Luckily there’s a simple, easily obtained and fairly cheap item that can be adapted into a good emergency power source – a simple car battery. With a few extra components, and a handful of basic tools, you can easily convert a standard vehicle battery into a power pack that will let you get some essentials running again.
The other option is to tie your survival battery bank in with solar panels or a wind turbine. This gives you the capability of producing and storing power during an emergency. In this case, you’ll need a power charger that accepts a 12 – 24-volt DC input, rather than the 120-volt AC input a regular car battery charger uses.
With a few extra components, and a handful of basic tools, you can easily convert a standard vehicle battery into a power pack that will let you get some essentials running again. You won’t be able to power your house off it, but if you urgently need to use your tools this method will let you do that.
A power system based on a car battery is quite versatile and useful, and as long as you remember its capacity isn’t limitless it can be a real bonus in an emergency. Before you do anything involving electricity, it’s important to have the right tools.
You will need some sort of battery charger to top off your car batteries. What kind you use will depend on the power source that you want. If you are using the survival battery bank alone, without any sort of off-grid power, you can use a normal automotive battery charger, which gets its power from your home’s electrical outlets.
The output of your survival battery bank is going to be 12 volts DC. You could connect any automotive charger to this, for charging cell phones and other small electronics. But if you want to use to power small home appliances, your refrigerator or electric power tools, you’ll need to boost the voltage to 120 volts AC.