What type of battery is good for emergency power for blackouts?

....propane? Less prone to degradation, easier to store/transport (containers are 'built-in'), variable size containers, can be used 'directly' for hot water and cooking etc.

There are propane powered generators around and also propane conversion kits.

As per @davenn the actual answer depends on your consumption needs.

 

I hope you have learned from other posts on this thread that battery power alone is not a good solution for blackout conditions, mainly because you don't know how long the blackout will last. Even the largest battery bank is eventually depleted by an extended blackout condition. After depletion of their stored energy, the batteries must either be re-charged or re-placed, so they are a temporary "solution" at best and a non-solution at worst, if after years of storage they fail to deliver their "stored" energy when it is needed most. What you need during blackout conditions is a reliable source of backup power, typically provided by a gasoline, diesel, or natural gas fueled motor-generator set.

Another (more expensive) alternative is hydrogen/air based fuel cells. These are currently used by EMT first-responder teams to power up medical diagnostic and treatment equipment in the field. Later, the hydrogen fuel is replaced by high-pressure electrolytic separation of hydrogen from water at the operations base using locally generated power. The hydrogen is stored in high-pressure (about 400 psig) gas bottles for transportation to trauma sites. This is not a very efficient system, but it works well as a field-portable electrical power source that can be hand-carried when and where power is needed. It is probably not affordable by your average consumer of electricity, but there are no toxic fumes generated, so it is suitable for use in an apartment by anyone with deep pockets full of cash.

We live in Florida and it is currently (September-October 2018) hurricane season. Last year Hurricane Irma downed power lines in our neighborhood (and elsewhere) when trees fell on them. We were without utility-served power for almost a week. There are also frequent lightning storms (Florida, especially southwestern area, is the "Lightning Capital of the World") that often cause brief power outages that are typically ignored by a UPS system. However, any power outage lasting more than a few minutes will defeat most consumer UPS modules by depleting the energy stored in their small battery.

However, a properly designed UPS can protect against power-line transients and surges caused by nearby lightning strikes. Nothing will protect from a direct lightning strike to a power line, but the UPS protects against induced transients and surges from nearby strikes by first rectifying the AC power line to DC and storing the DC in a battery. Then it uses an inverter, galvanically isolated from incoming AC power, to produce AC power for external loads. It is important that there be no "switchover" to inverter power to prevent transient surges. The inverter must run continuously, whether input AC power is present or not, powering the loads attached to the UPS. When input AC power fails, the inverter simply continues to run, without so much as a hiccup, from battery power until input AC power is restored.

So, we have a gasoline-fueled motor-generator set that provides about 3500 watts of 120 VAC, 60 Hz, power when Florida Power and Light (FPL) fails to provide us with electricity. This is enough power to run a few lights, a television set, a couple of laptop computers, our Internet fiber-optic service, and maybe our refrigerator and a small chest freezer.

To my dismay and chagrin, our MG set does not produce 220 VAC which is necessary to run two submersible pumps used for our well-water system: a 1 hp pump for the well and a 1/2 hp pump for the aerator. So, just prior to the arrival of Hurricane Irma, we filled a bathtub in the guest bathroom with water and, with a small bucket, used it to flush the toilet. Later, after the storm passed, I purchased a used 1:2 ratio step-up dry transformer from eBay that I will now use to operate the water pumps. But there is no way that anything less than about 10 to 12 kW will power our 220 VAC whole-house air-conditioning system, electric water heater, and electric cooking range. As soon as I can afford it, I will be looking into buying a "whole house" dual-fuel backup motor-generator set that runs from gasoline or propane. I doubt that I will go so far as to bury a propane tank in a side yard, but the "barbecue grill" sized tanks (about 20 lbs net weight) are convenient to use and readily available everywhere.

MG sets, however fueled, must either be operated outside or, if inside, in a sealed and ventilated enclosure with separate combustion air intake and exhaust outlets . In either case, inside or outside, exhaust fumes must not be allowed to enter living areas. This is not possible if, as you stated, you live in an apartment building with no outside balcony. You must consider moving if extended power outages are unacceptable to you, and if such outages are anticipated to re-occur in your area. With the overloaded and degrading infrastructure of the North American power grid, extended outages and "brownouts" are soon to be the expected norm. I don't suppose a petition to the apartment building manager, to install a motor-generator set to service the entire building, would be an effective alternative, but it could be worth investigating... if you live in a "prepper" community environment.

 

Many people live in high rise apartment buildings that have a single elevator and no generator. They complain to TV news that they are stranded when it takes a week or more to replace the worn out elevator or there is an electricity blackout and they are in a wheelchair. People complain about flooding when their home is at the bottom of a hill or on the banks of a river.

I complain that I have reliable underground electricity, I don't live in a high rise apartment nor at the bottom of a hill nor on the bank of a river and am not in a wheelchair because I never have any of these excitements.

 

Maybe you just haven't lived long enough yet, despite your common-sense precautions to avoid excitements.

 

We live (relatively) remotely and frequently suffer power outages due to trees on the lines and having at least ONE portable generator makes life so much more 'relaxing' during those periods. Very quick and easy to set up - wire a change-over switch and external socket to further simplify the process etc.

It's rare to have an outage longer than 24 hours but the small generators we use (inverter-type) are ideal to power TV, internet, laptops and lighting in the main house (heating is via wood stove and hot water and cooking is via propane anyway) and a separate one is used to boost the freezers (which can survive 48 hours without defrosting anyway) if required.

Avoiding heavy electricity-consuming devices is key - water heaters, home heating etc - but that isn't always possible for most.

It's fun (but that's a matter of opinion!) figuring out how to SHTF-proof your home!

 

I don't know where you could find one (military surplus store?) but a guaranteed backup for low powered devices like that is an old fashioned dynamo. Basically, you turn a crank and it drives a generator to produce power.

Myself, I'm a bit lazy with my auto start up standby generator that runs on natural gas.

 

Your power requirements are approximately:

1. 2-3W
2. 2-5W
3. 1-3W
4. 1-5W
5. 50-120W

Worst case is around 140W but that assumes all items in use, all the time. Realistically you would be looking at the lower end of the range so around 60W. This is a 'piddling' amount in terms of battery storage.

A reasonable 120A/hr leisure battery has a capacity of 1440Whr so about 10 hours at your worst case scenario or 20 hours+ in a realistic situation. This would equate to two to three days use (or more, depends on how fanatical you are...)

Use your cellphone as a flashlight, music player and radio (potentially even internet access too) and you're down to ONE item that takes 5W to charge so aforementioned battery could keep it topped up for DAAAYS - weeks even.

Keep a few spare cellphone batteries as 'backup' and/or a spare cellphone entirely.

It's all 'relative' and depends on how you approach what you think is a 'problem'.

Personally, in your situation, I'd get a few (say 6-10) of those USB 10000mA battery banks (decent quality) and keep them charged and use them cyclically to keep them 'fresh'. Our local 'mart has them for £10 each - cheaper and easier to manage than a large lead-acid leisure battery and 'trade able' if the issue arose.

One wall wart charger could maintain them all and the total size could fit your jacket pocket.

 

A 20000 mAh power bank would power your cell phone for 10 days. You should be able to find a rechargeble flashlight that has a 5V charge port, so the power bank will handle that too.

I would look for other devices than can run off such a power bank.

These devices are dirt cheap compared to other types of batteries because they are a mass narket item. And the charging is done via a phone charger which ypu probably already have multiples of.

Bob

 

You can buy crank flashlights, radios and even one's that will charge your cellphone like this one


But what's in my mind is ww2 era military dynamos that you'd crank and it had a mainspring that would keep it operating about 3 minutes after you'd stop cranking.

Perhaps you could rig something similar to your bicycle to make a super dynamo?

 

It isn't possible, IMHO, to provide a backup power source that meets your other requirements for that amount of money. OTOH, your short-list of five low-power items does seem to be doable with lead-acid battery technology, specifically the AGM variety in a sealed, no-maintenance, package. Depending on whether any of your equipments can operate directly from DC power, you might not even need a DC-to-AC power inverter... just a few DC-to-DC voltage converters to supply the correct DC voltage to each device... flashlights, radio, iPod, cell phone, and laptop. You would also need a "float charger" to maintain charge on the AGM lead-acid battery when normal utility power is available prior to a blackout.

You would need to size the battery, i.e., specify an ampere-hour energy according to how much energy you would expect to use during a short-term power outage, and perhaps purchase an inverter capable of running your laptop battery charger if you can't, or don't want to, run the laptop from an AGM battery.

It is NOT easily achievable. An athlete in excellent condition can produce 100 watts of electricity by pedaling a bicycle... for a short period of time. It is exhausting exercise to produce 100 watts on a continuous basis, even with an efficient recumbent bicycle. You can check this out at a local gym that has bicycles with variable pedaling efforts and electronic readouts showing how much energy you produce while pedaling.

Of course you don't have to produce 100 watts while pedaling... ten or twenty watts might be maintainable for an hour or more, and this level of energy production would replace some of the energy depleted from your AGM battery. I think you will want to rig up a bicycle with a variable gear ratio... maybe not twelve speeds, but certainly more than one. Be sure to connect a voltmeter and an ammeter to the generator (or alternator) output and use a computer to digitize and measure these two variables. You will want the computer program to display the rate of energy production in watts, as well as the total amount of energy produced during a pedaling session.

 

A big Mac contains about 563 calories. One calorie of food energy is equal to 1.16 watt-hours. When I do the math, it tells me that if I were to get into excellent shape and pedal hard to generate 100 watts of power, then after an hour of pedaling, my big Mac meal would provide me with 563 x 1.16 watt-hours = 653 watt-hours of energy, presumably to be stored in a battery for later use. Dividing that number by 100 watts yields 6.53 hours of pedaling energy produced from one big Mac at the rate of 100 watts per hour. I suppose that's "close enuf" for about 8 hours of energy production per sandwich, but there is no way I would pedal for 6.53 hours, much less 8 hours, for a single big Mac sandwich. There would have to be a super-sized Coke and large fries included with the meal... and maybe a couple of baked apple pies too.