I’m working on a lighting system for my Burning Man costume and I needed to estimate how many batteries I needed to bring. So, after some research I think I figured it out. If I’ve missed anything please let me know!
Load: 5 inverters driving 10 12″ CCFL tubes @ 12v 5mA per inverter
- Convert the load into watts: 12v * 0.005A = 0.06W per inverter
- Divide the watts by 10 for a 12v cirucit: 0.006W / 10 = 0.006A DC
- Multiply the Amps by the number of hours: 0.006A DC * 8 hours = 0.048AH
- Multiply the Amp/Hours by the number of inverters: 0.048 * 5 = 0.24AH
- Divide the number of Amps in the 12v battery by the number of Amp/Hours: 23A / 0.24AH = 95 hours.
According to this It looks like I’ll be able to run my costume off a single 12v camera battery for the entire week. This estimation doesn’t take into account the discharge rate affecting the percentage of the 23A that I’ll actually be able to squeeze out of this battery, but all the charts I saw indicated a near 100% amp availability if the battery was being discharged over at least 20 hours. 95 hours is significantly over the 20 hour mark, but I have no data on how a long discharge time affects amps.
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