RE>>more heating ideas                       9/30/95

On Sat, 30 Sep 1995, Tobin T. Copley wrote:

[ceramic heaters used in the garage to warm up T2 prior to takeoff]
> 
> 'Course, you need to be hooked up to 110V AC to run it, so it doesn't do 
> you much good on drives longer than a few minutes in really cold weather.

    If you had a battery devoted to the heater, how many minutes
    could you run it with an inverter? Wild guesses welcome.

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Well l l l l l  - a lot of these small electric heaters draw about 1500 watts.
 1500/12 = 125 amps.  (from watts = volts X amps).  Now, assuming you could
afford an inverter that could support this load plus the start up surge (cold
heater wiring elemets draw lots more current when cold, and then as the get
hot draw less) plus adding at least 20% for conversion efficiency losses, a
fair guess at the steady state load would be around 150 amps at 12 volts.  

People, I don't think this is gonna work .  If you started with a good deep
discharge cycle marine battery, maybe 5 minutes before you sucked the battery
inside out?  

Harvey