How to take your Electrical Appliance (Router) off the Electrical Grid in case of Eskom Load Shedding.

This is a guide on how to take an electrical appliance such as an Internet Router off the Eskom grid and powered during load shedding periods.

Guide

How to take your Electrical Appliance off the Electrical Grid in case of Eskom Load Shedding.

This is a guide on how to take an electrical appliance such as an Internet Router off the Eskom grid and powered during load shedding periods.

This is not intended as a comprehensive guide but rather a quick fix to a problem.

First, it is important to realise that you cannot easily take large appliances that use AC electricity directly off the grid such as a washing machine.

The basic concept is simple: Any appliance that uses a DC power supply can be replaced with a battery as the source but the output voltage needs to be tweaked to be the same as what the normal output voltage would have been.

For example, when looking at a router, you will find that it is connected to the wall by a small adapter (usually black). Inside this adapter there is a convertor to change the high AC 220V voltage provided by Eskom to a much lower specific to the device. By close examination the rated output voltage can be obtained visibly on the adapter. The router that I have uses a power supply with an output rating of 5.7V. Yet, when I plug use a multimeter to test the actual output I see that it is 6.10V and not 5.7V as indicated. Thus, I want to find a way to change the battery that will be used to provide between 5.7V-6.10V.

Since using a 12V rechargeable Lead-Acid battery is really the cheapest option to store electricity, we need to change the output voltage to be between 5.7V and 6.10V. The easiest way would be to use a voltage divider but not everyone knows how to build a voltage divider correctly, the easiest second to that would be using a Step-Down convertor. These step-down convertors simply connect to the battery as input and the output is adjusted by using a screw and measuring with a multimeter the actual output voltage.

Lastly, once the output voltage has been set correctly for the battery when fully charged, a similar jack or adapter needs to be used to physically fit into the device, or router in our case. An option is cut of the existing jack, add a switch to determine which of the following two circuits are actually connected:

• A connection through the standard DC power supply supplied with the product
• The battery connected with the step-down converter.

This way when the power is on, you can set the switch so that the router/device is power from the grid and when there is Eskom load shedding or no power then you simply need to flick the switch to run the device from the battery setup.

If you need to run the device for longer simply add more batteries in parallel.

The step-down convertor is available from Leobot Electronics at

https://leobot.net/viewproduct.aspx?id=2998

A multimeter to test the output is available at Leobot Electronics here

https://leobot.net/viewproduct.aspx?id=270