Burnham alpine/emergency power

Jfonto

My Alpine 150 wont run on my generator during outages.I want to run on an inverter/battery setup. Do I need a "modified sine wave" or "pure sine wave " inverter. and how much amperage will Alpine150 draw; the plate says "less than 12amps" but I know it must be much less. Does anyone know of a power conditioner that can clean up the generator power.

Jean-David Beyer

I have a similar question.

I have a W-M Ultra 3. The Installation manual says to put it on a 15 amp circuit. My policy is to run anything new in my house on a breaker all its own, so that is what it has. I, too, was considering a UPS in there. Now I have 4 Taco 007 circulators, but at most three can run at a time, so that is about 3 Amps. The starting surge on a motor like that is likely to be small. There is the power to run the controls, that I imagine is quite small. The power required to run the blower for induced draft, etc., is almost certainly less than a circulator. And the high voltage to ignite the burner I do not know, but is probably small. For all I know it does not spark all the time, because the same electrode is used for flame detection. I could probably figure all this out if I had to.



The important question is about the quality required for the waveform. There is no way to guess that. I do not think the motors would care for a square wave, but the UPSs that I have seen are either modified square wave (such as in APC Back-UPS models, or pretty pure sine wave, such as in most of their Smart-UPS models. Only the boiler manufacturer could answer that, and my guess is that unless you get just the right person on the line, they will not know either.



The other question is how long you need it to run. Most home style UPSs, and mine is really big (2500 VA), are really meant to run only long enough to be able to do a controlled automatic shutdown. Mine will run about an hour, drawing 400 watts or so, because it is oversized. So let's imagine that my boiler took the same amount of power. Would an hour be enough? Sometimes my power drops out for a second or two. Sometimes for 15 minutes. Sometimes several hours. Once for four days? The big problem is the long ones. If power failed for an hour, it would not make much difference. I do not know how long it would take to freeze the water in my radiant slab. Surely more than 4 hours. But I have baseboard, too, and that could freeze a lot faster than the slab. I do not have anti-freeze in there and the house is about 60 years old, so freezing does not seem to be a problem.



I have not put in a UPS, though I do have a whole house surge protector in the power panel. The main reason is that the only place to put it is in the unheated garage near the boiler, and these UPSs are not designed to be left out in the cold. The other reason is that the batteries last only a little over three years here, and they are quite expensive to replace. If you forget, your first clue may be that when the power fails, the UPS does not pick up the load.



If you have a generator for the long run stuff, you could do what telephone companies do. They would rectify the incoming power down to 50 volts DC and have batteries continuously charged. When the power failed, the load would not know it because it got the power from the batteries as it always did. Now relay central officies could run on 50 volts DC. And you motors require AC, so that would require a suitable invertor, and only your boiler manufacturer and your circulator manufacturer could tell you for sure.

Tim McElwain

I dropped a line

to the Burnham Rep should have an answer by Monday if you can wait.

Jfonto

Yea

I can wait; want to do it right.

thanks

Tim McElwain

From Burnham Rep

Still looking into the generator thing. The boiler itself uses a set amperage but they will have to add in the pumps and other controls.

Model Number/Nominal Current (amps)

ALP080/

Tim McElwain

Having Trouble with posting

Still looking into the generator thing. The boiler itself uses a set amperage but they will have to add in the pumps and other controls.

Model Number/Nominal Current (amps)

ALP080/

Tim McElwain

The 150 draws

2 amps not counting pumps and other attachments

Jfonto

Thanks

I know the pumps and zone control add up to about 2 amps.

Maybe I can power off battery and inverter and alternate boiler/recharge/boiler etc.

4 amps isn't a great deal to supply.



Thank you