[PLUG] Marine battery safety...

[Michael C. Robinson]

Fine, but I never said that I have to sustain 200 amps.  I only
mentioned that as a if a buy a generator do I have to push 200 
amps?  I am after backing up one 20 amp circuit.  Long term, I'm
thinking about a natural gas powered 8 KW generator.  That should
run 3 twenty amp circuits handily and almost a fully loaded 15 amp
light circuit as well.

Are marine batteries safe indoors?

How much ventilation is needed?

How do I figure out the amp hours of a particular marine battery?

On Sun, 2010-11-07 at 08:20 -0800, Erik Lane wrote:
> You want to run 200 amp 120V service off of batteries? I hope you have
> deep pockets! You would need a battery room the size of a good garage
> to run that for any length of time. A large battery could be rated at
> 200 amp hours, so that would put out 200 amps for one hour. (Well, if
> you were trying to drain it that fast it wouldn't last for an hour.
> Those ratings are for a much lower drain at a time.) But that is only
> at 12 or 6 volts. So if it is at 12 volts then divide it by 10 and
> subtract off the losses for the inverter. So one battery might provide
> something like 20 amp hours of service doing 120 V AC if you have a
> very good inverter and have a bunch of batteries so the drain on each
> one wasn't too much. And these are the BIG batteries that cost mucho
> dollars. I did a quick search and found some that costed $400-600
> dollars each. I have no idea if you can get them cheaper, but you
> would need so many of them that you probably don't have room, even if
> you had the money.
> 
> You're just not going to get around that trying to provide that much
> power is not going to be cheap. You're talking about large amounts of
> power. The generator that John is talking about that provides power
> for all the basics to survive a power outage is only providing ~45
> amps at 120V, assuming it can put out that peak power continuously and
> everything is working well.
> 
> But really, if you need this kind of power and backup solutions then
> you're going to need to pay for it. You should really be talking to an
> expert in the field about what your realistic options are.
> 
> Erik