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Good idea, and I've used a car for backup power before when my power was out for a whole weekend... didn't have an incubator to power though.
What you can also do is get one of those portable jump starter/compressor/Inverter power packs. Everybody ought to own one anyway, mine has saved me twice when I was far from home and having trouble. The one I have has an inverter built in. You could pack over to the incubator, power it for a few hours, then take it back out to the car to charge for a while, then power the incubator again, etc.
Cover the incubator up with a big box and some blankets as well. Most of your power draw from an incubator is going to just be to produce heat. That box and some blankets over it would insulate things more, keeping the heat in, which means the incubator doesn't have to use as much power to produce heat, giving you longer battery life, and fewer trips out to the car for a recharge.
One more thing - if you buy one of those portable jump starters, keep it charged up! If you just let it languish in a corner draining all of it's power out for months, the battery will sulfate and it won't hold as much of a charge. They all come with an AC plug that you can plug in to keep it charged up, and most come with a 12V adapter too.
I'm building an incubator soon. Power outages like this are why I'm going to insulate the crap out of it, and include a battery back-up that will operate it for 24 hours or so.
Good idea, and I've used a car for backup power before when my power was out for a whole weekend... didn't have an incubator to power though.
What you can also do is get one of those portable jump starter/compressor/Inverter power packs. Everybody ought to own one anyway, mine has saved me twice when I was far from home and having trouble. The one I have has an inverter built in. You could pack over to the incubator, power it for a few hours, then take it back out to the car to charge for a while, then power the incubator again, etc.
Cover the incubator up with a big box and some blankets as well. Most of your power draw from an incubator is going to just be to produce heat. That box and some blankets over it would insulate things more, keeping the heat in, which means the incubator doesn't have to use as much power to produce heat, giving you longer battery life, and fewer trips out to the car for a recharge.
One more thing - if you buy one of those portable jump starters, keep it charged up! If you just let it languish in a corner draining all of it's power out for months, the battery will sulfate and it won't hold as much of a charge. They all come with an AC plug that you can plug in to keep it charged up, and most come with a 12V adapter too.
I'm building an incubator soon. Power outages like this are why I'm going to insulate the crap out of it, and include a battery back-up that will operate it for 24 hours or so.
