Joekovar
Active Member
Some things I've learned in the last 44 hours.
1) Portable generators are great, but have drawbacks. Gas can be hard to come by, and running generators are tough to guard if everyone has to go somewhere even for a short period.
2) DC powered equipment is king in a power outage and it's not even close. Meaning it has a replaceable power brick, and you can provide DC via something like the Meanwell NDR-240-24 and DUPS-20.
When powering my DC wavemakers on a typical UPS with 8AH SLA batteries, I got 1 hour and 11 minutes before the UPS died.
After I took the batteries out of the UPS, and moved everything to that Meanwell combo, I got an additional 8 hours out of those batteries that the UPS could no longer run on, and all things considered I anticipate they would last 24 hours freshly charged.
3) Some UPS units can not power up from batteries, meaning you can't simply swap the batteries once they die. They require 120vac to power up and switch over to battery power. It seems to be the cheaper, single 12v battery ones that have this limitation, I didn't observe it with units that have 2x 12v batteries wired in series for 24v inside the UPS. The Meanwell DUPS-20 is a unit that won't power up off of battery alone. I ended up dedicating a UPS that can power up from battery to jumpstart anything that couldn't between battery swaps.
4) Power use difference for my wavemakers on full power, vs 20% power was negligible. My priority ended up being finding a balance between aerating the water and not splashing it everywhere.
5) My return pump used 7x as much power as all 3 wavemakers combined. It made more sense to use the wavemakers for aerating, and run the return/skimmer sparingly.
1) Portable generators are great, but have drawbacks. Gas can be hard to come by, and running generators are tough to guard if everyone has to go somewhere even for a short period.
2) DC powered equipment is king in a power outage and it's not even close. Meaning it has a replaceable power brick, and you can provide DC via something like the Meanwell NDR-240-24 and DUPS-20.
When powering my DC wavemakers on a typical UPS with 8AH SLA batteries, I got 1 hour and 11 minutes before the UPS died.
After I took the batteries out of the UPS, and moved everything to that Meanwell combo, I got an additional 8 hours out of those batteries that the UPS could no longer run on, and all things considered I anticipate they would last 24 hours freshly charged.
3) Some UPS units can not power up from batteries, meaning you can't simply swap the batteries once they die. They require 120vac to power up and switch over to battery power. It seems to be the cheaper, single 12v battery ones that have this limitation, I didn't observe it with units that have 2x 12v batteries wired in series for 24v inside the UPS. The Meanwell DUPS-20 is a unit that won't power up off of battery alone. I ended up dedicating a UPS that can power up from battery to jumpstart anything that couldn't between battery swaps.
4) Power use difference for my wavemakers on full power, vs 20% power was negligible. My priority ended up being finding a balance between aerating the water and not splashing it everywhere.
5) My return pump used 7x as much power as all 3 wavemakers combined. It made more sense to use the wavemakers for aerating, and run the return/skimmer sparingly.
