One of the best ways you can support TouchArcade is by doing your Amazon shopping through a TouchArcade affiliate link. We’ve set up the easy to remember toucharcade.com/amazon too if you want to type that in or bookmark it. We get a small percentage of anything you buy through any of these links, which otherwise would just go to financing Jeff Bezos’s rotary dial cell phones or whatever else he’s up to now, and it goes a long way to supporting the site at no additional cost to you. These Amazon Items of the Day articles are all products we have used ourselves, and feel are things that the TouchArcade audience might be interested in!
This is a little odd to feature on TouchArcade, but I’ve given this advice to so many of my east coast friends this week as they get ready for Florence that I figured I’d post it here in case it helps someone in the TouchArcade community as well. Anyway, if you live in an area that is prone to any sort of weather that might lead to power outages, it’s generally a decent idea to have a generator. The problem there is, it’s one more gas engine to maintain, and they can take up a ton of room in your garage- Or potentially are not feasible at all to own if you don’t have a garage. What a lot of people don’t consider is that you can get most of the functionality of a generator out of a high capacity power inverter hooked up to your car, like the POTEK 750W Car Power Inverter. Most folks are familiar with smaller inverters that you plug into a 12v socket that might provide enough power to charge a laptop, but higher capacity inverters connect directly to your car battery- Effectively turning the alternator of your car into a reasonably decent capacity generator that can run for hours and hours and hours.
The POTEK 750W Car Power Inverter is capable of providing 1500 watts of peak power and 750 watts of constant power, which should be enough to power most average sized modern refrigerators and a few other things. For instance, my refrigerator which I got a few years ago when it’s running only uses around 100 watts, but when the compressor first kicks on its usage surges up to around 700 watts. So, this inverter is completely capable of handling my fridge. If you’re not sure how much power your appliances use, both at peak and at idle, it’s reasonably easy to find someone who has figured it out by searching Google for your model number or you can get something like the Kill A Watt usage monitor (which is another useful gizmo to have). 750 watt inverters are also sort of the sweet spot for what most average cars can handle, but this is also a good thing to do a bit of research on if you’re driving something weird like a Smart FourTwo or something that might have a lower power electrical system.
While blackouts in my area (knock on wood) have barely lasted long enough to be worth worrying about, I grew up in a very rural area where multi-day outages after a storm wasn’t that abnormal. If you cover your fridge with a bunch of blankets to insulate it better, you can just run it on an inverter for long enough for the compressor to complete a cycle, then just plug in something else like your TV or whatever else, then power your refrigerator some more a few hours later. Does this work as well as having some huge whole house generator setup? No, of course not, but we’re also talking a $45 power inverter that you can keep in your blackout kit and basically forget about until you need it versus a multi-thousand dollar generator setup. The only other thing to keep this whole thing going is a heavy gauge extension cord, which you might even already have.
Even if this sort of thing doesn’t specifically apply to you now, the fact that you can do this is worth data banking somewhere in your brain, as you never know when you’re going to need to deal with extended blackouts or prepare for an incoming storm.
Thanks for checking out today’s Amazon Item of the Day, and as mentioned before, even if you’re not interested in this particular product, buying things from Amazon by first visiting toucharcade.com/amazon is immensely helpful in supporting the site at no additional cost to you. If you want to take things a step further, you can check out our Patreon, but either way we just appreciate you sticking with us and continuing to both visit and contribute to the TouchArcade community over the years! If you’ve got a product you’re interested in seeing featured in an Amazon Item of the Day, don’t hesitate to reach out. The best way to get in contact with us is via email at [email protected] and be sure to include “Amazon Item of the Day" in the subject.
