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This tip of the week started out as an E-mail to a friend, and was never sent. The story began after a large storm hit Seattle a month or so ago, and I lost power at my house.  It occurred to me the next day that the power outage, which doesn't occur often in Seattle, made a nice dress rehearsal for the power outage I expect come January 2000.

Also, as the owner of TheEpicenter.com, I end up being the guy who fields questions from customers.  Several folks have asked the same questions like "what can I do with the power related stuff Epicenter offers."  Specifically, "what can you use a solar panel for?" and "what's a power inverter used for?"  Other questions have included "what would you use one of those Power stations for, and how long can you run a lap top on one of those Power plant batteries?"

So, without further delay, read on. Remember that a large chunk of the text below is a narrative that was made in the first few hours of the storm. Photos were taken the next day (in daylight), and that some additional information was added later to round out the story.

So, its 03/03/99 4:32 AM, and I awoke to the sounds of an amazing wind storm.  A peculiar glow was coming from the hallway next to my bed room and I realized that the Emergency power failure lights I have installed all over the house were illuminating.  I turned to the clock radio to see the time and to catch a bit of news on the radio and realized that it was brain dead from the lack of AC power.  I grabbed one of the power fail lamps from its perch (plugged into an AC outlet) following its relentless illumination, got dressed and went in search for my BayGen freeplay radio.  After cranking the handle for a minute or two, I tuned to my favorite news station and discovered that I was one of 200,000 homes in the area without power.

My first thought was to get the generator fired up, and then my sleepy brain reminded me of the ridiculously early hour and of my slumbering, unaware neighbors. An unexpectedly early trip to the bathroom guided by a power fail lamp allowed a few minutes of thought to outline my plans for the morning.

I couldn’t help but to think of the Hurricane I went through in Hawaii in 1992 as I listened to the Seattle winds howl and the vent pipes in the bathroom whistle. It was reminiscent of the sounds the toilet in Hawaii made from the make shift shelter, bathroom home.

After some quality bathroom time, I took the power fail light with me as I assessed the tasks I wanted to accomplish and the equipment that I was going to need.  After all, there was no way I was going to be able to go back to sleep.  Might as well get some work done.  Wind storms spook me a bit after my Hurricane experience.  I decided to check my E-mail when I realized I had the Epicenter lap top with me.  I also realized that I had one of the Power Plant Lap top batteries with me (an item that Epicenter also sells), and the cables required to power the Extensa 390 from the battery.  It’s funny, but a few weeks ago I had a chance to use the Power Plant Lap top battery on a trip to Hawaii for the wedding of a friend.  My testing of the battery on that airline trip proved that the lap top would run for over 4 ½ hours on the Power Plant battery, and another hour or so on the internal lap top battery.  So here I am, sharing my thought thanks to a fully charged battery.  Am I prepared or what?

I logged on to the secure server (thank God the Un-interruptible power supply was keeping the server alive), and I downloaded the Epicenter orders. I then realized that I would need to print the orders so I could assess the work load for the upcoming day. I looked at the power requirements of the HP Laserjet 5L printer at my home and determined that I would need 240 Watts of AC power to get the orders printed.

One of the nice things about owning TheEpicenter.com is that I get to take cool new products home to check out. So I guess I’m the best prepared guy around, and if anyone has to go through a power outage I guess I’m the best choice and least impacted. Funny, but I happen to have a bunch of products here at my house that will be useful! Imagine that!

Anyway, my first idea was to use a new product (found on the power page) to power the laser printer.  It’s something like the power station one (a portable DC power source) but also has a built in 120Watt power converter, a DC outlet, and a light among other features, but the power converter size would not be sufficient to run the printer.  I decided I would need a DC power source and a 500 Watt inverter to allow enough head room to accommodate the warm up cycle of the laser printer.  So, what to do about the DC power source?  Well, my next thought was to use the Power Station one, but they are all sold out and I didn't save one for my own use!.  Then I remembered another new product I just brought home a few days ago which has a larger battery than the power station one, and would be able to power the operation for considerably more time.

After rounding up the components and hooking it all up on my kitchen floor, I hit the on switch. Presto!  A few minutes later I had all the orders printed.

It occurred to me that this little episode could be repeated for weeks on end next year what with Y2K and all.  Granted, most people don’t need to process orders at 4:30 in the morning in total darkness (except for the light of a power fail light) but it demonstrates that having the right tools available and a little resourcefulness can really make your life a bit easier.  I guess I’ll be picking up some additional items from down at the warehouse later today (assuming there is power down there) just in case.  And if needed I’ll fire up one of my generators later today.

Also later in the day (when the sun comes up) I’ll be hooking up one of the 15Watt solar cells to the laptop to recharge the battery.  That’s a project I’ve been wanting to do for some time now, the only problem is that I don’t have a battery or butane powered soldering iron to solder the connector I’ll need to the end of the wires from the solar panel.

I remembered that throughout my house there is only one phone (in the Garage) that’s not a cordless, and none of the cordless phones function if the base is without power. Several years ago I made a conscious effort to make sure that there was at least one old style phone in the house for this exact reason. Perhaps the reader of this tip should also consider keeping an old phone around.

This little outage has sparked a few new ideas for the Tip Of The Week.  In the episodes to follow, we will outline some uses for the power related products we offer.

Update:

03/03/99 6:54:40 AM

Post dialog, and a solar project:

A few days later I completed the project to power the Extensa 390 laptop from one of Epicenter’s 15 watt solar panels:

The day after I got the panel working, TheEpicenter.com's former accountant (my sister in fact) came up to work on the books for the quarterly tax returns and I provided the lap top for her to use here.  Yes, the solar panel was powering the operation much to her surprise.  It was fun to be able to show off one of those crazy Epicenter products in operation to my big sister. She has always thought I’m some mad scientist, now with a capitalist spin I guess (in her eyes).

Anyway, there were some catches on the solar powered laptop project.

In the case of this project, the power was being applied to the input of my laptop directly, and the lap top has its own internal charge controller for the internal battery and its own voltage regulator for internal circuitry.  I took a look at the rated voltage of the laptop power supply / charger and it was rated at 19.6 Volts DC, and testing of the input determined that the laptop would be happy with input voltages as low as 10 volts or so before it would switch over to internal battery. So, with the data I collected, and knowing a bit about how an engineer builds in margins into the design of power supplies, I was happy with the numbers.  Especially knowing that with a slight load on the solar panel, the output voltage would drop well below the 19.6 volt specification for the external power supply for the Extensa laptop.  The only question was what the laptop would think of the slightly high input power if it were powered off, the battery was charged, and the solar panel was plugged into the lap top initially when the load was low.

Since TheEpicenter.com had a customer that wanted to buy a modified solar panel that did this task, I chickened out (an Engineering term for knowing everything is OK, but not wanting to be responsible for blowing up someone else’s stuff), so I added one more protection element in the final design.

In the final design, I added an 18Volt , 10Watt Zener Diode to the output of the solar panel.  The zener diode serves as a crude voltage regulator to insure that the output of the panel would never exceed 18 volts (that’s below the 19.6 volt rating of the external supply for the Extensa).  Although the output of the panel is below this voltage when things are hooked up and there is a load, the zener diode sits there and burns power and insures the voltage is never over 18 volts even if the laptop is turned off and the panel is first hooked up.  It’s a cheap bit of insurance and worth my piece of mind.