Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How many machines can you run from a battery backup?”.
Welcome back to the channel, I am so glad you’re here today we’re going to be testing the ability to basically run a maker space from a battery backup, like let’s say you were going to an event or something like that. I’Ve had this question for years. People are always asking me: can you run 3D printers sewing machines, CNC machines from a battery backup things like Arts, festivals, maker fares, even campouts, where it’s like a whole bunch of makers together, and they want to run the machines people have been asking. Can you run these from battery backups the cool folks at genaverse who are sponsoring this video took the challenge I asked them I said: can I throw a bunch of 3D printers at it and a CNC mill and stuff and they said yeah no problem, so I’m Going to give it a try, you see, there’s there’s simple basic math that I could do. Let’S say the the uh.
Let’S say the battery backup is 2 000 Watt hours and my 3D printer, like the prusa mini, runs roughly 80 Watts. You could do some basic math and say you get like what 30 hours it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter because I don’t trust just doing the math there’s too many variables, for example right now. It is 54 degrees out here, which means if I’m printing in pla, my 3D printer, is going to have to run the heater on the bed and the heater and the extruder more often to keep it at temperature.
Those numbers are just vague, I’m from Missouri. Our motto is, the show me state, so what I’m going to do is just set up a time, lapse, camera and simulate running an event out here in this field, where I have no electricity and just see what I can throw at this thing and how it Does it may not be the most exciting thing in the world like when you describe it, but I am excited because I have wondered this for a long time. I love to camp out and I’m always wanting to show off cool gear. So this is going to be fun.
Let’S get started, okay to start off we’re using the Jennifer’s home power to Pro it is 2400 watt hours. It’S kind of a beast uh and the first thing we need to do is plug in the time lapse, camera. So it will actually record everything I’ll tell you more about this machine later, but for now, let’s just get 3D printers going foreign I’ve got the two prusa minis Printing and you can see we’re pulling a hundred roughly between 100 and 150 watts fluctuating out of this Thing and it estimates it’s going to run 15 hours just on the charge that I gave it yesterday.
That’S plenty for an all-day event for two 3D printers. My prusa mark 3s, unfortunately, would not boot up correctly. It’S got a wiring issue that apparently I aggravated when I drug it out into a field, but what would a simulation of an event be without some kind of a hardware failure? Am I right so we can see here no problem.
We could run two 3D printers. Let’S show those actually running, so we can see here. This sucker is running and this sucker is running and that one is not okay. You’Re at your event, you have your 3D printers going, but that’s not enough. That’S not like a maker space. So let’s do some stickers foreign we’ve got our vinyl cutter here. Scanner cutter we’ll draw up some cool stickers and cut those now look at that ugly print.
It’S too cold out here, so my first layer is pretty ugly. If you ever worked an event, you know what that’s like: let’s make the the make robot the unit I’m using for this video is the geneverse home power 2. Pro this thing is pretty much the top of their line of their home units that you can buy, and it is a beast it has over 2400 watt hours packed in this box.
It’S super easy to use you just Yank It Out of the Box, plug it in and charge it or you can use it with solar panels. They have these weatherproof portable solar panels that come in a nice package. That’S easy to carry around that just unfold and plug into the back of the unit and with the solar panels. You can actually charge this thing up in only three to four hours. If you plug this thing into the wall, you can actually get it from empty to a full charge in one to two hours.
That is crazy fast, especially considering this thing is built to power a normal person’s home for up to seven days. You can run your home appliances, power tools and stuff like that. Off of this thing now we’re makers, so I’m gon na throw a ridiculous silly amount of stuff to it.
In this article and you’re gon na see me really pushing what you can do with this thing in one day, not only does it have the AC out that you see here on the front these three ports, it also has USB 3 and USB T2 with fast Charging the batteries on these things are incredibly reliable. Now they are life po4 and they actually can go through over 3 000 empty to fully charged Cycles. It even has a mobile app which allows you to see everything going on with the unit, but I feel, most importantly, it allows you to set up a charging timer so that you can schedule it to charge on certain intervals. Uh.
You know just in case of of emergency like during stormy Seasons or tornado season here, where I live in Missouri. If you want to learn more about a verse in general, go to jenniferse.com. If you want to learn about this specific machine, there will be a link to it down in the description below go check. It out read the details.
This is an impressive unit. Okay, it is nine a little after nine o’clock now, which means I’ve been running about uh two hour or an hour and a half we’re down to 88 battery we’ve made stickers. The the brother scan and cut is still on the two prusa minis are running. I’Ve noticed that the startup sequence for The prusa Minis like when the print failed, and I had to redo the the uh startup sequence, where they heat the bed and level and everything it’ll drop down to estimating much less time. It’S sucking up a lot more power. I brought out a third printer to really strain the system when I fire that thing up, it’ll it’ll drop down to thinking it only has like five hours left, but once it gets to the printing part, it shoots right back up to like 10 hours uh so That that mingda magician is a major uh Power hog, but so far right now this this mingda is not printing.
It’S saying I’ve got 15 hours left. I don’t know how the number keeps going up. I’M not charging this on anything. I think it’s just getting to more efficient States on all these machines at that point in time, so we’re going to throw more stuff at it, foreign. Let’S do some sewing, I’m going to make a pillow case. Look at that, let’s check on our power, so it’s uh, almost 10 30 in the morning we’ve been going since 7 30..
We have three printers going. This vinyl cutter is still on, but it’s not running at the moment. I’Ve been sewing for like almost an hour, and the system says it has roughly between four and seven hours of run. Time left it’s at 75 percent charge now the folks at giniverse, when I told them all that I wanted to plug into this thing, they decided to send me some solar panels as well.
You see this thing, doesn’t just charge up and and run all day. You can also plug solar panels into it to charge it on the go while it’s in use, so I’m going to throw the solar panels on it just in case and we’ll see what all else we can put on this thing. How about a laser cutter – or I don’t know, we’ll see what else I have laying around now again, there’s probably simple math each one of these solar panels. It has a 200 watt output under optimal conditions, and so, if you take that again, that proofsa mini runs at about 80 Watts, one of these should technically be able to run it. So I really don’t think we have to worry about power. Okay, if you’re skeptical like me, you realize that, even though the three 3D printers are running Non-Stop and sucking up a bunch of power, the sewing machine which is still on, and the brother vinyl cutter, which is still on. They really only consume a tiny bit unless they’re actively in use, so I’ve left them on they’re sitting there, but they were only in use a tiny bit. So I thought a good test might be to do a really long engrave with a laser too.
While all that’s happening simultaneously, so I’ve got this set up, I’m going to go ahead and start an engrave and then I’m gon na go eat lunch foreign. It’S sucking up some energy, but I still want to challenge this thing, so I’ve I’ve grabbed another 3D printer that I’ll I’ll get up here and get going as well. So we’ll have a total of four 3D printers operating at the same time, some stuff plugged in not running we’ll just see what it does. Let’S see here, it is 11 A.M. Temperature has gone up to 75 degrees, we’ve got four 3D printers going, the laser is cutting right now. We’Ve got a vinyl cutter and a sewing machine on, but they’re not doing anything and we’re down to 72. Let’S see if you can see it better. Without this we’re down to 72 percent, it says we have about 7.5 hours, uh eight hours now remaining, but we have a 3D printer preheating right now, which is the most uh power intensive part, so that number you can see it jumping all around it’ll, probably come Back up momentarily see, you can see it jumped to 25 hours foreign. I really wanted to show that this could do some impressive stuff at an event, and so I thought you know what more impressive than to pull this big CNC router out now the math. The math here is a little bit unbalanced, with everything running the the four 3D printers, the laser engraver, the CNC machine, running it full blast and the shop vac we’re pulling over 2 000 Watts. I got some footage of it bumping around between 1800 and 2100 Watts. Now the the simple map is, that’s only going to be able to sustain if you did all of that full-blown full blast for like an hour, maybe two if there were breaks in there, but the fact is: I’ve now run five jobs on this today and all Those are still running they’re running right now.
You can see them in the background and I’ve still got 38 left on that battery. Okay, it’s the end of the day, the sun’s going down behind the trees. It’S covering up my solar panels. I’Ve been out here filming all day, long with a time lapse Non-Stop. What did I learn? Well probably didn’t learn a whole lot because, again, like I said in the beginning, it’s kind of basic math on how these solar systems will work. But what I got was confidence. If we look here, we have four 3D printers that have been going all day long, a laser cutter that’s been going off and on all day long we did some sewing before that we did vinyl cutting.
I have confidence that this machine would have run all of that no problem right now we’re at 19 charge, so it thinks it can only run another couple hours right now unless I get the solar panels into the sunlight. This is a lot of stuff to have been running off of it and that CNC machine I kind of threw on here. As a joke, I mean you really wouldn’t plan on running a CNC router off of a battery backup for any extended amount of time, because it’s going to be over a thousand Watts that it’s going to be pulling whenever it’s running.
Actually, whenever the CNC machine and the dust collection that I was running when they were going, they were over 1500 watts. I was pulling, but I was actually pretty impressed with how this handled it. We went over 2 000 Watts draw at once, and I really think if you wanted to go to an event like a Maker Faire or an arts festival or something run all your stuff off of this. You could do it no problem and you could even bring along that giant, CNC router and do a demo like once an hour or something giving it time to recharge in between without issue.
I’M super impressed. I I want to say thank you to them for sponsoring this video, of course, but also for letting me run this ridiculous test so that I could see how it worked firsthand. I’Ve always wanted to try this and I’m happy with the results. I hope you enjoyed this silly little experiment to be sure to give us a thumbs up. It helps us out a lot and I’ll see you on the next article.
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