Alternate Battery Back-up Power Sources

Alternate Battery-Back-up Power Sources

To follow-up on last week’s blog post about the Importance of a Battery Back-up System, this week I’m writing a post about alternate power sources of that battery back-up.

Some alternate power sources for sump pumps appeared on the market in recent years that sounded great at first review. One is a battery power system for your primary AC operated pump. When the power goes out the system converts the DC power to AC power and runs your only sump pump. The manufacturer will tell you that it’s better since your primary AC operated pump will normally pump more than a DC operated one. This is true, but not a key issue in most cases. The main issue or problem here is that you have only one pump. If the pump fails you get flooded despite this back-up protection. Secondly, converting DC to AC power is very inefficient. You lose more than half of your power in the process. So your primary pump will run and pump plenty of water out, but not for long. In our test it was only one hour of time and then the batteries went dead. Since the primary pump we used pumped 2200 gallons an hour, it was just 2200 gallons of protection this system offered.

The next type of system that sounds good is another single-pump system that can be used as a primary and back-up pump in one unit. It is actually a DC pump with batteries hooked up to it. When the power is on the AC is converted to DC to run the pump. When the power is off the pump runs on the batteries. Sounds good. But you only have one pump and if it fails you’re dead in the water. In addition, no matter how strong the DC pump, you only get as much water out equal to the amount of battery power you put behind the pumps.