Camping with a CPAP?

[Guest]

Does anyone have any experience in camping with a CPAP? I have a Eureka 1210 tent that comes with a DC power supply. Is this something I could use with my CPAP? It will just be one night. Is there anything I need to verify in order to use it? Thanks.

[nate fry]

I used mine on my boat. I just used the 12 volt adapter and it was fine.I wouldn't use my primary battery, you might be walking/

[rested gal]

I don't know enough about batteries to offer any suggestion. Here's a link, though, to many discussions that might be helpful:

LINKS to Battery operation, camping, power outage
viewtopic.php?t=9682

[GuyK]

The answer is yes, potentially (electrical engineer joke there) --

You'll need to figure out whether or not your CPAP machine can take a 12V DC input, and then you'll need to get the physical connection taken care of, including the polarity of the 12V DC plug.

Guy

[nomoore]

If you are using the E! Power Pak then the battery size is listed on their website as being 7 amp hours. It is a sealed lead acid battery which means ideally you wouldn't want to discharge it past 50%. You can discharge it down to a 20% state of charge safely and the battery should recover but it will significantly reduce the life of the battery. That means that whatever machine you have, the E! Power Pak would not be ideal. You need a larger battery, even for 1 night of use.

It looks like the tent uses standard cigarette lighter type power adapters so the machine should plug into it with a 12volt cable from CPAP.com (if your machine can be run off of 12 volts). How does the tent connect to the battery? Is it a standard cigarette lighter type plug? If so then it should be easy to connect the tent to a larger battery.

Really though, I don't think I would want to use an electrical system integrated into a tent for my CPAP machine. It just seems like the system would get easily damaged and I wouldn't want any flakiness in the power system for something as important to me as my CPAP machine. Also, the purpose of the system is to make it easy to power multiple accessories. I also wouldn't want to have any other accessories putting a drain on my CPAP battery. I could possibly misjudge and not have enough power to run my CPAP machine at night.