Deployable Emergency Backup Power

okay so backup power what i'm going to be covering today uh needs some context what i'm going to be covering today is deployable emergency backup power and planning for it in the context of a major incident not a minor two or three day power outage like we just went through but the idea is if you're going to spend money if you're going to buy equipment and make plans uh why not go a little extra and make a plan for a major incident so that's the difference between planning for two or three days without power and planning for two or three weeks maybe as many as four weeks without power and keeping in mind that in a major incident not only are you not going to have power for maybe three or four weeks but you're also not going to have cell service possibly not water possibly not gas um so it's a little bit more involved but the ideas are exactly the same whether you're planning for a an eight-hour power outage or a month-long power outage the the the ideas are basically the same but that's the context in which we'll be addressing this so um some people have been thinking about whole house solutions like hooking their entire house up to natural gas lines and or propane or a solar whole solar house solution and um that's a little bit beyond the scope of what i'm going to be covering but we can talk about that in the discussion afterwards if you'd like the most important thing to understand off right off the bat is that when you're thinking about a generator and that's the go-to machine that most of us are considering when when we need backup power if you're thinking about a generator it's important to understand that they're actually two different kinds of generator and the difference is significant the uh the standard simple old-school generator and what's called an inverter now sometimes these will be marketed under the they'll be called inverter generators sometimes they're just called inverters um but there's an important difference between a plane generator and an inverter a generator a plane simple generator produces uh 120 volts of ac current in a very raw unfiltered form now this is okay for refrigerators and large appliances washing machines whatever this raw ac current will run them just fine but it is not going to be useful for sensitive electronics or medical equipment for example the the energy the power that's coming out of a simple generator is called a modified sine wave and it's kind of uh it's kind of dirty and noisy and it's not going to play nice with your laptops and your phones and any sophisticated delicate medical equipment you might need to run now an inverter on the other hand also generates it's an engine just like a regular generator but it generates a raw alternating current as well but then it immediately converts it internally to direct current to dc and once once it's converted to dc it basically cleans up that that signal it filters it and then once it's all cleaned up it reconverts it back to alternating current so that it can poop it out the front of the generator of the inverter but what comes out of an inverter generator is what's called pure sine wave um ac and it's a significant difference and to to give you an idea what you see here in that nice smooth blue line is pure sine wave okay doesn't that look happy and gentle and smooth and easy and then you see in that red or oh my is it chartreuse it looks like it might be chartreuse anyway the red modified sine wave is all squared off right so you can see that the difference between the two kinds of energy that comes out of either a simple generator or a pure sine wave inverter is significant even though as you can see the amplitude of the two waves is exactly the same and the frequency of the two waves is exactly the same but that modified sine wave has that steep climb a flat plateau a steep drop off the the modified sine wave that comes out of a standard simple generator is uh a lot noisier and it creates what's called harmonic distortion and the upshot of that is is that it generates a lot of heat it generates way more heat than an inverter and that heat is essentially wasted energy so it's reducing your the efficiency of the current that's coming out and it also uh it's hard on equipment even on a refrigerator or even on appliances that will be perfectly happy and run just fine on a generator they're going to suffer more wear and tear if they're run off of a modified sine wave simple generator than if they're run from a pure sine wave inverter so obviously you've already figured out the way to go here is probably for most people in most instances an inverter and you can save depending on the comparison you can save up to 40 percent in the efficiency by going with an inverter over a simple generator so again if you're thinking a plan for a long-term outage that's going to make a big difference in the amount of fuel that you have to uh store and provide for an extended outage if you've got a up to a 40 percent increase in efficiency that's that's a pretty big difference so now beyond just the decision between a simple generator and an inverter generator the next thing that you have to consider is the fuel type and the storage of said fuel now the most common fuel type for uh generators and inverters is of course gasoline petroleum gasoline now with the generator simple generator they're going to usually have a larger uh fuel tank so they're they're designed to be able to run for a longer operating time but this will make them generally larger and less portable an inverter is usually going to be smaller and it'll be more portable easier to move around but it's going to have a smaller gas tank on it and it will need to be refueled more often if you go with a gas powered generator or inverter one of the things that you're going to want to also have is a siphon and you can get one of these for about twenty dollars with the bulb so that you don't have to be sucking on a on a hose and get gas in your mouth you get a twenty dollar bulb siphon so that you can take gasoline from your vehicle if you have a gas powered vehicle or from your neighbor's vehicles if you have an extended outage and you want to run your generator and you've run out of your emergency fuel you can get fuel from literally hundreds of cars in laurel canyon that have tanks filled with gasoline but you need that siphon to be able to do that and storing gasoline requires the use of a stabilizer which is very easy to do for a five gallon can of gasoline you put about two ounces of something like stable or one of those gasoline additives and that will give you they say up to two-year storage before the gas goes bad i i usually change mine out after a year what i do is i i take the year old gas and i put it in my truck and i just use it in my truck and then take the empty can and uh refill it with fresh gas add stabilizer now i've got another year before i have to worry about it so gasoline is the most common choice whether it's an inverter or a uh an old-school simple generator but there are some things to consider you're gonna have to store that gas use a stabilizer and have a siphon on hand so that you can get more another option is propane and i think i can comfortably say that you want to avoid a propane only inverter they do make them some of them are awful cute and they will run a small piece of equipment for a relatively short period of time but uh propane is not the ideal uh way to go for a couple of reasons first of all liquid propane itself as a fuel uh has a lower btu output it simply stores less potential energy per volume in liquid propane than in uh petroleum gasoline so that means that you're looking at with propane you're looking at a higher fuel cost and the necessity to store more of it um major consideration with propane as well again we're planning for a 30 day outage is that once those tanks are empty there's no way to refill them um [Music] home depot is not going to be open after you know two weeks after an earthquake so avoid the propane only um this is an example if you think about the standard propane tank that most people know that's that 20 pounder right that people have underneath their grills or you see them on trailers for for camp campers and rvs that 20 pound can of liquid propane will run a generator or an inverter for about five hours on 50 load so if you have an inverter and you're running it at fifty percent capacity a twenty pound tank will keep that generator going for five hours so if you do the math on that and you wanna have enough propane to make it 30 days you're talking about again on relatively low load you're talking about in the neighborhood of 600 pounds of propane that you're going to need to store that's a lot of propane that's a lot of a lot of tanks so avoid the propane only uh inverters unless again unless you have a very specific strange situation um but they do however make uh what are called hybrids or dual fuel uh inverters and uh these could be a good solution for certain people the most popular kind are gas propane hybrids so these are inverters that will run off of both propane and gasoline you just change the switch on the on the front of it and it will run off of either fuel so this gives you an option to have uh just a couple of those 20-pound propane tanks that you can store that if you have a short-term outage of a day two days three days like we just had then you can easily and cleanly and quickly connect one of your 20-pound tanks to that inverter get it up and running keep your refrigerator from spoiling and charge up your laptops and do all that stuff knowing that within a couple of days at most power is going to be restored and even if it isn't even if it stretches into a fourth day home depot is still open because home depot has power so you can get in your car and you can drive and you can refill your propane tanks so for a short-term solution propane inverters are not bad at all they're really easy you don't have to worry about spilling gas very clean but for short term only but then if you have this dual fuel generator and you have a longer situation you can also have petroleum gasoline stored and keep that on hand for the longer term outages so gas propane hybrid could be a solution for for some people now they do also make generators inverters that run off of natural gas and some people might have a use for a generator like that but that's only going to be as part of a more complex broader emergency power situation because if you're just buying one inverter one machine one engine to generate your emergency backup power you do not want it to depend on natural gas only okay because when we have earthquakes what's one of the most common things that happens the gas come shuts off the gas lines are damaged the gas company has to shut the gas off because maybe your gas lines are okay but somebody nearby's has a rupture and now they're shutting off gas mains so it's very very common it's expected in any kind of a major earthquake for there to be interruption of natural gas so you do not want to have your only backup power option depending on natural gas you may have a situation where you can coordinate having a a natural gas uh generator that also uh teams up with an inverter or maybe two inverters or maybe a dual fuel but a standalone natural gas generator is a bad idea if it's all you have now that you've chosen either a generator or an inverter and you've chosen the kind of fuel that you're going to have what you need to figure out is what's the capacity how much juice do you need to come out of that motor okay so what you have to consider is is that an inverter which again is going to work for most people but they max out at around 4000 watts i think you can get 4 000 or 4 500 starting watts on some machines now but they start getting pretty pricey the more the more output that you get from an inverter now simple generators old-school generators the modified sine wave generators those things can go up as high as 50 000 watts okay this is what you're seeing you see roadwork road crews with the big lights and the generators that thing it's on a trailer it's so big okay so simple generators can get really really big um probably unlikely that that many people in the canyon have an equipment use um that would require something like that in an emergency but that's that's how it breaks out uh simple generators have higher capacity inverters max out around 4000 watts um so what you have to figure out is you have to figure out how much are you going to need and unfortunately and i say unfortunately because i failed math three times in high school so i don't like math but unfortunately you have to do some math here um if you want to make sure that you're getting the right inverter for your purposes and what you have to do is figure out what you're going to need to run refrigerator deep freezer do you want to be able to run your entertainment consoles cd player television charge up laptops etc and importantly do you want to run something like a portable air conditioner or a portable space heater okay remember those two things if you have a portable space heater or a portable air conditioner that's part of your plan you can save some math but if you don't if you have to figure out what your math is there's a very simple equation you only have to know one equation and that is amps times volts equals watts okay amps times volts equals watts now it's easy because we always know what volts is volts is always going to be 120 okay and what we're trying to solve for is watts we want to know how many watts our refrigerator requires for example so we know that the volts is 120 because that's the voltage that's coming out of the generator it's the voltage that comes out of your wall so all we need to do is find out how many amps that particular appliance requires and the way to do that is to walk over to your refrigerator and open the door and look for the little plaque on the inside somewhere somewhere inside there's a little plaque that's going to tell you in the case of my refrigerator it draws three amps so for my refrigerator i have three times 120 equals 360 watts now this is a generalization you have to understand a refrigerator does not draw 360w watts from the moment you plug it in you know for hours on end most things have a surge of energy that they will draw from a generator or an inverter first for example when you first plug in a refrigerator and that compressor goes on the compressor is going to draw a surge of energy maybe as high as five or 600 watts initially depending on how old your refrigerator is so it's going to draw a surge of power initially to start up and then once the compressor is running the load that it requires is going to drop down significantly over time but to do this equation this gets you in the ballpark of having a general idea of how much power a given appliance is going to need okay now a space heater this is why if you're a space heater or a portable air conditioner is part of your plan why it saves you math a space heater or portable air conditioner draws a lot of power okay and in all likelihood whatever you have in your plan if you have a space heater in there that's going to be the thing that's going to draw the more the most power so you just need to go to that space heater find the label and read how many watts it draws the one that i have is a sealed oil space heater it draws 1600 watts okay that's a lot of power 1600 watts so once i know i have a space here with 1600 watts it really doesn't matter how many amps my refrigerator or my freezer pull uh because i have to find a generator that's going to run my space heater i have to find an inverter that's going to run my space heater so um that helps now when i mentioned earlier about a surge this is another important thing to know about capacity and generators and inverters when you're picking them out you'll see two numbers generally on most uh machines it'll say starting watts and running watts um or it'll say surge watts and running watts usually it's starting and running watts the starting watt is what it refers it's what it's referring to the capacity that it will put out for that momentary surge of of load that might be drawn from your refrigerator's compressor starting up so for a short period of time for example my generator will put out 2200 watts but its running wattage is 1800 watts right now i picked it out because i determined that the space heater was the piece of equipment that was going to draw the most power so 1600 watts was my target i wanted to have more than 1 600 watts capacity so i had some room so i got an 1800 running watts generator some people will see these things and they'll say oh it's a 2000 it's a xxx 2000 uh inverter and think that it's got 2 000 watts output it generally doesn't when when when there's a number as part of the model number that number is usually the starting watts because they're marketing and they want you to think oh it's got 2000 watts of power well that's starting watts it will give you 2000 watts for a short period of time what you need to know what are the running watts and a 2000 starting watt generator or inverter is generally going to give you 1600 running watts or in that area okay so figuring out the capacity of the generator that you're going to need can be made easier if you also make a plan for how that load is going to be distributed for example are you going to put everything on your inverter all at once are you going to need to run a refrigerator a freezer a space heater charge your laptops run a chicken coop i don't know are you going to have to run everything all at the same time probably not um so what you can do is you can figure out a plan for how you will keep your powered equipment in service that doesn't involve having to draw a maximum number of watts at all time and then that way you can figure out what's the maximum amount of load that i'm going to need to draw from my emergency generator or my emergency inverter and then you can buy one with that capacity for me i stagger the load so i say okay the power goes out right note the time find out as soon as i can what's the source of the power outage oh okay it's going to last a couple of days or if the ground has just stopped shaking i stopped shaking then i know what the cause of the power outages so i will stage my generator out on the patio get it ready to go but i don't need to hook up that refrigerator right away do i i've in fact got about four hours before my refrigerator is going to need power so what i'll do is if uh if it's the winter time and i need to warm up a room i'll move the the sealed oil heater into the guest room and i'll warm that room up so make sure i have at least one warm room and then as it comes up on three or four hours since the outage i'll take the heater off of the generator or the inverter and i'll move it into the kitchen and plug in the refrigerator i'll run the refrigerator for roughly a half an hour to top it back off again as long as the doors have not been opened with my deep freezer i don't need to worry about that for up to 24 hours as long as it's packed full all the way to the top i don't have to worry about it for 48 hours so i'm not really going to be worrying about running an extension cord down to the laundry room to get to my deep freezer for a day or two so i can stagger the load so that i know that with a 1800 running watt gasoline power generator i can handle all of the things that i'm going to need for an extended up to 30 day power outage okay now some people are going to employ multiple generators that's an option for some people i have two of them really again because of the r word redundancy i just want to have a second one in case the first one poops out in an emergency so we have two uh inverters and um and we're all set uh oh one other thing however that you want to make sure you have is you want to make sure you have sufficient cables sufficient proper gauge extension cords to get from your generator to your appliances so you're going to want to go for 14 gauge or higher which actually means a lower number so 14 or 12 gauge extension cords and make sure you have a long enough run to be able to get from wherever you have to put your generator outside to wherever you need the power to run inside okay and the last thing is that to understand that what whatever you do whether you get a generator or an inverter this is a motor it's a motor that's generating electricity it's dangerous okay the two primary hazards that come from a generator or an inverter are carbon monoxide poisoning and a fire hazard okay so you have to be very very serious and never slack off when you're operating generators even if it's two three weeks into an extended emergency you have to treat that generator or that inverter with respect because it's a dangerous piece of equipment it should never be left unattended um and you should always have a fire extinguisher nearby when you're operating a generator now there's uh there's a section in the in the lsep in the laurel canyon emergency plan that that covers this i think it's page 65 um so you can uh read up on power outages and generators in the laurel canyon emergency plan on page 65. doesn't go into detail and generators the way i just did now but it's got a lot of the safety information on there um and one last thing you're not going to believe that i have to say this but i have to say this because it actually happens if you get a generator or an inverter understand that you cannot take an extension cord and plug it into your inverter and then run that cord into your living room and plug it into the wall to feed power into your house i know i know right who would do that sadly a lot of people do that and there are people who get electrocuted and there are people who burn down their houses i've got jim moore on here who's a veteran electrician jim you've heard of this probably right you've heard of people back feeding yeah and also i want to uh clarify something you said if you're running an extension cord from a generator i would recommend at least 10 gauge not 14. because that's a that's a long way so you want to de-rate the wire because uh it will transmit heat which we can cause a fire or a failure so at least 10 gauge when you're when you're feeding a generator and maybe even higher if the rule of thumb is if you're going 50 feet 10 gauge if you're going 100 feet it was probably good to derate the wire even more but uh and as far as power goes for a 20 amp breaker you could probably run a large appliance like a refrigerator and a light or two on it but the rule of thumb is for startup capacity on a 20 amp per acre you don't want to exceed 80 percent okay so startup is fine to reach that point but when you're uh whatever you're running on your generator you don't want to exceed 80 percent of capacity that's a good rule to remember and you'll be safe yeah and and the thing to remember that's tricky is that when you're talking about gauge wire gauge a bigger thicker wire is a smaller number okay it's a little a little backwards so a 12 a 12 gauge cable is going to be thicker than a 14 gauge a 10 gauge will be thicker etc et cetera jim's an electrician he's an expert his life depends on understanding what the best way is to do it if jim says 10 go 10. well 12 gauge is certainly better than what some people do where they would just run a common extension cord from their generator to feed something and people that's going to radiate a lot of heat and heat causes electrical fires so you really don't want to do that that's a lot of transfer from point a to point b so you want wire that's going to handle that transfer and in a standard uh uh extension cord that's in your home that's not going to cut it that's that's a fire looking for a place to happen it's um it's kind of what i was talking about earlier the difference between a generator and an inverter um the the movement of electricity from point a to point b always involves a certain amount of heat loss it's unavoidable and that's why a simple generator versus an inverter creates more heat because the the the signal is not it's it's it's that modified sine wave it's got that square shape it's not as efficient it doesn't travel through the through the cable as as nicely as smoothly so it generates more heat so uh heat obviously can be dangerous if you have a an under gauged cable running over flammable material that's not a good thing and i'll say if anybody on the team any ect members have any questions or or problems putting together their emergency power plan i'd be more than happy to to help you out give me a shoot me an email or give me a call i'll help you out if you have a question that i can't answer we got jim i'll call up jim and we'll get jim to answer the the higher end electro boy questions that are beyond my uh my skills now the only other thing i want to mention before we go into a question and answer and discussion is that in addition to having you know a plan for for an inverter um it really still is a good idea to just have a lot of batteries man just you can never have too many batteries have batteries batteries batteries for everything that that runs in your house for kids toys for mom's hearing aid for your smoke detectors for your tv remote for everything just have batteries and then also have some of these battery packs these portable things that you can throw in your bag and use to recharge your phone those can come in really handy they also make these very inexpensive and very effective solar chargers that are like the size of a coffee table book right you fold it open set it on the table out on the patio plug your cell phone into it and two hours later your cell phone is recharged okay so have other options to your your inverter or your generator have other ways to go um and things that you can add to supplement and reduce the amount of load that you're going to need to be demanding from your inverter or from your generator so again just a quick review for most people an inverter is going to be the way to go for most people most situations a gasoline-powered inverter is going to be the way to go it's going to be less expensive it's going to be less fuel to store and it's going to be more efficient use of the energy for most people who just want to run a refrigerator and a light and a couple of other things like that a mid-sized 2000 starting watt 1600 running watt inverter generator is going to do the job okay it's going to provide enough to keep your food from spoiling in your refrigerator to charge up your laptops because it's an inverter it's pure sine wave ac coming out of it so it's not going to damage any of your devices that's going to be the way to go now once you start having a higher demand a higher load now you have to start doing some math you just have to start making a plan and thinking about staggering your loads but again for a basic i don't want my food to spoil i want to be able to recharge my laptop and my tablets for my kids you can get that set up with gas cans a siphon and your inverter and fill the tank up for five or six hundred dollars and that'll pay for itself probably after a couple of simple multi-day power outages that'll pay for itself in in food that you won't be replacing from your refrigerator in your freezer um all right so and oh just the one last thing again i can't believe i have to say it but but based on some things i saw that were pointed out to me uh on the facebook group never use candles no candles in a power outage okay ever never use candles the stats on this are simply undeniable and we all think that we're smart people and we won't do something stupid but the stats say otherwise the stats say in point of fact we're all mostly morons and we will do something stupid okay of house fires caused by burning candles between i forget the years but it was like a big chunk of time it was like 2012 2012 to 2016. it was at least a four year span this was from the nfpa of all of the house fires that were caused by candles seventy percent of those candle house fires occurred during power outages okay it's just a fact don't use candles especially for an extended outage the odds increase that you're going to nod off and fall asleep now a candle's burning unattended you're going to get distracted go to another room forget that you left a candle burning in the other room now a candle's burning unattended you have a dog dog comes by knocks it over has no idea what's going on next thing you know your house is on fire so now you not only have no power but now you have your house on fire no candles okay so have your generator set up have your battery backups and do not use candles but this this this has just reminded me of something karen thank you for pointing out that unusual refrigerator because it just reminded me of something that actually is really a common issue with people who are trying to power their refrigerators off of inverters and that is a lot of people have built-ins and they go out and they get a generator and they get an extension cord and they start at their generator and they run the extension cord into their kitchen and they realize they don't have access to the plug for the refrigerator it's a built-in it's behind it now they need two two 240-pound guys and a furniture dolly to move that refrigerator out of the built-in so that they can access the refrigerator's power cable at the back so you have to might have to arrange you might have to move you can't move it it's built into the wall right but do you have access to the plug that it is i'll have to check when i can climb up it it might be above above it but i don't know sometimes sometimes it'll be hardwired see this is the thing you have i'm betting it's hardwired yeah yeah i would i would bet that it's hardware i get one of those things that are called i think it's called a jedi or jetty and it's a keeps your food fresh in your car for like four days well i mean there are lots of things that you can do karen but but again as like i said at the beginning the context of what i'm presenting and recommending today is preparing for the big one okay if we if you're prepared for a three or four week power outage then you're going to be prepared for a three or four day power outage is the idea and if you're going to spend the money and put the effort in you might as well get prepared for that big major incident and and then all the other preparation you know will will fall into place so but what you might want to do and what anybody who's considering running a refrigerator off of a off of a deployable emergency inverter is make sure you have access to the refrigerator plug right i mean it's believe me i had to actually when i set mine up i had to actually move my refrigerator within the built-in and then i had to get the the refrigerator's cable and connect it to a special appliance extension cord so that i could basically pull it along the side of the refrigerator so i could reach in to the little spot between the the built-in wall and the refrigerator wall and grab the extension cord pull it out unplug it and plug it into the extension cord from the generator from the inverter okay so it's a very common thing a lot of people you know have the built-ins or even don't have built-ins they just don't have an easy way maybe the refrigerator is right next to the stove is right next to a cabinet whatever you have to make sure that you have access to the plug if you want to plug it in al did you say that somebody had a question about solar generators i think somebody did somebody have a solar generator issue i had a question about the solar generators but um if that you know just because yeah no that's that's that that's actually a good thing because a lot of people um get uh seduced by these uh these really cute uh really nice well-made uh what they call solar generators and the thing about these things is that they're not actually generators they're they're a big angry battery inside a cute little box with all sorts of connections and they're very well made and they can be very very helpful and very useful in some circumstances but what you have to understand is is that if you go with one of these things whether they call it a solar generator or a power bank uh whatever they call it they're made by companies like jackery and blue eddy and um uh rinology uh or renergy anyway a lot of companies are making them there's a lot of competition for this uh for this mar in this market now you have to keep in mind is it basically it's just a battery okay so what you're buying is a big battery that has a large capacity and you're going to be powering everything from a big battery that's then going to have to be recharged okay so let's say just for a common example let's say you have uh one of these all-in-ones right and let's say you have a refrigerator okay let's make this very very simple let's say i have a refrigerator and i figured out that a refrigerator if i do it on a staggered plan is going to consume about 500 watt hours per day okay and i'm going to get one of these solar generator all-in-ones that is based around a 100 amp hour battery at 12 volts okay so that means that that all-in-one solar generator is going to provide me with again amps times volts equals watts that's going to provide me with 100 amp hours at 12 volts is going to give me 1200 watt hours and what that means is is that that solar generator will give me an output of 1200 watts for one hour or it will give me an output of one watt for 1200 hours okay and all the combinations in between so when you're talking about watt hours that's what that means uh when you have a bulb you say you have a 40 watt bulb what that means is that that light bulb draws 40 watts per hour okay so now if we do the math if we have a 500 watt hour per day refrigerator and we have a capacity in our solar power pack of 1200 watt hours we can run that for probably two days or thereabouts before the battery is going to need to be recharged but at some point after probably a day or two probably much less that battery and that solar generator is going to have to be recharged now it's called the solar generator right so you think oh great as long as it's sunny i can just plug it in okay here comes more math you have to know how much solar input you're going to need to put into that battery to recharge it and the easiest way to do that is to think okay well i have a 1200 watt hour capacity battery the average amount of sun that is usable again average but the average amount of sun that's usable in a given day is five hours if i divide 1200 watt hours by 5 hours that means i need solar panel output of 240 watts okay that means i need three 100 watt panels in series or i need two 160 watt panels in series to have more than the capacity that i need because again remember what jim said whenever electricity is passing through wire there's loss there's heat loss okay that applies to any time electricity is passing through a wire you're losing some of the juice when it passes through a wire so now i have to have a solar array of 300 watt output and i have to count on the fact that i'm going to get five hours or more of good sun per day in order to keep that solar generator powered up and running for more than a couple of days okay so you've probably you're probably a step ahead of me here yeah thank you james so you're probably a step ahead of me here but what that means is is that even if you have a solar power bank solar generator whatever it's been called you're going to need a gas generator to charge it up at the end of the day you're still going to need that gasoline generator because after two three maybe four days if you're lucky even if there's sun that solar power generator is going to be out of juice and you're not going to be able to plug it into the wall to charge it up because your power's out so you're going to need a gas generator a gas inverter in order to charge up your sexy cute and boy they are cute they are cute sexy little devices these things you know blue eddie man you've seen the blue eddies blue eddie makes these really really hot looking things they're kind of retro they're kind of future they're kind of they're really really you know pretty things and they look like they'd be fun to own and they are and they might do great they might actually work into your plan you might say let me have one of those for the for the short term outage right like we had just the other day man let me have one of those blue eddies i can pull it out of the closet i can plug my refrigerator into it i'm done two days later i don't even have to deploy solar panels two three days later when the power comes back on i just plug it into the wall and recharge the battery it's just a battery that's the thing you gotta keep in mind it's just a battery these solar chargers are just a big old angry battery so it's going to need to be recharged somehow some way you

Channel: LC ECT Laurel Canyon Emergency Communications Team

Views: 238

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Id: iY7rI8K4Sk8

Length: 43min 36sec (2616 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021