Power outage - Backup did not work

[SleepDepraved2]

I haven't been up here for a while. I've been tootling along with my CPAP for quite some time now. I've been feeling pretty good though still have occasional problems with fatigue, but mostly it's under control.

To get to the meat of the problem, I had bought the power converter for my machine and had never used it. It was still in the box. Until last night when our power went out at 9 o'clock.

At first, I thought I could just read on my tablet until they got it running...shouldn't take more than a few hours by the power company's original estimate on their website. However, once 11 o'clock rolled around and it still wasn't up, I decided that I should just go to bed. So I went and hauled out everything for my backup plan, including the power converter and the jump starter I keep in the house for such occasions (which had not yet occurred). I checked the level, and it was 57%. Still, I figured I could get a couple hours out of it. More if I disconnected the humidifier.

I put it next to my bed and hooked it up. Turned on my machine, and hooray! It worked! I had been in the middle of swapping out all my tubing, mask, etc, and washing the Pad-A-Cheek cover for my mask yesterday so had to put it all back together Of course, the Pad-a-Cheek wasn't dry yet, but I needed to sleep and figured once it was warmed up I wouldn't notice. I have two of the things but have misplaced one so couldn't use that. Got everything back together and assembled my bionic sleep accoutrements (wrist brace for that tendinitis that flares periodically, ear plugs because my husband snores (and won't treat it with CPAP because he can't tolerate)), turned on my machine, and settled down to sleep. I was just drifting off when my machine abruptly turned off. The jump starter was still on. It still had 40% of the battery. I decided just to get up and wait some more. Finally at 2 o'clock I decided to try again, this time without the humidifier. I went to disconnect it only to find that my heated tube won't connect to just the base unit, I need a plain tube which I don't have. The humidifier would have to stay. I went through my rigamarole, got settled in, and it shut off again after only 10 minutes. I laid there and tried to sleep without it, but once you are used to it, it isn't easy. They power came on at only about 4 volts so we had a brown out and I didn't want to hook it back up so laid back down and maybe dosed a little. The power finally came on at 4 o'clock, thank God.

So my question is why did the machine shut off when the jump starter had not run out of juice? Was the level of power from the jump starter fluctuating possibly? Could it have been the power converter? Obviously, I need to figure this out before the next power outage. I've had the power converter for a couple of years so I don't know if I'll be able to get a new one if it's defective.

If you use a jump starter as a battery backup, what do you recommend if I need to get another?

[SGearhart]

You are showing a S9. They operate on 24 volts DC. Does your jumpstarter have that voltage capability? . . . Most don't. Also in all likelihood, the jumpstarter has an auto shutoff feature to prevent an absentminded user from leaving it on since it wasn't designed to provide continuous power. Just a guess.

[Sleeprider]

With a starting battery, the battery is effectively dead at that voltage. You cannot use the last 40-50 percent. As shown in the chart below, once you hit 40%, the battery no longer supplies 12 volts, and in your case the inverter is pretty inefficient, but can't generate the necessary voltage to operate your machine with a source under 12 volts.

Nice plan, but it required a fully charged battery. Starting batteries are damaged by low charge states in a process called sulfation. Sulfation occurs when a lead acid battery is deprived of a full charge. This can lower the charge acceptance of a battery and cause permanent loss of capacity. Keep the battery charged to prevent this.

[Sir NoddinOff]

Not to mention, running a humidifier is generally not possible even with the best of battery backup systems since it will radically draw down the battery. If you absolutely have to run the humidifier you will need to look at portable power generators.

[SleepDepraved2]

Thanks everyone! I knew someone here would have the answer.

The battery had been fully charged but obviously it had lost charge with just sitting.

I will recharge it and resolve to check it more often to maintain the charge. I will buy the standard tubing so I can run the machine without the humidifier. I'm guessing that it shut off once the pressure got higher on my machine, which can vary. I need a pretty high pressure most of the time, anywhere from 12 to 18, which is why I have the Autoset to begin with.

I may just have to spring for the Resmed battery pack which can handle my machine, but at $300 it's a bit pricier than a jump starter, which is why I had hoped to use one of those instead.

[CapnLoki]

If you use a jump starter as a battery backup, what do you recommend if I need to get another?

Hmmm ... your story shows the problem with these devices and you finish with "need to get another"? OK, first, you've left out a couple of critical details: have you ever charged the device? At the very least it should be charged every 3 months to have a prayer of working. The fact that it seemed to have around 50% left means the battery still has life in it. And second, how you powering the CPAP - I'm guessing though the inverter (which wastes half the power). Much better is the 12-24V converter from Resmed that will allow you to run at full efficiency from a standard 12V battery.

As for the "57%" and "40%" power levels, these gadgets are horribly inaccurate, and could have been off by 30% or more! The fact that it went from 57 to 40 before you fell asleep should be a sign that it has issues.

The third big detail you left out was the model of the jump starter, or at least the battery size. The manual should say, if not, you should be able to open it and read the battery number (they almost always are built with the ability to replace the battery). The spec should be something like "20 Amp-hours"; typical sizes range from 10 to 35 Amp-hours. If its under 18, it will have trouble running even one night so you're best off giving it to the guy down the street who works on old cars. If its 18 or more, it might be worth charging it up and seeing how it does for a night. BTW, powering a humidifier requires about 30 Amp-hours (and a lot more if you use the inverter). By ditching the heated hose and using minimal humidity, you might get that down to 20 Amp-hours.

If you want to replace it with something that actually will work, even power your humidifier (barely) check out my setup:
viewtopic.php?t=102775
The battery is safe for use in the house - its the same one my father has in his mobility scooter charging in his living room.

[TangledHose]

Thanks everyone! I knew someone here would have the answer.

The battery had been fully charged but obviously it had lost charge with just sitting.

I will recharge it and resolve to check it more often to maintain the charge. I will buy the standard tubing so I can run the machine without the humidifier. I'm guessing that it shut off once the pressure got higher on my machine, which can vary. I need a pretty high pressure most of the time, anywhere from 12 to 18, which is why I have the Autoset to begin with.

I may just have to spring for the Resmed battery pack which can handle my machine, but at $300 it's a bit pricier than a jump starter, which is why I had hoped to use one of those instead.

You don't have to bother separating the humidifier and getting the standard hose. Simply leave everything as it is now and just go into settings and set your climate control to manual and then you can turn off the humidifier and turn off the heated hose. The lowest settings for humidity and temperature basically shut those functions off and still allow you to have everything hooked up as usual including your heated hose, but they won't be drawing any power from your battery set up. You may have to go into the clinical settings to switch the climate control to manual and reduce the humidity to off and temp off, but that's a lot easier than disconnecting the humidifier and hooking up a standard hose in the middle of the night during a power failure. You'll also have the advantage of the therapy air blowing across the water in the humidifier which gives you what is called "pass-over humidity" the air will still pick up some of the water molecules (evaporative) and give you more humidity than if you simply detach the humidifier.

After you are back up to household power simply set your climate control back to Auto or whatever you had it set on previously.

S9 Clinical Manual:

Climate Control
When the ClimateLine heated air tubing is connected and Climate Control is
enabled, the patient can adjust the air temperature to find the setting that is
most comfortable for them.
When set to Auto, Climate Control prevents rainout by maintaining 80%
relative humidity in the delivered air. If Climate Control is set to Off, Humidity
Level and Heated Tube temperature can be set independently.

When the temperature setting is set to Off the tube will not heat the air, nor will the humidifier heat
the water to add humidity to the air.

[archangle]

SleepDepraved2, I think your problem was just not charging the battery recently enough.

Charging my jumper batteries is on my 1st of the month todo list.

We all need to give our power outage plans a trial test every so often if we want them to be reliable. (and if we want to be able to find all the parts in the dark during a power outage.

Finally at 2 o'clock I decided to try again, this time without the humidifier. I went to disconnect it only to find that my heated tube won't connect to just the base unit, I need a plain tube which I don't have. The humidifier would have to stay.

You don't need to physically remove the humidifier, just turn the knob to the left to shut off the humidifier and heated hose. If you've got it set to control the hose and humidifier separately, you need to turn them off separately with the dial.

In a pinch, you can swap ends of the heated hose and put the end with the connector on the mask. The "mask" end of the heated hose will fit onto the blower unit. Fitting the connector end onto the mask is a bit wonky, but it worked when I tried it. It's probably a lot more likely to fall off the mask during the night.

I checked the level, and it was 57%. Still, I figured I could get a couple hours out of it.

Those kinds of gauges are usually rather inaccurate. It's really hard to figure out the remaining power of a lead acid battery with a cheap gauge. It might be useful if you started with a fully charged battery and used it up within a day or so, but for one that's been sitting for a while, the voltage on the battery is "wonky" and doesn't give you a good clue about the actual charge unless you turn it on and run for a while.

Assuming your battery is still good, and you fully charge it you may get 10 times more usage than what it showed at 57%.

With the humidifier turned off, most fully charged jumper batteries would run your CPAP one night with no problem. Do you have the model number of your jumper battery?

So my question is why did the machine shut off when the jump starter had not run out of juice? Was the level of power from the jump starter fluctuating possibly? Could it have been the power converter? Obviously, I need to figure this out before the next power outage. I've had the power converter for a couple of years so I don't know if I'll be able to get a new one if it's defective.

If you use a jump starter as a battery backup, what do you recommend if I need to get another?

Charge it back up, leave it on the charger overnight after it says 100%. Try using it to power your CPAP some night and see how long it lasts.

Is it a ResMed DC-DC converter? If so, they're designed to shut down when the voltage gets too low to avoid shortening the life of your battery by discharging it too far. If you run the battery down too low, it reduces the lifetime of the battery.

By the time the converter shuts down, there's not much run time left in the battery anyway.

Unless you need to go portable, or move it around a lot, the best solution is around $150. You get a battery box, a car battery sized battery, and the right charger and keep it near the bed so you don't have to move it when the power goes out.

The portable battery packs usually cost a lot more and have less capacity.

You can pay more for a sealed lead acid (SLA/AGM/Gel cell) battery, but the main advantage of that kind of battery is that it can't be spilled. If it's going to sit in one place, put it in a battery box, sit it somewhere you won't kick it over, and it will work fine.

Lithium batteries are lighter, but much more expensive. They also tend to fail with no warning, especially if you don't charge them regularly.

Don't forget that even under the best of conditions, you probably need to replace a rechargeable battery every 5 years or so. That makes it even more expensive to get one of the "fancy" solutions.

Here's an old post with more info:

Deep cycle battery setup for Respironics PRS1 CPAP machines and ResMed S9 machines.

Not to mention, running a humidifier is generally not possible even with the best of battery backup systems since it will radically draw down the battery. If you absolutely have to run the humidifier you will need to look at portable power generators.

You can run the machine with humidifier off of a jumper battery, but you'll get less hours of use. In my case, it lasts about 3x longer without the humidifier. I have a Diehard 1150 jumper battery/inverter, and it runs my S9 fine with the humidifier fine for a few hours. I haven't had an outage long enough to run it down yet.

I measured the nightly average AC power consumption of my S9 and PRS1 machines running at 14 cmH2O.

With Humidifier - 30 Watts AC, 3 Amps DC.
Without humdifier - 10 Watts AC, 1 Amp DC.

A jumper battery can easily handle 3 Amps for a few hours. A car battery sized battery can give you a couple of nights.

They will last around 3 times longer without the humidifier, but a battery backup system can definitely run the system with the humidifier.

BTW, there are ResMed specs on battery usage in the useful links in my signature line at the bottom of this post. (Unless ResMed has screwed up their web site and broken the links again.)

[Hose_Head]

I haven't been up here for a while. I've been tootling along with my CPAP for quite some time now. I've been feeling pretty good though still have occasional problems with fatigue, but mostly it's under control.

To get to the meat of the problem, I had bought the power converter for my machine and had never used it. It was still in the box. Until last night when our power went out at 9 o'clock.

At first, I thought I could just read on my tablet until they got it running...shouldn't take more than a few hours by the power company's original estimate on their website. However, once 11 o'clock rolled around and it still wasn't up, I decided that I should just go to bed. So I went and hauled out everything for my backup plan, including the power converter and the jump starter I keep in the house for such occasions (which had not yet occurred). I checked the level, and it was 57%. Still, I figured I could get a couple hours out of it. More if I disconnected the humidifier.

I put it next to my bed and hooked it up. Turned on my machine, and hooray! It worked! I had been in the middle of swapping out all my tubing, mask, etc, and washing the Pad-A-Cheek cover for my mask yesterday so had to put it all back together Of course, the Pad-a-Cheek wasn't dry yet, but I needed to sleep and figured once it was warmed up I wouldn't notice. I have two of the things but have misplaced one so couldn't use that. Got everything back together and assembled my bionic sleep accoutrements (wrist brace for that tendinitis that flares periodically, ear plugs because my husband snores (and won't treat it with CPAP because he can't tolerate)), turned on my machine, and settled down to sleep. I was just drifting off when my machine abruptly turned off. The jump starter was still on. It still had 40% of the battery. I decided just to get up and wait some more. Finally at 2 o'clock I decided to try again, this time without the humidifier. I went to disconnect it only to find that my heated tube won't connect to just the base unit, I need a plain tube which I don't have. The humidifier would have to stay. I went through my rigamarole, got settled in, and it shut off again after only 10 minutes. I laid there and tried to sleep without it, but once you are used to it, it isn't easy. They power came on at only about 4 volts so we had a brown out and I didn't want to hook it back up so laid back down and maybe dosed a little. The power finally came on at 4 o'clock, thank God.

So my question is why did the machine shut off when the jump starter had not run out of juice? Was the level of power from the jump starter fluctuating possibly? Could it have been the power converter? Obviously, I need to figure this out before the next power outage. I've had the power converter for a couple of years so I don't know if I'll be able to get a new one if it's defective.

If you use a jump starter as a battery backup, what do you recommend if I need to get another?

Your first mistake seems to be that you didn't test your backup system. This is a must with any new system and to be effective, the test should be repeated at least once per year. To test it, set up the system for use and use it for a night, even though the household power is still "on".

The second mistake was that you didn't maintain your backup by keeping the battery charged. A trickle charger might be an answer here (keep it plugged in, charging, all the time).

Once you get your backup operational again, don't succumb to a repeat of these two fundamental mistakes!

[archangle]

The second mistake was that you didn't maintain your backup by keeping the battery charged. A trickle charger might be an answer here (keep it plugged in, charging, all the time).

A lot of "trickle" chargers will eventually "eat" the battery if you leave them turned on all the time. Even ones that are advertised to be good for full time use, and labeled as "float" charge or "maintainer" charge.

This would be especially true for a "trickle" charger intended for car batteries but used on a jumper battery.

[squid13]

I built this system long time ago when John Fisher came up with it and it works like a charm. viewtopic.php?t=49115

[Hose_Head]

The second mistake was that you didn't maintain your backup by keeping the battery charged. A trickle charger might be an answer here (keep it plugged in, charging, all the time).

A lot of "trickle" chargers will eventually "eat" the battery if you leave them turned on all the time. Even ones that are advertised to be good for full time use, and labeled as "float" charge or "maintainer" charge.

This would be especially true for a "trickle" charger intended for car batteries but used on a jumper battery.

I'm no expert in use of trickle chargers and I defer to those with experience.

If a permanent trickle charger set-up is not optimal, then how about controlling its charging time by use of a heavy duty timer so that it's charging for just a few minutes or perhaps an hour per day? The trick then would be to determine how long that daily cycle should be!

I don't claim to have the answer here. I'm just trying to offer a crumb of a solution to the OP.

[archangle]

I'm no expert in use of trickle chargers and I defer to those with experience.

If a permanent trickle charger set-up is not optimal, then how about controlling its charging time by use of a heavy duty timer so that it's charging for just a few minutes or perhaps an hour per day? The trick then would be to determine how long that daily cycle should be!

I don't claim to have the answer here. I'm just trying to offer a crumb of a solution to the OP.

A trickle charger is "the right" solution in some sense. I've just found in my experience that a lot of the trickle chargers sold eat the batteries over time.

The daily charge solution has some problems because sometimes the chargers tend to start out at a higher charge rate for a while and it might even be worse than full time on. There are weekly timers you can plug into the wall and have it do something like run for 4 hours one day a week. I like the 4 hours a week solution, because if it's a "smart" charger and it "goes nuts," it only gets to abuse the battery for 4 hours before getting a power reset cycle.

I've had good results over many years with the Schumacher SE-1-12S charger. I have also combined this charger with a marine deep cycle battery and the weekly power timer.

[CapnLoki]

The second mistake was that you didn't maintain your backup by keeping the battery charged. A trickle charger might be an answer here (keep it plugged in, charging, all the time).

A lot of "trickle" chargers will eventually "eat" the battery if you leave them turned on all the time. Even ones that are advertised to be good for full time use, and labeled as "float" charge or "maintainer" charge.

This would be especially true for a "trickle" charger intended for car batteries but used on a jumper battery.

I'm no expert in use of trickle chargers and I defer to those with experience.

If a permanent trickle charger set-up is not optimal, then how about controlling its charging time by use of a heavy duty timer so that it's charging for just a few minutes or perhaps an hour per day? The trick then would be to determine how long that daily cycle should be!

I don't claim to have the answer here. I'm just trying to offer a crumb of a solution to the OP.

If you buy a quality trickle charger, such as the Battery Tender, there really isn't that much of a problem leaving a battery on full time. However, even Battery Tender recommends checking on the battery periodically and maybe giving it a rest. What I do is is unplug the charger every month or so for a few days and then check the charge by powering up the pump. When there's storm predicted that could create a power outage, I simply plug in the 12V supply to the pump while the charger is running and I have a UPS.

This is one of the primary issues I have with the jump starter gadgets. In practice, they combine low quality chargers and inverters with an undersized battery and are marketed as a canned solution to people who don't want to think about the details. For about the same money you can get twice the power (or more) and superior components. The only downside is a few wires.

[ElvishKnight]

When I lived on the east coast I worried a lot about power outages from rain/snow storms. Where I live in TX it's not that big of a deal. Does anyone know if insurance companies pay for cpap batteries? Maybe a doctor could write something about you needing it?