Why have an ups for your Kitchen lights?
Where we live the light goes out many times sometimes it's only for some seconds and with bad weather sometimes it's hours. A great solution is to have an ups so the leds don't get damaged and i've even added some red led lights that pulse when the mains fail.
Since the total consumption is around 100w max on an small ups battery you might get 5-10 minutes when the battery is new. This wont do it for me since the power might take longer to come back, so i added a battery bank out of various old 7Ah ups batteries that still have some capacity left but alone wont provide enough power, i've also added an old car battery i had that couldn't start the car anymore but stil had more than enough capacity for an small ups.
So with this battery bank it will extend the running time to one hour or more depending on the load, and i've added an fan to keep the insides cool because these small upses are not made to run for more than 5-10 minutes.
Material used?
Here is a list of everything i used:
- Old 420W ups from phasak
- Old 80Ah car battery
- 6 old 7Ah ups battery
- 2 Car battery terminals
- 2 4mm wires with 70cm
- 12 1.5mm wires with 20cm
- Wago connectors
- 220v DPDT relay
- 12v computer fan
- 12v red signal leds
- 12v Battery voltage display
- Allot of spacers, screws and diferent wires for everything
How?
Open up the old ups that was not working correctly even with a low load the ups would shutdown almost instantly meaning the battery was close to dead, make two holes in the back of the ups and extend the black and red wires from where the battery was connected and close the ups back up.
Now in my case i've made a whole in the front of the ups and added a filter in front of the fan, as you can see it's quite dusty on this location, i've also connected all batteries to the car battery and from the car battery to the ups.
Here you can see the controll box that shows the battery voltage and turns the warning leds on when the mains fail. This system has already saved dinners which else would have been in the dark or candle light.