Battery Back up What Works and what is a waste of money

[cmn3]

Ok so short of buying a generator I want to set up some sort of battery back up to run just a power head and heat and a small air pump.. I have seen the battery powered air pumps but I want somthing that will kick in when the power goes out. we have not lost power yet but it has flashed a few time and messed up my powerheads by reversing the flow so what works??????

 

[Guerry]

here's an idea for you Reef Central Online Community - View Single Post - Mike's 300 Double-D

 

[fall0n]

I've been doing some looking around myself on this topic. That's not a bad solution. Super easy to put together. Found some APC unit's but of course they are in in/avail in US. I'm still working on this and will post up if I come across a winning solution for me.

 

[jrgilles]

I know there is a setup you can get for tunze powerheads, vortech too I'm sure, where you can just put a car battery on it, and if power goes out, it will run your powerheads off a car battery for a day or day and a half or something.

No experience with this though, so someone please correct me or add in more info

 

[DonW]

There are air pumps that will turn on when the power fails. If you want to do a diy sort of thing any ac dpdt relay will switch with a power failure.

Don

 

[cmn3]

some realy good ideas so far looks like a deep cycle batt and a charger and a switch + an inverter.. sound like work. I should have started on this a month ago

 

[wsboyette]

some realy good ideas so far looks like a deep cycle batt and a charger and a switch + an inverter.. sound like work. I should have started on this a month ago

If running a full-blown reef setup (which is not the case here), we need to bear in mind that even a high cap. DC batt will not hold up for more than 4-6 hours. For longer outages, such as those resulting from serious storm damage, a generator is needed. But for this application a DC battery & inverter is a great idea !