Backup generator

[woody1]

Sure, if your car isn't over-sophisticated.

It's 19 years old so I doubt it, and the battery is readily accessible. When the electricity goes down, I hook a 12V 10W LED to it so we at least have some lighting in the house.

[woody1]

On reflection, maybe the easiest thing to do, if the power looks like it's going to be down for longer than a day, would be to just do what one of our neighbours did and check into a hotel.

[Protagoras]

Just in case perhaps you've not seen them, so-called 'portable power station' products are available. I've not used one myself, but a bloke I know has one on his boat (not sure what make it is).

e.g. https://www.ankersolix.com/uk/products/c1000

This could be a good option for running some portable LED lighting etc during power cuts rather than connecting to the car.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Sure, if your car isn't over-sophisticated.

For charging a battery I would think even the cheapest, nastiest generator would do a better job, though.

I think both my generators (defence in depth ) have 12V charging.

The other thing I found was that the thing won't start generating on load, so you have to start it, get it running, then turn the load on.

The alternators fitted to the el cheapo chinesium generators are weird.

I had to replace a 12uF capacitor on one because it had dropped to 2uF and the resonance was wrong. Truly weird.

No idea what the output waveform is like but I wouldn't run anything electronic off mine.

I've got a 300W 12V to 240W inverter for running sensitive stuff.

Pure sinewave inverter generators are available.