Ask the Cryptogonners: Run Freezer Off Van and 12v Inverter? [Confirmed: Yes.]
October 11th, 2015Update: Success!
I bought a NOMAD MOBILE 1500w pure sine wave inverter from waveinverter.co.nz (I have no affiliate relationship with them, I’m just a customer).
For testing, I unplugged the freezer (Westinghouse WCM5000WC) for a couple of hours and let it warm up a bit. Then I connected the inverter to our van’s battery terminals using jumper cables, plugged in the freezer (with 10 metres extension cord), started up the van and switched on the inverter.
It all worked perfectly.
The freezer ran for about 25 minutes, getting the temp down to normal, then it switched off and just reverted to its normal duty cycle. I have it set so that it ranges between -15.8C and -17.8C.
Running this freezer is a walk in the park for this inverter, which stayed cool to the touch after an hour. The fans were turning at very low RPM.
I was thinking that I’d sell this inverter in a couple of years, once we get our batteries for our solar system, but seeing the quality of this thing, I’m having other ideas…
I might build some sort of off grid shack (known as a “sleepout” in NZ) for our sons on our land and this inverter, plus a couple of cheap deep cycle batteries, solar panels and a charge controller could give them plenty of AC for lights, computers and a small fridge, chest-freezer-as-fridge or even a small fridge/freezer. Wi-Fi the network over to them… Easy! (I used gear from Ubiquiti Networks on a recent job and it’s fantastic.)
My guess is that parents don’t usually know what their young children will wind up doing later in life. If our boys find themselves in mainstream circles, suits and ties, etc. they’ll be able to tell hilarious stories about how they had an off grid sleepout in the wopwops and their freak parents.
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Update: Inefficiency of Using the Van + Inverter Method
Lots of people are pointing out that the van + inverter method is inefficient. Yep. I get it.
Here’s an email I wrote to one person that covers this topic:
Hello,
I bought a 1500 watt (3000 watt peak) pure sine wave inverter.
I get that the van is an inefficient way of going for this, but considering:
* that six days is the longest outage anyone alive around here can remember
* that most of the outages we experience, (over 90%) of them, are less than 12 hours
* that I just don’t want a piece of crap Chinese generator breaking and or leaking petrol and oil
* that I can easily re-sell that inverter once I no longer need it because lots of people around here are living in off grid shacks and house buses, etc.
* and keeping the freezer cold would only require idling the van for a couple of hours per day, max.
The inverter seems like the way to go.
Cheers,
Kevin
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Update: Lots of Responses
Thanks to everyone who responded. I have a lot of emails to go through!
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Yesterday, we were given a chest freezer!
In the past, we used to keep the meat from our homekills in a chest freezer at my mother and father in laws’ house. That freezer is now in our garage, so we will be keeping the meat over here.
Regular readers will know that we routinely experience power outages here in the Far North of New Zealand. (There was another one yesterday. Update: “The Far North district has the worst number of outages in the country.”)
The substation that serves my inlaws’ place has diesel backup, so they have much shorter outages over there because Top Energy just spins up the generators. We never worried about keeping the meat over there. Out where we are, though, we’re usually the first to lose power and the last to get it restored. The record length of a blackout at our place is six days.
Ok, it’s not an option to lose thousands of dollars worth of meat due to a blackout. The obvious way to make sure that doesn’t happen is with the use of a generator. (Or, in the event of an EMP attack/zombie apocalypse, 200 litre barrels and lots of salt. *grin*) Honda makes the best small generators, but they cost the most.
There are lots of cheap Chinese made lucky dragon generators out there that cost about 1/4 of what a Honda costs. There is also a middle-ground option that uses a Honda engine and lucky dragon everything else, but costs half as much as a Honda. That one has a system warranty of two years and coil warranty of five years. All the rest have one year, the minimum required in NZ.
The generators I’ve been looking at are in the 2kw to 2.6kw range.
I used a Kill-A-Watt type device and learned that my freezer needs 1450 watts to start the compressor. It uses about 100 watts while running. (If you don’t understand why the startup load is so high, see locked rotor current.)
I really don’t want to buy one of those bottom of the barrel generators.
Within about three years, we’ll buy a battery system for our house that will have backup functionality. So really, what I want is a bit of insurance against an extended blackout until we get our solar system batteries.
As bad as power reliability is here, most blackouts don’t last longer than 12 hours and wouldn’t have much impact on a chest freezer. Past a day, especially in summer, we’ll need a backup plan.
So:
How about a 12 volt inverter connected directly to the battery terminals of our van? (Don’t try this with the cigarette lighter plug.) There are lots of 1000 watt (2000 watt peak) units out there for under $100. They even come with the car battery clamps attached. They’re all lucky dragon, but at those prices, maybe buy a few. I mean, if they’re all tested and working ok beforehand, it would be really bad luck to smoke three of them on the big day (when only one needs to work).
I’d love to hear from someone who has actually tried this: Car/Inverter/Freezer. What I’m interested in is stories of success or failure by people who knew their fridge or freezer startup power requirement, used an appropriately sized inverter and kept the length of extension cord to a minimum.
My guess is that the fly in the ointment for this cunning plan could come down to whether or not the inverter is actually capable of peaking to 1450 watts for the fraction of a second it takes to get that compressor motor spinning.
Turkey: Blasts At Peace Rally
October 10th, 2015Update: At Least 95 Killed in Explosions in Turkey’s Capital Ankara
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Via: NPR:
Eighty-six people were killed and another 186 were injured when two bombs exploded during a peace rally in central Ankara, Turkey, the country’s Interior Minister, Selami Altinok, said during a press conference on Saturday.
One video from the scene showed demonstrators dancing and chanting when a blast goes off behind them. Pictures from the aftermath show scores of bodies strewn on city streets — many of them covered with the banners used in the protest.
Who Is Responsible for a Driverless Car Accident?
October 9th, 2015Via: BBC:
Volvo says it will accept full liability for accidents involving its driverless cars, making it “one of the first” car companies to do so.
It joins Mercedes and also tech firm Google, who have made similar claims.
Volvo says it is trying to expedite regulation in the US, where “a patchwork” of rules is holding back the industry.
Uncertainty over liability for a driverless car crash is seen as one of the biggest barriers to adoption.
Wind Now Competes with Fossil Fuels, Solar Almost Does
October 9th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in NZ. I’m long Enphase Energy (ENPH).
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Via: Fortune:
When it comes to electricity, it’s all about the cost. A new report shows how clean energy electricity is becoming mainstream.
Electricity generated by large wind farms is now cheap enough in many places around the world to compete effectively with electricity generated by coal and natural gas.
At the same time, solar panel farms aren’t quite low cost enough to be as competitive with fossil fuels as wind energy is. Still, the cost of electricity generated by solar panels has also come down significantly this year.
These are the findings of a new report from Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance research unit, which looks at the costs of electricity from various sources of energy around the world for the second half of 2015. The report focuses on the overall cost of electricity—from generation, to upfront investment, to the cost of financing—called the “levelised cost electricity,” or LCOE.
The new statistics are important because they show how, thanks to dropping technology costs and lower financing costs, clean energy is becoming mainstream. Wind farms and solar panel farms are no longer niche technologies.
As more countries and states enact market systems that put a price on carbon emissions, clean energy technologies will actually become cheaper than fossil fuel technologies. In fact, they already are in places like the U.K. and Germany, which have aggressive carbon policies.
These technology and market shifts will lead to one of the largest transformations ever for the world’s energy infrastructure.
Gene Patents Probably Dead Worldwide Following Australian Court Decision
October 9th, 2015Via: Ars Technica:
Australia’s highest court has ruled unanimously that a version of a gene that is linked to an increased risk for breast cancer cannot be patented. The case was brought by 69-year-old pensioner from Queensland, Yvonne D’Arcy, who had taken the US company Myriad Genetics to court over its patent for mutations in the BRCA1 gene that increase the probability of breast and ovarian cancer developing, as The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Although she lost twice in the lower courts, the High Court of Australia allowed her appeal, ruling that a gene was not a “patentable invention.”
The court based its reasoning (PDF) on the fact that, although an isolated gene such as BRCA1 was “a product of human action, it was the existence of the information stored in the relevant sequences that was an essential element of the invention as claimed.” Since the information stored in the DNA as a sequence of nucleotides was a product of nature, it did not require human action to bring it into existence, and therefore could not be patented.
Although that seems a sensible ruling, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry has been fighting against this self-evident logic for years.
Fukushima Thyroid Cancer Rate in Children 20 to 50 Times Normal
October 8th, 2015Via: AP:
A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate 20 to 50 times that of children elsewhere, a difference the authors contend undermines the government’s position that more cases have been discovered in the area only because of stringent monitoring.
Most of the 370,000 children in Fukushima prefecture (state) have been given ultrasound checkups since the March 2011 meltdowns at the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The most recent statistics, released in August, show that thyroid cancer is suspected or confirmed in 137 of those children, a number that rose by 25 from a year earlier. Elsewhere, the disease occurs in only about one or two of every million children per year by some estimates.
“This is more than expected and emerging faster than expected,” lead author Toshihide Tsuda told The Associated Press during a visit to Tokyo. “This is 20 times to 50 times what would be normally expected.”
Syrian Forces Begin Ground Offensive Backed by Russian Air and Sea Power
October 7th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
Russia’s Caspian Sea fleet on Wednesday launched a complex cruise missile strike against Syrian rebels from nearly 1,000 miles away, a potent exhibition of Moscow’s firepower as it backs a government offensive in Syria’s multi-faction civil war.
The bombardment was the first naval salvo of Russia’s week-old military intervention in Syria, where it has already launched more than 100 airstrikes against the Islamic State and factions of Islamist and U.S.-backed rebel forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.
The attack showcased Russia’s advanced military capabilities and closer coordination with the governments of Iran and Iraq, whose airspace the missiles traversed before striking targets in Syria held by the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda.
CITE: The $1 Billion City That Nobody Calls Home
October 7th, 2015Via: CNN:
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
The CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) project is a full-scale model of an ordinary American town. Yet it will be used as a petri dish to develop new technologies that will shape the future of the urban environment.
The $1 billion scheme, led by telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, will see 15-square-miles dedicated to ambitious experiments in fields such as transport, construction, communication and security.
CITE will include specialized zones for developing new forms of agriculture, energy, and water treatment. An underground data collection network will provide detailed, real-time feedback.
Who is Behind Al-Nusra Front (aka Al-Qaeda in Syria)?
October 7th, 2015This is a flyer that the Russians are dropping on the Syrian cities Rastan and Talbiseh.
Via: Daily Mail:
Dire warning: The leaflets (pictured) being dropped by Russian jets warn people to get out of the zone of ‘special operations’ – and one implies that terror group al-Nusra Front are backed by America and Israel
Hacking Risks to Nuclear Power Plants
October 6th, 2015haha. Somehow, I thought the control systems for nuclear power plants were air-gapped.
This article says that’s a, “Pervading myth.”
Via: Computer World:
The risk of serious cyber-attacks on nuclear power plants is growing, according to a new report by think-tank Chatham House. If you follow this type of news, then this is probably not a big shocker, but did you know there have been around 50 cyberattacks on nuclear plants?
One unnamed expert quoted in the Chatham report (pdf) claimed, “What people keep saying is ‘wait until something big happens, then we’ll take it seriously’. But the problem is that we have already had a lot of very big things happen. There have probably been about 50 actual control systems cyber incidents in the nuclear industry so far, but only two or three have been made public.” The report claimed that there is limited incident disclosure and a “need to know” mindset that further limits collaboration and information-sharing.
“In a worst-case scenario, cyberattacks could lead to a release of ionizing radiation with potentially disastrous impacts on local populations.” In fact, “something as simple as employees installing a personal device onto a nuclear facility’s internal network could open it up to attacks,” Caroline Baylon, a cybersecurity researcher at Chatham House, told Newsweek. She explained, “Let’s say the people in the plant want to install a router so they can check their emails. That might all of a sudden open up a vulnerability.”
It is also a “pervading myth” that nuclear power plants are air-gapped – not connected to the Internet – and can’t be hacked. Yet executives controlling the purse strings at some plants are in denial; a source said they consider a cyberattack just “a movie scenario, maybe in the future. They think it is just states against states, not everybody wants to hack us, and also it won’t happen here.”
