Power outages can be a real drag, especially when you have a refrigerator or freezer full of perishable food and drinks. You don't want your milk, eggs and all your meats to go bad the next time you lose power.
Fortunately, you don't have to live at the mercy of the power grid if you know how to run a fridge on battery power.
That is where energy expert Jeffrey Yago can help you. Yago, a licensed engineer with more than 40 years of professional experience in the energy and emergency power field, shares his tips on preparing for the worst in his new book, "Lights On: The Non-technical Guide to Battery Power When the Grid Goes Down."
The book would make an excellent Christmas gift this year for preppers or anyone wishing to become more self-sufficient.
After all, future power outages remain a strong possibility, and they will likely last longer and cover wider areas than anything seen before. This is because the U.S. power grid is at greater risk today than ever due to crumbling infrastructure, solar storms, severe weather and the looming threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack.
In his book, Yago presents detailed instructions to help people replace their electrical grid-reliant devices with battery-powered appliances. He also discusses the many ways to keep batteries charged and ready to use, allowing Americans to be ready when the grid goes down. He writes in such a way that you do not need to be an energy expert to learn from him.
In one online do-it-yourself video, Yago demonstrates how to run a battery-powered fridge. He uses a SunDanzer unit that can be used as a refrigerator or a freezer, depending on where the thermostat is set.
"Most people in an off-grid application would like this to be a freezer," Yago advises. "They can keep ice and frozen meats in it, and I think it will be a lot more functional than a refrigerator."
Whether you want it to be a fridge or a freezer, it's not hard to hook it up to battery power. As Yago demonstrates, all it takes is a Group 31 battery and an in-line fuse, in addition to a wire terminal crimper and a wrench.
But if you want it to be a freezer, it's best to add more battery power. Yago recommends two golf cart batteries.
Of course, the fridge or freezer battery will run down after a few days, so Yago shows viewers how to recharge the battery using a trickle charger.
The charging must obviously be done while the electrical grid is still up. Yago notes the importance of using a charger that puts more power into the battery than the battery discharges, so that the battery always remains fully charged while the power grid is up.
"The nice thing about this arrangement is if the grid goes down, we still are gonna continue to operate off the battery power and we don't have to turn anything on or off," he says.
In the sequel to this do-it-yourself video, Yago demonstrates how to keep your battery charged using a solar module. He uses a 55-watt module with an old-style junction box on the back, plus a solar charge controller. He walks you through how to connect all the necessary wires.
"As long as grid power is keeping the battery charged, the battery will stay fully charged, and the solar [module] will essentially not be doing anything but just sitting there idle," Yago explains. "If the grid goes down, the solar controller, the charge controller that we installed, will sense that the battery voltage is starting to drop and will immediately start taking charge from the solar module and putting it into the battery, and under those conditions we can run indefinitely off the solar system."
That is just the tip of the iceberg. Yago goes into far more detail about how to replace other appliances with battery-powered ones in "Lights On."
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