August 2021

​

Hi Reader,

This month I’m sharing a personal story about peafowl and my struggles to heat them. Read on to learn how heating peafowl relates to UPS systems.

As always, your feedback is welcome and encouraged.

Thanks again for reading.

Rob

​Rob@robdelauter.com ​

​Catch up on past newsletter.

What Do Peacocks and Batteries Have in Common

This past Memorial Day my wife convinced me to purchase peafowl eggs and hatch them. I agreed on the premise we would sell them after they hatched.

Twenty-eight days later, we had three peachicks and as of this writing, they are all healthy with no intentions of selling them. We are learning together how to raise and care for these exotic birds. One of the first things we discovered is they need supplemental heat until they are 21 weeks old.

The coop I built for our new farm animals is several hundred feet from any permanent electricity. No problem, I know something about batteries and inverters. I even have access to used batteries at a reduced cost. Everything I need to power a heater overnight.

The next step was to calculate how much battery would be required to heat our feathered friends for a night.

I’m using a battery rated for 112 amp hours at a 20-hour rate. Meaning each battery will support 5.6 amps for 20 hours, (112Ah/20h=5.6A).

The 200-watt radiant heater design for warming poultry will need 16.7 amps (200watts/12volts=16.7 amps).

Unfortunately, batteries do not discharge linearly. We can’t simply divide 112Ah by our needed 16.7A of current to get the backup time (112Ah/16.7A=6.5hours). Instead, we must use the manufacturer’s datasheet. Referring to this datasheet I learn this battery will support 16.6 amps for 6 hours. One battery will not be enough for the 10 hours my wife insists the chicks need heat.

As with a UPS system, I can increase my run time by adding batteries in parallel. Adding one battery reduces the current to 8.3 amps per battery. According to the manufacturer’s chart, we now get 12 hours of run time.

Adding more batteries will give me even more backup time. A third battery will reduce my current per battery to 5.6 amps, providing 20 hours of backup. Enough time for two nights between recharges.

There are flaws with my plan, one being how to recharge the batteries. A battery charger requires an AC electric source, and the reason I’m using batteries is there is no AC close to the coop.

But the biggest obstacle is the time needed to recharge the batteries. If batteries are not recharged in a reasonable time, several hours, they will die prematurely.

This is also true for small UPS systems with long backup times. Small UPS systems have small battery charges, increasing the time needed to recharge large battery plants.

One solution is to add an external charger. This external charger will assist the UPS battery charger, decreasing recharge time.

There is another problem with long backup times, heat. If your UPS system is supplying power to a load, that load is generating heat. Without a way to remove the heat, the loads will shut down on over-temperature and could damage the batteries.

If you need backup times over 20 minutes, I recommend talking with someone experienced in designing and implementing long battery backup times.

I imagine few people plan to raise peachicks hundreds of feet from their house. But hopefully, you can relate increasing batteries on my home inverter to increasing batteries and runtime for your UPS system.

However, if you find yourself needing heat hundreds of feet from your house, I recommend having permanent utility power available, which we are now working to do.

You can learn more about UPS System and batteries in my book, "UPS Handbook, A Layman's Guide to Uninterruptible Power Supply Systems."

​

​

​