Whole house "battery" wiring/power...

Single point of failure. Probably not a good idea.

Cindy Hamilton

If I am not mistaken, at low (12v) voltages, there is substantial voltage loss in longer cable runs. Also, many DC devices operate on other voltages, like 9V, 6V, 19V, 20V, etc. There is also not a universal DC power outlet, unless you think of the car lighter type plug, but I've seen other outlets in airplanes, etc.

So all in all I don't think it is feasible.

That URL resized my Firefox Browser window! Not cool.

picture...

That means my camera, TV remote controls and many other items would revert to "wired", each with a wire running to a plug!!!!!!!! No way!!!!!!!!

You need lots of copper.

Now lets see - there's my torch, my mobile 'phone, my camera, the remote controls for our TV, VCR, HDD recorder, CD recorder, digibox....

Not sure I want those hard-wired to a central battery >-|

The only other battery operated devices I can think of are the smoke and CO2 alarms. Not worth the effort.

When I was thinking about this, I was going to put a bank of inexpensive (relatively) car/truck batteries in a dedicated vented area out behind my workshop and potentially move to 24VDC rather than 12 due to the losses involved in low-voltage DC appls over any kind of distance (initially testing just for the workshop, and if successful wiring the house, too).

Charging / supplemental power could be via all sorts of means, of course.

The problem is that you'll either have the inefficiency of running DC-DC convertors all over the place, or in hacking your devices to better match them to the available power (lots of stuff does the regulation on-board rather than in the wall-wart).

Personally I was thinking along the lines of doing it to power some of the lighting and things like my laptop which can be easily adapted, but it wouldn't be possible to completely switch off the AC supply at present

- but maybe one day there'll be a standard for low-voltage DC outlets and devices will be available that'll just use them.

cheers

Jules

feds should mandate a wall wort standard, the wide variety of them clogging the landfills is very wasteful. all wall wart devices could be designed to accept a standard voltage.,....... same for a cell phone charger standard to cut down on trash

One for cell phones is happening - see:

There already are, have been for decades. Originally they were cigarette lighters, but these days plenty are designed as power receptacles only.

As someone else said, there's far too much loss in 12V to pipe it all over the house, you get much higher efficiency by converting the 120 or

240V already wired at each point of use.

There's only a handful of different voltages in common use. Most stuff is 5V, 9V, or 12V, with 5 and 12 being the most common.

I save wall warts and reuse them all the time, I don't think we need a law to mandate they all be the same.

Hmm, I generally use batteries for *PORTABLE* devices. The stuff that sits in one place is all AC operated. I think your idea needs work.

His idea may need work, but I still have plenty non portable things with battery power or battery backup. Both thermostats have AA cells. My light timer and clock radio use batteries for backup. Telephone memory has 4 cells, a caller ID unit has a 9V. Some of those items have plug in adapters, some don't. I have one smoke/co detector that is battery operated, the others are had wired.

> Hmm, I generally use batteries for *PORTABLE* devices. The stuff that

The batteries in clocks and thermostats generally last years. Smoke alarms are best served by lithium cells which will last 5-10 years. For everything else, there's rechargeable cells. They have improved a great deal in recent years and I find they work well in nearly everything.

I got sick of the 9V batteries in my clocks always being dead when I needed them so I added a resistor across the isolation diode and installed a "9V" NiCD battery in each of them which is trickle charged through the resistor. It's been great, I've never had to reset a clock after a power outage since.

Most have none ;maybe an old clock radio.

Nope. None here. Both powered off the heat pumps. It doesn't take much of a battery to keep a clock going. A button cell should last the life of the clock.

See above. You bought junk.

Wired is a requirement now.

One problem whigh you might ecounter when powering devices from one DC power supply: Ground loop. If you feed everythign with one power supply, is is very asy to get noise problems to system if those parts were originally designed t work with their wall warts what provide isolated power. Then worst case would be if one equipment would have - side grounded to case and other one + connected to case...

There are whole house surge protectors that plug to main electrical panel. The DC power distribution system on the other hand could have it's own surges when things are plugged in and out...

24V distributed around and locally converted to 12V or whatever needed is a working idea. A suitable switch mode power supply circuit could do that (and provide isolation if needed). The problem here is that you need that small converter box near the outlet.. not much different from small switch mode type wall wart in size. If you plan to hide those things inside wall electrical box, then it would not be much different than having the wall warts hidden somewhere inside the wall (many same problems).

Indeed. Many things have proprietary wall warts anyway, with ferrite stubs (like my turntable/RIAA preamp compo, each came with its own 16 V wall wart;the preamp, a Cambridge Audio

540 PP moving magnet preamp, 16 V with a ferrit stub, the turntable, a Pro-ject )Debut III with a physically (and probably electrically) same 16 V wall wart, with the same male jack, but without a ferrit stub). The only place I've seen that has a dc grid, is a 300 MW steam power station, fossil fired with brown coal, but I have forgotten the details, since it's been 15 years or so. It's in Kozani, west macedonia (not the country, province of Greece). They needed it for the excitation circuits of the main alternators. While large AC trasformers have a very high efficiency (99% at full load) wall warts have a much lower, 50% IIRC. And if they're DC/DC it needs more advanced technology. Not mentioning needing probably #4 wires for the DC grid of a residence....

Remember that 9 volts will loose voltage in a short run. By the time you get it trough a wire from one end of the house to another, you might be down to 7 volts and that might not work too well.

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Look at the URL, it's for a popup window.

TDD