Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for power after a ice storm

Re:Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for ... by throw1234651234 on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @10:21AM (#26238267)

Laptop with a car battery? 12V DC to 160 or whatever AC?

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Re:Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for ... by drewzero1 on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @10:40AM (#26238513)

Laptops (and computers in general) run on 12V DC and 5V DC (and more recently also 3.3V DC) internally. Modern laptop chargers tend to put out around 20V DC to charge the battery and stepped down by power management circuits. Not sure if it was already 20V in '98 or if laptops were still using 12V DC to charge the NiCads, I seem to remember car chargers that plugged the laptop directly into the cigarette lighter.

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Re:Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for ... by thedanbob on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @10:26AM (#26238338)

Probably a DC-DC adapter, bypassing the power brick entirely.

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Re:Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for ... by throw1234651234 on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @10:28AM (#26238358)

That would make sense, really interested in the details. Unrelated to anything, but makes me wonder how horribly inefficient running a car I4 is for providing power.

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Re:Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for ... by kube-system on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @11:54AM (#26239580)

Internal combustion engines emit the majority of their energy as heat. A typical gasoline engine is 20% efficient at turning gasoline into rotational power. (and that's under ideal usage, usually they're designed to be most efficient at operating speed, not at idle) Anything you have connected to the crankshaft after that is additional inefficiency on top of that.

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