Uninterruptible Power Supply running Rinnai or pellet stove?

[Garandman]

We have a small house near Mt Sunapee, NH that we will use mostly during ski season. Heat is a combination of wood stove, electric baseboards and a propane fueled Rinnai wall heater. Currently there is no whole house drain though we can shut off the water pump to minimize potential damage from frozen pipes.

According to neighbors, power outages are common. The Rinnai will be used to keep the place above freezing and needs electrical power to run the igniter and fan. But power required is only 121 watts - less than some laptops.

Anyone use a UPS to power a wall heater or pellet stove? It looks like I can get one for $500 to $1,000 that will run it for two to four days. Even if we got a whole house generator it seems wasteful to run it for a couple of days for one fan. Now with online outage maps available we'd be able to see if power was off longer than that.

This is the unit we have.

 

[oosik]

Regarding your proposed use of a UPS for running the heater. I suggest you contact APC - a mfg of UPS - and obtain their suggestions. I run an APC manufactured UPS on my computer and it will run approx. 120 minutes prior to a soft shutdown. My entire "protected" system requires 90 watts. I think you may be looking at a fairly large battery system. Its an interesting thought and probably would work with sufficient battery backup.

 

[Mendonsy]

I suspect that something like this would be a lot more practical.
Radiant Propane Heater
I use a smaller version to keep my greenhouse above freezing. No electricity required.

 

[techman]

You will need a more specialized UPS. Regular UPS's for computers are not designed to run for extended periods and may have thermal issues. Also the efficiency is not that high and you will likely need much more battery than you think. They will run down a battery in a few hours with virtually no load. Last the power out is a square wave, not a sine wave. This can cause issues with some devices. Some "controller boards" may have an issue, but that is a relatively small issue. Motors, however, do not like the harmonics associated with square wave power. Much higher losses associated with high harmonic content can cause excessive heating in some cases.

Talk to the mfgs and get their recommendations.

paul

 

[dave1949]

There are a variety of temperature monitor and notification systems like this one:

Temperature Monitoring | Temperature Alert

There are probably some that alert on loss of power.

I have no info about the UPS, but having power doesn't mean you have heat if something breaks.

 

[k0ua]

I don't believe you are going to find any UPS with a run time of 4 days for less than many many thousands of dollars. Perhaps a solar array on the roof and some batteries and and inverter would get you where you want to be. But even this would not be cheap. Of course this would assume you would have sunshine during the power outage. But 120 watts for 4 days is a LOT of power. A small gasoline generator would be a lot cheaper.

 

[k0ua]

I ran over to the APC UPC configurtor, and you will need a $1300 dollar UPS with almost $4000 of batteries to meet your specs. That is a lot of money..

 

[jaotguy]

would be cheaper to switch out the heater for an older pilot light style with no fan ....

or a large 12Volt RV unit .....

 

[charlz]

Currently there is no whole house drain though we can shut off the water pump to minimize potential damage from frozen pipes.

Just a note on that, its not just the water pipes that need to be winterized (some method to blow them out might work for you) but also your drains, toilet tanks etc.

I would think if power outages are frequent (how long they last is important) than solutions would also be abundant. I would take to the neighbors about what solutions others may already have in place.

Winterizing it each time you leave might be the best insurance.

 

[MikeInEburg]

Instead of using a UPS, you can connect several automotive or marine type 12v batteries with a charging circuit and a power converter. Much longer runtime at lower cost.