So after watching that stupid video (I'm not even going to link to it, in case somebody other then Lord Thanda starts to think the video is real) with the guy "powering" his TV with a AAA battery, I began to wonder what would it take to actually power my 27in TV downstairs with a AAA battery?
I've done some prelim calculations and this is what I've figured out so far:
First, My TV runs off of 120V AC power (standard for the US) and the AAA battery I've got says 1.5V DC. So there has to be a power inverter in the mix. And since there has to be a power inverter in the mix, I'm going to have to run 8 AAA batteries in series to get the 12 volts required to run the power inverter. Looking on the back of the TV, it says 119 Watts which, using Joule's Law, means that it's current is right around 1 Amp. And according to Duracell's site, the AAA alkaline battery is rated for a use of 1.25 amp-Hours.
So does that mean that I could run my 27 in TV for over an hour off of 8 AAA batteries runing through an inverter? Has anybody done anything like this? Am I missing something using the knowledge I remember from my introduction to electrical engineering class I took back in high school over 5 years ago?
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For example, you can take a motor and pump up its torque by a factor of ten. However, the power output of the motor is constant, so you have to drop the speed by the same factor of ten to do so, because you can't magically make the motor better than it is.
My instinct is that if you upped the voltage by a factor of 80, you'd drop the life by a factor of 80, and be able to run it for about a minute. Or else it would kneecap some other feature of the battery, making it unusable.
Someone more proficient in this shit can probably answer the question better.
For a transformer to produce 120V from 12V, it has to step the voltage up ten times. Not at all coincidentally, it has to step the current down ten times too. Thus to get 120V @ 1A your inverter (essentially a fancy transformer) is drawing 10A from your battery of 1.5V cells.
So that would be a total of 0.125 hours then. Or 7.5 minutes, assuming that the inverter is 100% efficient. Not the best use of a bunch of AAA's I can think of, but still a respectable amount of time under the circumstances.
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Also there is no way any AAA cell you can get at any retail store will put out 10A... you would need more than just 8 AAA's in parallel (maybe 64 in 8 sets of 8 in parallel/series, hehe).
well of course. Being in a family with a couple of electrical engineers, I'm not going to do anything without their supervision.
Side note: My dad wired a key switch onto the back of the TV to allow him to lock off the power to the tv in-case he thought we were watching too much tv. Well my brothers and I, while he was out of the house, wired up a secondary switch around his key switch to bypass it... and that was when none of us were even out of high school yet.
Man, this one time I shocked myself like a motherfucker from an old 19" CRT monitor. Luckily only went through and out one hand, rather than thru the old ticker (else I'd be posting this from beyond the grave, rather than Southampton)
Can you honestly say you're currently better off?
what you did there. I see it.