How long can a Server Rack Battery run a Fridge?

hey guys right here I like to explore power options when the power goes out today I'm going to be testing how long a typical server rack battery like this one will run a house refrigerator if you want to have some fun come along let's get started so this is the setup I'm using I'll be using one of these server rack batteries this battery is designed to go in a server rack so you can wheel it around your garage but it's mainly designed to power your house so this is a 48 volt battery but it also comes in a 12vt battery or 24volt battery at this standard size they all contain pretty much around 5 kwatt hours of energy now these batteries are really nice if you don't want to hook a whole bunch of those little 12vt batteries to get a large battery Bank these are cost friendly to you and they are designed to last a really long time this one has a 10-year warranty so here's the inverter I'm using this is a growatt all-in-one power system meaning it's an inverter that connects to server battery here but it's also a solar charge controller but I'm going to in this breaker box I'm going to turn off the solar power so it's just running on the battery so the the battery cables come down here just connect right underneath there to two bolts and then on the AC output side I have a box here that provides power and then that also comes over here provides power to this box and this is where I'm going to be uh plugging my extension cords into to run my fridge so when the inverter is idling it's it's using 50 watts of power so if that runs for an hour it's 50 W hours of battery power consumed so my battery is 5,120 W hours divid by 50 I get2 so I should be able to idle the inverter without the fridge on there for 102 hours so just over 4 days so let's use that calculation and go calculate how much power the fridge is going to use in theory okay this is our house fridge we're going to be powering we have five kids so this thing gets used a lot if you want to see how much power you're going to use on your fridge you could use this kilowatt basically you just plug it into your outlet and then you plug your fridge into that and you run it all day long and then you can see how much Watt hours or how many watts you're using throughout all the day but I haven't used this so I don't know how much uh energy my fridge is using so doing a quick Google search I think my fridge uses about 300 watts when the condenser is running but it's not running all the time I think it's using 150 watts on average so with the 150 watts of the fridge and the 50 Watts idle time of the inverter that's 200 Watts so if I divide 5,120 divided by 200 Watts I should get 25 hours of runtime in theory but let's make it a little more interesting when the power goes out I think most people will end up using extension cords to power their critical appliances like me my house isn't set up perfectly I'm still working on it but I'm using extension cords right now I'll show you my extension cord setup that I have now I don't think I I wouldn't recommend just running long lines of extension cords to power things again this is not ideal but this is a really long run so this is a 25 ft 14 gauge extension cord this is a 50t 10 gauge extension cord this is a 25 ft 12 gauge extension cord and this is a 25 ft 12 gauge extension cord it goes through my wall behind and is powering my fridge right here when my condenser is running on my fridge is using 300 wats of power which is like 2.5 amps now here's a little image I found When shopping for extension cords that will help you decide how many what size extension cord you need if you're going to power your appliances I have got 125 ft of extension cords and I'm only using 2.5 amps so it should be well within the limits I'm not using any 16 gauge extension cords uh for this setup so it should be good but of course if you have like a loose connection on some of your extension cords might get some heat or some melting where they connect so it's better just to have one big extension cord if you have to if you need to so let's use ohms law to calculate how much power we're going to lose with this long extension cord now ohms law states V is equal to I * r or voltage the voltage drop in the long extension cord will equal current times resistance so I believe the current on my fridge is going to be 2.5 amps when the condenser is running now I just need to measure the resistance in that long extension cord let's go measure the resistance and plug it into the formula 4.5 try the other side 34 just going to say for this test4 ohms using our formula 2.5 amps time4 ohms that equals only one volt of power loss now when I have one volt of power loss and my current is 2.5 amps 1 volt * 2.5 amps is 2.5 Watts so I have 2.5 watts of power loss using my long extension cord uh not too bad actually you know I thought it'd be a lot more let's run this test and see if we can run it for 25 hours okay here I am behind the fridge I'm going to use this to measure all the power going into the fridge how much power the fridge is going to be consuming during this test okay and and at the other end of my long extension cord I'm going to plug this meter in So at the end of the test I can compare the wat hour readings from these two meters can see how much power loss is coming from this really long extension cord plug that in plug this into the inverter and then for my battery I've got the smart shun it'll measure all the power coming out of the battery to power uh this inverter and the power loss in the extension Co s so so we'll see how efficient this setup is that I have I'll turn the solar off so it's just running off the battery looks like our battery is at 100% right now so let's flip it on right now it is 5:00 in the afternoon on a Monday there it goes okay we should be powering my fridge now all right the fridge is on that's good so someone unpluged plug my extension cord so I restarted the test on Tuesday morning at 10:00 so now it's Wednesday morning at 10:00 it's been a full 24 hours Let's go see how much power I have so my fridge it's using a lot less power than I originally estimated and it looks like I have 45% battery charg so that's awesome so let me check this tomorrow morning it's been 45 just over 45 hours let's look at the battery I think it's just about done for this one batter's at 1% cool consumed a total of 99 amp hours the most power draw I've seen from this has been 142 150 watts so the fridge isn't using that much power when the condenser is on um according to what I'm seeing here discharged 5.2 KW hours let's go check our meters at the fridge and at the power cord okay let's see how much power the fridge has used during this whole time 2.97 kwatt hours 2.97 kwatt hours divided by 5.2 kwatt hours so that's .55 so the fridge is responsible for for 55% of that power consumption let's see where the other power loss is occurring let's follow this extension cord look at the power meter on the other side of the extension cord see how much power loss we're getting in that extension cord okay that meter shows the fridge consumed 2.97 kilowatt hours P the extension cord out to the RV make use solar panels here okay it looks like this one is consumed 3.02 KW hours so pretty much 5 wat hours the entire time that's nothing having the extension cord on there that's only it's only on average it's only using 0.1 Watts 0.1 watts to have that extension cord on there granted the fridge isn't using very much power at all I'm going to go ahead and turn on my solar panels I've got about this many solar panels hooked up to that battery so it's 8:00 in the morning sun's not up very high but I should have the battery fully charged at about 2: in the afternoon these are actually $50 used solar panels that I got at SanTan solar so this entire array 300 bucks I've got a link to these panels and a discount code in the description but two of these panels should be able to keep your battery charged all day you have clouds you just have to order a few more solar panels can really have indefinite cold food in your fridge just get a bunch of used solar panels shipping is kind of expensive so you probably want to get a whole pallet or you can drive to one the location in Georgia or Arizona and pick them up in person that's probably the cheapest way to do it so yeah guys we got about 46 hours of run time if you want to see another test that I did where I ran three fridges and my furnace in my house and I also showed how to set up the battery system a little bit uh I'll put a link at the end of the video um including a link to that I'm going to do another test where I use this really expensive victron inverter we'll do the same test with the fridge we'll see how much more efficient that is but thanks for watching let me know if you want me to test anything else see you

Channel: DIY Solar Fun with Ray Loveless

Views: 68,889

Keywords: How long will a server rack battery run a fridge, How long can a fridge run on a server rack battery, How long can a fridge run on a LiFePO4 battery, How long can a fridge run on a Lithium battery, How long can a fridge run on a battery, How long can a fridge run on a EG4 LL battery, How long can a fridge run on a Signature Solar EG4 LL V2 battery, How long can a fridge run on a 48v battery, How long can a fridge run on a 48 volt battery, Fridge battery, fridge battery backup

Id: HLo-Z8CVJPc

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023