If You Find A Disaster Scary,
Try Going Though It In The Dark.
BizNet Shows How To Keep The Power.
|
If You Find A Disaster Scary,
BizNet Shows How To Keep The Power. |
When it comes to Jump-Starting a vehicle with a dead battery,
it’s hard to beat one of these units. Most
of us pay our local “Auto Club” anywhere from $30.00 to 90.00 per year in
order to get emergency roadside assistance. The biggest demand for tow trucks is a vehicle with a dead
battery; especially on rainy days when drivers turn their lights on during the
day and forget to turn them off. But
the “Auto Club” is hard to beat if you have a dead battery.
What’s not so great is the 15 minutes to an hour or more you’re going
to have to wait.
Wait as you miss business appointments.
Wait as your just purchased frozen foods thaw out.
Wait as it gets hotter and hotter in that car, and the kids get “ants
in their pants”. You get the idea. It’s
not the cost of belonging to an “auto Club”, it’s having to wait.
That’s why more and more people are buying portable power
units. When its not sitting in your
car, truck, home or office waiting to be used, you can use them for powering all
kinds of goodies when camping, or in an Emergency.
Not all of the units are built equally.
With this in mind BizNet takes a look at the RoadPro Jump Start System
from a company called RoadPro (in Pennsylvania call them at: 717-964-3642.
This is a heavy-duty unit. It
is rated at 1200 Amps (the “Starting Power”), so not only can this unit
start anything from a motorcycle, to a tractor-trailer rig; it can start more of
them and go longer without being recharged.
The unit comes with an adapter to charge it from any wall
outlet. Unlike some other cheaper
units I have seen, this one can also be charged from a 12-volt source.
It sounds strange, but a lot of the lower priced units specifically tell
you not to charge them from a 12-volt source.
Not so with this unit. That’s
a big deal if you think about it. If
you keep it in your car or truck, how are you going to charge it?
You don’t have a wall socket. You
do have a cigarette lighter plug. See,
it makes sense to have one that will take a 12-volt charge.
The unit is built with a lead acid battery, but it is sealed so you do
not have to be concerned about the position of the unit.
You can keep it standing up, or lay it on its side. With
this type of battery, unlike a Ni-Cad, there is no memory effect. You can charge this unit after every usage to keep it at full
power. Or, if you prefer, you can
run it till it’s almost dead then recharge it.
The built-in power indicator makes it easy to know how much
“juice” is left. The unit also
has two built-in 12-volt “Cigarette Lighter” style plugs and a work light.
Another big feature on this unit that most of the others
don’t have is a keyed safety switch. Before
the attached jumper cables can have any power running though them, you have to
insert and turn the attached safety key. The
reason for this is simple. You
never really want the ends of the Jumper Cables to touch each other when the
power is on. It cannot only run any power unit, it can be dangerous.
In the real world it can be very easy to have the cables touch.
In those other units, you can’t turn the power off.
Power… just how much emergency power does this thing have?
Lets put it this way. To
test it we turned on the built-in Emergency light.
A nice bright light. Enough
light to help on the side of the road or let you see a whole room when the power
is out. Five days later we got
tired of the light being on, so we turned it off and decided that no one needs a
light going 24 hours a day for 5 days.
Give RoadPro a call at 800-233-7009 and get one of their catalogs. The have lots of neat stuff.
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| Because It's The Right Thing To Do. | ||
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Last modified: November 08, 2002