Good Battery Backup (ups) For Aquarium Use?

[BBK1]

Go for the wind power. Once that hurricane gets blowing 150mph, the battery will charge in 5 seconds. All joking aside. The wind mill thing will be destroyed in the hurricane so I would defiantly get a gas generator to power the tank. Post an add in the paper that your looking for one and you will get one really really cheap. People are getting rid of them with the rising fuel prices.

 

[KraKen]

Alright, it seems that the battery backup is still your best option so I'll try to address your original question. Watts are a measure of power, which is the amount of energy used over time, watts = joules / seconds, joules are a measure of energy, joules = volts x amps. The energy of baterry backups is measured in VA's which are the same as joules. So if you have a 50w pump and a 150w heater which isn't on all the time so it probably uses about 25w on average, thats a total of about 75w. Since you need 2-3 days of power,

(3 days) x (24 hours/day) x (3600 seconds/hour) = .

(259200 seconds) x (75 watts) = 19440000 joules

So you would need a battery backup with a capacity of about 19.44 megajoules

APC seems to have some things that might work but they'd be very expensive. It'd probably be cheaper to go with solar panels and batteries for the nighttime.