I had posted back earlier this year after a camping trip to Daytona for the 500 about the interesting first experience with a cpap in a tent and a big long extension cord.
I have just completed a 58 day 15,200 + mile trip around North America. the gist is from Florida all the way up the east coast including Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Then crossing into Canada and doing the Trans-Canadian highway from Halifax NS over to Victoria BC then down the West Coast to Mexico. Then back across the south to home in Florida.
Great trip Lighthouses, Lobsters, Salmon & Grizzly Bears, Rugged scenic west coast scenic beauty, and of course the SW and the Mississippi Delta are just always a favorite.
Ok now that you have an idea of where I was this is what matters here to us as a CPAP users forum, how did I stay plugged in at night????
After much research and terror at the thought of being out on the road and camping without my CPAP I finally made a decision and invested about $350 to get set up so that I would be able to sleep well. If you know you have sleep apnea then every time you wake up it's worse, it is just horrible to know why you just awoke and what it will mean by 3 pm the next day.
I did call the great folks at CPAP.com first and they said hey our batteries honestly aren't really going to cut it for your Resmed S9, you might as well go get a Deep Cycle Marine Battery (25 pounds) for a lot less and that will work.
I did call ResMed and the techs go over Watt hours and Amps and stuff that you just can't figure out and after they tell you, well you still have no clue what it means.
They recommended a place online called Battery Power Solutions, they don't sell direct they just have a bunch of places they sell to that you can order from online.
The batteries were all on order from China and no one had one to sell me 2 weeks prior to my departure date?!
Here was the solution a 266 watt Hour Owell cpap battery (4 pounds) from BestCPAPprice.com 888-346-CPAP they were cool and explained they had worked a long time with the former husband wife of Battery power solutions and they were tired of waiting for them to get it together all the time so they just went and figured out the company in China where they were getting the Lithium Ion CPAP batteries and ordered direct from them Owell battery in China even the web sites English is a little broken.
So anyway they have the same battery about $100 - $150 cheaper than the other vendors that I had been ready to buy from first.
Didn't take long and the battery was at my door.
A day earlier the Amazon.com company that I ordered my 225 Watt inverter from had delivered no problem.
The skiny there is that ResMed god bless them has the great S9 looks like a clock radio not a big clunk of medical equipment next to my bed. But they haven't come out with a way to go from battery to machine. So you have to have a 110 v outlet in your tent or home to plug the S9 into.
A battery inverter takes the 12 volt battery amps it up to a 110 v and you can plug right into it just like at home, even if you are in a tent or sleeping as I found was necessary more than once in my car -a 2005 VolksWagen TDi Beetle !
Ok so it works great you can plug the inverter into the car cigarette lighter (does anyone still use that for that?) and then do a 110v recharge in about 4-5 hours of the battery.
Then at night you just switch it so the 12 v cigarette charger adapter goes into the battery and the ResMed S9 plugs right into the 225w Inverter just like your homes outlets.
The inverter takes away about half battery life as it ramps up the 12v to 110v so the run time was just almost 6 hours every night.
And you will wake up when you cpap stops and the battery warning beeper goes off !!!
Was it perfect no, but was it enough to get me the deep sleep I needed to drive and drive and drive, YES. Touchdown.
Maybe ResMed will release the promised cord that connects it to a 12 v by next summer and all will be well for 8+ hours a night.
Hard to follow but a picture is worth a thousand words so I will attach the pictures.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us This is the system ready to go on my front seat.
The battery.
The Inverter.Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Now the laughable parts.
Two nights out of 58 I was sleeping in my car in a well lit parking lot seat back very tinted windows sound asleep thanks to my CPAP.
Nothing like waking up to a loud 3 raps on my driver side window and the words " Hello this is the Police !!!"
The first fellow a Canadian didn't say anything about the CPAP as it was off and under a blanket by the time I was sitting up and had my window down.
He ran my license realized I was harmless and let me go back to sleep.
The Crecent City California officers first words were "Do you always sleep with an Oxygen mask on ?"
I was still half asleep as I stammered it is a CPAP machine, you know what that is right?
Of course he said no what?
In my half asleep condition I couldn't remember what the heck CPAP stood for ( my thought was something like C pressure AP ???)
so I just said "It keeps you blown up."
He informed me that camping was against the city ordinance but I could go back to sleep for a couple hours and move along he didn't really have a problem with that.
I hope that this helps someone out there get out of the house and out in the great big beautiful outdoors with peace of mind that they will sleep well.
Footnotes:
*I didn't do the humidifier since the Climate Line and humidifier are big time energy vampires.
*If you are not on a heated climate line and the temperature in the town of Banff in the Canadian Rockies falls to zero C you may wake up with very cold teeth.
*Ear Pluggs are fantastic cheap ways to ensure not waking up to random noises, trains, babies, or your battery alarm.
*A 25 pound Deep Cycle Marine Battery has great big heavy lead plates so that it can do a deep discharge and suffer no ill effects, although I am not going to hike or camp with it unless I was say on a boat!
* Your normal car battery has thin lead plates and a lead don't know what but I read it is similar to a sponge with lots of poors so that you get a strong flash of power to start your engine, if you deep discharge this type of battery often this stuff crumbles down to the bottom of the battery and it don't work so good anymore.....( at least thats what I read.)
