So, if you recall, late last year I had a post up about picking up one of those handy-dandy battery jump-packs at CostCo. They’re a fairly simple, though not perfect, solution for people who are just not inclined, mechanically or motivationally, to whip up their own battery-in-a-box.

After that, I got the curious interest of wondering how long my converted DC LED desk lamp would run on the jump-pack before failing. (The short answer was at least a week 24/7, which, at 6 hours per evening comes out to a freakin’ month of light. Probably more…I quit the program after a week figuring I had enough info.)

It was, to me, a very useful experiment and showed the potential for some tremendous utility from those devices in case of emergency. But…it’s very localized lighting. Its a desk lamp, after all. Which means it’s ‘area of effect’ in terms of illumination isn’t very large. So…what if……….

Was up at CostCo and they have a 4′ LED shoplight that looks similar to the old-style fluorescent shop lights we’re all familiar with. Now, lets state right up front that these were not the really high output LED worklights that are avaialble…for $25 the box says you get about 4000 lumens. Ok, thats fine…what I’m after is the ability to light up a room in a manner that looks virtually identical to what it looks like when the power is on, and not like someone pulled the housing off a MagLight and set it up on a file cabinet in the corner.

Here’s the rub…its set up for AC current, which means that I have to plug it into the built-in inverter on the battery pack. Problem is, the LEDs are DC to begin with…. converting DC (battery) to AC(fixture) to DC (LEDs), as I understand it, isn’t as efficient as if it was just straight DC to begin with. Fortunately, the internet is not without a supply of posts and DIY from people who wanted to do exactly that…. so, I may dig out my snips and electrical tape and see what I can do. But, for now, I’m curious to see how long it’ll run off the battery pack.

I still have these guys sitting here and it would be interesting to put them together to form a self-contained emergency backup lighting system for the storage area where all the emergency gear is.

I have no illusion this thing will run as long as the desk lamp did, but that lamp ran over 168 hours…this thing, on the ther hand, ran for three. Three. I suspect that the actual runtime would be several orders of magnitude longer if it were DC-DC. So….some tinkering is in order.