Who says the Prius can only save the planet by reducing resource consumption and emissions? Prius to the rescue!

Hobbit - CleanMPG.com - April 17, 2007

Hobbit’s Prius parked on the road near an overflowing lake.

New England has been hammered by a fairly vicious rain/wind storm over the last couple of days. In spite of that, I had been working an event all day and maybe 15 minutes after finally getting in from it and expecting a quiet evening at home catching up, I got this call from a friend. The gist was, "I've been notified that my basement is flooding and the power is out so the sump pump can't run, and I'm still on my two week vacay in ... Scotland." A tree had apparently come down across a bunch of wires up the street, and power had been out for over a day since the power company has been going *nuts* trying to fix the widespread damage from last night.

The person caretaking for the house wasn't sure what to do, and there was no prognosis on when the power was going to be restored. The owner had a "crazy idea" that if there were any charged UPSes kicking around the house that weren't running computers [and thus already long since discharged], they might be enough to power the pump for a while. "Yeah, for about ten minutes, maybe" I said, envisioning your typical sump pump with a fairly massive 120VAC motor atop a pipe and float valve assembly. Not enough to pump down the likely four or more inches of water that had already accumulated, and this house does *not* have a small footprint.

In further discussion all he could remember about the pump was a slightly odd mode of operation and the number "1800", but upon plugging "sump pump" and "1800" into google, the first hit was the Rule 1800 submersible marine/utility pump. "That's it!" he said, and a little more link-chasing revealed that this little fella only draws 100 watts when running. It doesn't have a float valve, it simply tries pumping every 2 minutes or so and if it detects that there is no water load, shuts down again. I realized that my big ol' UPS, the one that can also plug into the car's 12V system as shown could probably hold up that load. This UPS is only good for about 400 watts -- built for long runtime, not high power. It has 66 amp-hours of 12V lead-acid goodness inside, as well as being able to either be maintained off the Prius or *jump* the car if its aux battery was down. So I coordinated with the caretaking person, loaded up the UPS and a bunch of power hose, and tooled off into the gathering night.

Hobbit’s Prius powered UPS.

I backed the car up to the door and left it powered on, fired up the UPS and went inside trailing a long AC cord with a CF-lamped clip light plugged in as work light in the basement. The water level was more like six or eight inches by now especially over near where the sump hole is, and was just about to kiss the bottom of the oil burner motor on the boiler. Pulled the power cord over near the pump and plugged it in; the pump gave a little kick and started up. We went outside to check the outflow; it looked fairly anemic and didn't seem promising to get the basement emptied in a reasonable timeframe or even hold its own against any more water coming in through the natural fieldstone foundation. But said friend had a couple of larger pumps, model 2800 [which, in the meantime, we had found indicates gallons per hour capacity] sitting around down there that he hadn't adapted to the system yet. These only claim to pull 1.6 amps apiece, or about 200 watts. We fooled around with the hose fittings and couldn't quite see how to connect things, but then I realized that the right-angle output elbow comes completely off leaving a stub that only needed a few wraps of tape to fit inside the hose perfectly, totally leak proof after the clamp was tightened down. So we fed the hose out the basement window and away from the foundation, and I dropped this additional pump down into the icky, oil-slicked swill and plugged it in, fully expecting it to overload the UPS and for both pumps and my light to go off within about 20 seconds. So I waited for that.

And waited.

And waited. And it didn't happen. The UPS was holding up the whole schlemiel, and the car was in turn holding the UPS up and simply running intermittently to keep the HV level just above the usual two-pink-bars when you're sitting in Park for a long time. And this new pump was *way* better than the first one. Pretty impressive, actually, that either one of them could push a fairly hefty volume of water up against eight feet of pressure on only that much power. So now all we had to do was wait for the level to drop, if it would. There was a visible difference about 20 minutes later, and in maybe another hour and a half [punctuated by more phone calls and a food break], the water level was down to the sump well and I could go around the foundation and try to see where it was coming in and how badly. A little trickle down the wall under where the water main comes in, and a small upwelling over in another corner ... but nothing huge, and at this point we were back to only the smaller pump which could hold its own against that small continuing influx. It would run long enough to empty the sump well, detect that it was sucking air and shut off, and then come back on for another run about two minutes later.

But now the problem was how to maintain this state. It's not like I really wanted to leave my car powered up in his driveway all night. But after a little amp-hour math I realized that the UPS could probably run that pump continuously on its own internal batteries for six or seven hours, and at the 25 or 30% duty cycle it was now running at to empty the sump well and shut down again that would easily last overnight. [There's a reason this thing weighs about 100 pounds... it's full of lead and iron!] So I lugged the UPS out of the car into his kitchen and left the pump plugged into it, and headed home. Hopefully that will keep the water from rising.

The UPS is plugged into the wall, so if power comes back it will simply feed through and continue powering the pump while recharging the internal batteries.

On the way out I observed that the power guys were up the street working on the downed tree, so power might actually be back tonight. It's just started raining again, though, with another two days of this crap predicted, so this might be, uh, interesting.

Regardless, there's probably a fairly nice bottle of single-malt with my name on it now.


Hobbit

Hah! I almost did something similar some time ago when we had a long power failure. I was going to go over to my parents and use the FEH outlet and an extension cord to power the sump pump, but power came back on before that became an issue.

Fantastic....