I want an old prius battery

[GSRman]

hmmm most of your 12v equipment would be 12v AC? requiring transformer? from batteries anyway? a decent lead acid battery pack will provide a pretty decent runtime (depending on what you want to run) if you were to use NiMH or LIon batteries i think you would need to have different charge circuitry than the standard UPS type charging.

are you trying to run your stuff on off-peak power or something? so you run your standby stuff during peak periods on the cheaper overnight power? or is this purely for keeping your shit going when the power actually goes out?

[BMWTurbo]

I'm sure you are aware you will have to do a bunch of rewiring to get a prius battery back down to 12v?

Prius Battery voltages

*EDIT* Ahh yes mondo2000 did mention this.

[Dark Orange]

All of the 12v stuff I want to run is 12vDC. Yes, I know there are odd voltages in the prius battery packs, but I have DC->DC converters here that will do the job (a little less efficiently) if reconfiguring proves too difficult.

Yes, I can use lead acid, but I would prefer dry storage for this.

[darwinschops]

I have access to 12/24v UPS hardware, and the stuff we want to run is all 12v. And we want to run it continually, after 9pm.

No problem. Following anyway, good idea.

[mondo2000]

So only 300 cycles would suck in the op's application. Say 2 cyclones a year in only a hundred and fifty years he will need to get new batteries.

Yes I acknowledged that. These days it doesn't make sense to have a large battery bank sitting idle in a UPS. Might as well connect up some solar panels and reduce your electricity bill.

[Rdyno]

Yes, I can use lead acid, but I would prefer dry storage for this.

Imho this will cost you more.

[Dark Orange]

Yes I acknowledged that. These days it doesn't make sense to have a large battery bank sitting idle in a UPS. Might as well connect up some solar panels and reduce your electricity bill.

We can survive the cyclone season quite easily as we start consuming the frozen food and buying more canned food at that time of year. When we lose power, we use the frozen foods first, then start on the other stuff. We cook on the gas BBQ and shower using solar HW. We were without power for 3 days during Yasi and after we bought a small gell-cell battery to run the phone and ADSL router, the biggest problem was lighting at night and keeping the laptop charged. (We had to go to a friend's place who had power to do that)

A solar array will not help when the power goes out during torrential rain unless you have storage.

I was thinking that an old hybrid battery would be a cheap source of that storage. Looks like I will have to ask around some wreckers when I get back home.

[Skippy]

Would moving to an area that doesn't repeatedly get raped by cyclones be an option?

[zeusch]

if you are looking at up to 3 days or more then surely an inverter generator would be a better option than batteries

[irsa76]

http://www.re-involt.com/Prius_Battery-.html
Reman battery packs.
Don't ask about shipping. It's possible to airfreight them but it's ALOT of messing around, saw an email about Holden bringing a couple of Volt packs in a couple of weeks ago.

[piss98]

I wish your dad used one Trojan.

This was fucking tops and deserved more credit. :D:D

[darwinschops]

Would moving to an area that doesn't repeatedly get raped by cyclones be an option?

Great part of the country, wouldn't let it scare you off. 16 years we've been here, two in the late 90's, only minor damage and lucky for yasi, even managed to keep power.

Fires, earthquakes, junkies, traffic, meh, everywhere has it's slight pain.

[MexicanBatman]

http://www.re-involt.com/Prius_Battery-.html
Reman battery packs.
Don't ask about shipping. It's possible to airfreight them but it's ALOT of messing around, saw an email about Holden bringing a couple of Volt packs in a couple of weeks ago.

First time I saw the Holden volt was when it was on a pallet coming off an aircraft, 2 of them

The prius are nimh so the lithium crap does not apply, I have the email here about lithium on pax a/c not sure about cargo only a/c, but like mentioned nickel metal not lithium like the volt

[mondo2000]

We can survive the cyclone season quite easily as we start consuming the frozen food and buying more canned food at that time of year. When we lose power, we use the frozen foods first, then start on the other stuff. We cook on the gas BBQ and shower using solar HW. We were without power for 3 days during Yasi and after we bought a small gell-cell battery to run the phone and ADSL router, the biggest problem was lighting at night and keeping the laptop charged. (We had to go to a friend's place who had power to do that)

A solar array will not help when the power goes out during torrential rain unless you have storage.

What I meant was if you have a battery for emergencies, you might as well have a solar panel and use it regularly as well. With your 12/24V setup you don't need to buy an expensive inverter. Use your 12V instead of 240v everyday to reduce your electricity bill and as long as you have a decent sized battery you will have emergency power as well.

If you take this one step further and have a grid connection as well this is called distributed storage. Electricity generation feed in credits are heading towards zero. In the future utility companies will pay storage credits if you have enough capacity. It's all about making the power available when people need it, rather than total gigawatts generated. As more renewable sources come online this will be more and more important.

[Karnage]