now. I have never popped the caps off the top of the batteries until last week, and they were very very low (the tops of the plates were exposed)... I will make it a point now to add distilled water regularly...

 

[pactrop]

Re: UPS Power Inverter

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7314940#post7314940 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by mhurley
Thanks for a great article Greg.

mhurley, do you have a link to the article?

 

[Skipper]

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-05/gh/index.php

 

[ikatobiko]

In order to get max power over the longest time you need to connect the12 V batteries in parallel. This means connect all the neg together and all the pos together then the last neg and pos go to the Triplite or the load. When batteries are connected in parallel the voltage is 12 V regardless of how many batteries you connect. However the amount of stored current (or more accuraely VA) in the batteries increases linearly with the number of batteries (at least roughly neglecting load matching, cable run lengths, and other effects).

If you connect 12 V batteries in series you will damage any load that requires 12 Volts unless the load is designed to accept a range of voltages.

 

[ostrow]

I have another question: do these batteries need to be vented? In fact, exactly what batteries are people using?