I’m not sure quite what it is I need, but I know they exist.
It’s not a portable power pack. It’s a unit that I can plug an oil radiator into, that plugs into the mains.
It’s to stop it losing its memory every time we have a power cut. I need the radiator to have power if the mains trips (and not much as it’s just enough to stop the electrical timer wiping).
Not sure what I need to google to buy.
I have an external room where it’s Baltic once radiator season stops (now) and I have a heater set for cheap overnight heating. Except it has no memory and it’s a pain to programme!
Depending on the radiator power, that’s not a trivial problem.
The difficulty is that the control electronics, which you want to protect, and the relatively power-hungry heater elements currently (yeah, I know, ha ha) both draw their power through the unit’s single 13A mains plug. There’s no easy way of separating them so that only the controls draw power.
You’d either need to get inside the radiator and modify it to separate the control electronics from the heater or you’d need to buy a relatively huge Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) which could power them both for as long as the power cut lasts.
Gregg’s switch looks like it could, in principle, be used to replace the control electronics (or used to send power to a ‘dumb’ heater) but in the former case you’d still need to detach the existing control electronics.
It’s not a timer I need. It’s a power supply that’s always on, in between the radiator and the mains.
With enough juice to last an hour or so of the power goes. And be passive otherwise.
Are you thinking of an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)? if so then a very expensive solution, cheaper to change the heater to non-timer and buy a battery backup timer.
Probably that.
It’s mad the thing doesn’t have a memory in. It’s a proper pain to programme and any blip in the supply and the dam thing is flashing zero and off!
As Cosmo says a UPS with enough capacity to power a heater for an hour or more would cost thousands new (ridiculous, I accept, but they’re built for computers where you only need maybe 10 minutes to shut them all down or for your generator-based mains backup system to kick in).
You might look for a used one, but it’ll be for sale because its internal battery will be approaching end-of-life and a replacement battery will also be ridiculously expensive.
Gregg’s switch (or some equivalent) and a dumb heater might be do-able for as little as a hundred quid.
Or you might even be able to find a heater that has a battery backup for its controls (or even just non-volatile memory - I can load info into a memory stick after all and that doesn’t get lost when I unplug it !).
I think (I may be wrong) that the problem is there’s a timer built into the heater. That timer needs to be programmed before the heater will generate any heat, and it loses its programming every time there’s a power cut. And Steve is cheesed off that he has to keep reprogramming it.
What he needs is a dumb heater (without a timer in it) controlled by your separate timer which won’t forget everything each time the lights go out.