Since I replaced the battery, my power situation seems to be stable. However, with some of the warm days, I tried running the air conditioner off of batteries (this is the 9500 BTU air conditioner) and it only runs a few hours. My watt meter's screen doesn't appear to be turning on, so I'm not sure how much it is drawing. I also tried running it on "fan only", and that seems to draw the batteries down just as well. More on this further down.
Some tidbits from Winter: I bought a heated blanket from Target. It worked wonderful... for about 3 hours. I woke up freezing. Now, these blankets have an auto-shut off for 8 hours that can be reset by turning it off and on again. That was not the issue. So I exchanged it for another blanket and that one never turned on in the first place. This was very frustrating. I returned that one for cash.
I ordered a Sunbeam heated blanket from Amazon. This works "ok". It takes about 20 minutes to heat up, but does remain heated. However, the blanket seems to only be useful if I foldit up around me (which the instructions warn me against doing). Otherwise, you don't really feel any warmth from it. I would say my sleeping bag remains more useful.
What would probably work better would be a mattress pad. These are designed to be placed under blankets and radiate warmth. I would love to have one of these setup with a remote control/timer. Say at 5:50am it turns on and starts heating up. I would get out there by 6:20 and just climb right in to heated goodness.
Finally, today marked a grand entrance into Spring for me with temperatures outside bordering around 90F. I had brought the generator back down yesterday, topped it off, and had it ready for today. It got to 84F by 11am, so I went out, started up the generator, and fired up the air conditioner. The temperature started dropping nicely and I actually got cold enough to put a blanket on. Sweet, sweet, air conditioned bliss.
Some tidbits from Winter: I bought a heated blanket from Target. It worked wonderful... for about 3 hours. I woke up freezing. Now, these blankets have an auto-shut off for 8 hours that can be reset by turning it off and on again. That was not the issue. So I exchanged it for another blanket and that one never turned on in the first place. This was very frustrating. I returned that one for cash.
I ordered a Sunbeam heated blanket from Amazon. This works "ok". It takes about 20 minutes to heat up, but does remain heated. However, the blanket seems to only be useful if I foldit up around me (which the instructions warn me against doing). Otherwise, you don't really feel any warmth from it. I would say my sleeping bag remains more useful.
What would probably work better would be a mattress pad. These are designed to be placed under blankets and radiate warmth. I would love to have one of these setup with a remote control/timer. Say at 5:50am it turns on and starts heating up. I would get out there by 6:20 and just climb right in to heated goodness.
Finally, today marked a grand entrance into Spring for me with temperatures outside bordering around 90F. I had brought the generator back down yesterday, topped it off, and had it ready for today. It got to 84F by 11am, so I went out, started up the generator, and fired up the air conditioner. The temperature started dropping nicely and I actually got cold enough to put a blanket on. Sweet, sweet, air conditioned bliss.
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