Topic Type:
Question
wondering if someone can help or point to a basic resource on using battery power. wanting to do small food cart for off farm income (live very close to a college entertainment district). wondering if can use battery power to run just light strings, speakers (maybe) and a toaster oven. will be a cheesecrisp stand. am thinking to use a high capacity 12v battery and an inverter like used in a car and then just plug the stuff in. should that work? how to figure how long the setup could run on the battery? hope to solar recharge; i imagine that would be simple. thanks
Ok, I am not sure which part you hope will be simple, lets focus on the toaster oven because that will take the most electricity. You have to know how much power you are going to need. An average toaster oven uses 750-1100 watts. So you will need an inverter that can handle that large of a load, lets call it 1000 watts. Next is the battery, an average car battery doesn't like to be drained and recharged all the time. You need to look to a deep cycle or marine battery. A good deep cycle battery is rated for about 100 amp-hours (that means it can do 1 amp for 100 hours or 100 amps for one hour). We also know that Watts=volts x amps, so 100 amp-hours at 12 volts is going to give you 1200 watts-hours. So a good battery will only run that toaster oven for about an hour. So you need to know how many minutes to toast the cheese crisp and how many you want to sell in a day.
So what if it is also hooked to a solar panel? well the solar panel will be rated in watts, and you need something to charge the batter equal to the amount of watts you are using. This is likely going to be a big panel, or take a lot of lot of time.
Finally, I would recommend a fossil fuel. Propane, is the most efficient...find a way to make the cheese crisps with propane and just run lights (LEDs) and music with the battery and solar panel.
I hope this helps. I am not an expert, but my dad is and a bit has rubbed off on me. Jenna