How To Power Your Laptop From Your Car
Posted by: Brad
Tags: laptop, notebook, power inverter, power inverters
If you’ve always wanted to know how you could charge your laptop from your car, you’re reading the right article because today I’m going to teach you how to do just that. The reason you can’t charge your laptop from your car battery is because your car battery uses 12 volt DC electricity and your laptop requires all 120 volts of AC electricity.
These two forms of power are just not compatible. In order to be able to power your laptop and charge it from your car battery, you need to use a simple device called a power inverter. Power inverters come in all shapes and sizes and range in price from $20.00 to $20,000.
The power inverters used for powering laptop computers are very inexpensive and can be purchased online or in your local automotive store. You’ll probably find a much better selection and get a much better price if you purchase your power inverter online. For a simple job of powering a laptop with your car battery, you can get by with a very small power inverter that simply plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter outlet.
If you want to be able to power larger electrical loads with your car, you’ll probably want to purchase a power inverter that is much larger. Although the size of them is actually bigger, when I say larger what I’m referring to is the amount of wattage that the power inverter puts out. For laptops you can probably get by with a simple 50 watt power inverter but if you would like to run power tools from your work truck with the power inverter, you would be wise to purchase a three or 4000 watt power inverter.
It’s not a good idea to try to run these large power inverters from your cigarette lighter outlet. These outlets simply don’t have large enough fuses and you would constantly be blowing the fuse if you wired these larger power inverters up to plug into your car’s 12 volt power outlet. For these larger models, you will want to hard wire them into your car’s electrical system with heavy gauge wiring.