Laptop power for in-vehicle charging

Laptop power for in-vehicle charging Would you be able to recommend a PSU (power supply unit) to be used in a car by means of the cigarette lighter port? I’m looking for an in-car laptop battery charging station, which apparently will need a 12v 65w/100w USB-C power supply for the United Synagogue’s laptop. I’m also in the market for a 4G MiFi router, I’d like to buy the Portable Wireless 4G MiFi Router, so that I can have internet access outside the office & home – any ideas that works with the US-supplied laptop? Easiest way use an ‘inverter’ / ‘converter’ you plug into the cigarette lighter socket which provides a house-type electric power socket. But unlike regular house current you need to ensure your inverter is strong enough for the job. A cheap 20W inverter will struggle, flatly refuse or perhaps even catch fire trying, so make sure you pick one with more W than your laptop consumes (shown on label). If the inverter shows signs of stress such as overheating don’t aggravate the situation using the computer too while the battery is charging. For technically-minded readers: There’s a significant amount of wasted energy and extra circuit complexity during the supply chain powering the laptop. Starts off at 12 V, bumped up to house voltage and then bumped back down to low voltage again. Some electronics enthuisasts (such as myself) have made their own alternative laptop power supply that plugs directly into the car (instead of house current). Based on single switchmode boost regulator having stabilisation to 19 V. A far as I’m aware this isn’t available as a consumer product. You need a 12V power inverter, but not just any inverter. Units that output 80W of constant power will charge your laptop when it is off, but will not work properly while in use. Most cheap inverters advertise their “peak” capability, which is a useless number. Divide it in half to get the alleged constant power rating. I still would not trust that number. The 150W peak inverters are in reality 75–80W units, which are mostly useless. Ideally, you want an inverter that has a cigarette lighter plug but is rated to output at least 100W of constant power. I use and recommend this unit: Bravo 400-Watt Power Inverter with USB Charging. It charges my 17″ laptop while in use. It also has a low power shutoff feature so it will not over-drain my vehicle battery. While it doesn’t output anywhere near 400W, it handles my laptop with no complaints. 26.1K views Absolutely, but avoid the inverter and get a 12V charger. The inverter will work of course, but you go from 12VDC to 110VAC or 230VAC back to something like 20VDC (depending on your laptop battery). It’s much more efficient, much less bulky and much cheaper to simply use a step-up DC-DC converter. You can get a variable output voltage (12V-20V) power supply off eBay for about $5-$10 with plugs for all sorts of laptops. Check the output voltage on your original power supply and set the output voltage on the 12V power supply and you’re good to go. Make sure that the power supply is rated for the maximum power that your laptop needs, especially since it’s a gaming laptop. That may be a problem, actually. Gaming laptops draw significantly more power than regular laptops, so you’ll need to make sure your power supply can handle it. On top of this, the high power draw will of course drain your battery faster. I don’t know why you want to take your laptop on the road trip, but if you can replace it with a more efficient device (regular laptop, netbook, tablet, phone, …), then that might be worth it. Of course it also depends on how much you’ll use the laptop vs. how much you’ll be driving. Also be sure to check your car battery. Perform a load test by starting the car and check that the battery voltage doesn’t drop below 9.6V. If it does, your battery should be replaced, especially since you’ll be asking a lot from that battery. I would also recommend monitoring the battery voltage while you’re using the laptop with the stationary car to avoid discharging it too much, which may potentially cause starting issues or even damage your battery. You can get cheap accessories off Amazon or eBay that show the battery voltage and will warn you if it drops too low. Car batteries are not designed to power accessories when the car is off. They shouldn’t be drained more than to about 50% of their rated capacity, so your usable capacity on the safe side for a 12V 80Ah battery is only 40Ah or 480W. With a gaming laptop drawing potentially up to 250W of power, that’s just 2 hours. A regular laptop, like my Macbook Pro, only draws about 60W of power, so that’s about 8 hours of use. If you’re going on a long road trip and since a gaming laptop can drain a regular car battery pretty quickly, it might be worth it to invest in an auxiliary deep-cycle battery. Use a battery isolator to charge the auxiliary battery with the alternator without risking discharging the starter battery, and simply get a 12V socket with two battery clamps and plug your power supply in that. This is a relatively significant investment (about $250 for a 125Ah auxiliary battery, a voltage-sensing battery isolator and the 12V socket), although you can get some of it back when you resell the equipment. Of course an auxiliary battery is bulky and requires a bit of space in your car. In conclusion, ask yourself: • do I need the gaming laptop or will a more energy-efficient device suffice for what I’m going to do? • Is my car battery still good? How much usable capacity does it have? How long can I power my laptop using this battery? How many hours a day will I use my device? Does the car battery suffice? • Is it worth investing in an auxiliary battery? 10K views A car cigarette lighter can supply more than 150W, so it should be fine. You’ll have to be careful, though. It will run down the battery pretty quickly if you aren’t moving, even if you have a pretty new car battery. A car battery gives you about 1kWh, and the laptop will probably draw something like 100W. If you factor in inefficiencies in the laptop charger and the inverter, you’ll probably be drawing about 150W. That gives you about 7 hours from full to empty, and you really don’t want to empty the car battery (it shortens battery life time), so I would limit it to maybe 4 hours. 4 hours of use for every 1–2 hours of (pretty fast) driving should be fine. I just had this arrive from ebay for $3 3–32 volts imput 12–14volts is well within the car voltage and my laptop power supply is 19 volts at 3.2 amps. I measured it running the laptop and it was only drawing a maximum of 2 amps so 4 amps leaves plenty in reserve. I adjusted it to 19 volts so I will just connect a cigarette lighter plug to the input and the damaged laptop cord to the output it is rated at 94% efficient that has to be better than running an inverter and the laptop power supply. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/DC-DC-4A-Boost-Converter-3V-32V-12V-to-5V-35V-24V-Step-UpVoltage-Regulato-Module/112517047764?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649 A few days later here it is in action with a 13.8 v power supply with a cigarette lighter socket it is dark and raining and I am not going out to the car just to try it on the car battery. 16.9K views as others have noted, most modern laptops require about 19–21V, This is because they typically use 3-cell Li batteries (or parallel-multiples thereof) which outputs 10.8V and you need add’n voltage drop for the charging circuitry — so that is at least 16V. your question says no inverter…. why? there is nothing to distinguish an inverter from a “converter”. They both use switching step-up circuitry to transform 12V DC to some higher voltage, whether AC or DC. The DC converters first convert 12V DC to some AC power signal, before converting back to DC. so if you are going to exclude “inverters”, you must logically also exclude “converters”, since they are the same thing. Then there are no great solutions left, only crazy impractical solutions. If however, you are asking: How to power your laptop directly between 12V DC and 19V DC so to avoid using the laptop AC charger, that makes more sense, because you are trying to reduce two voltage converters in favor of just one. There are plenty of DC-DC converters out there that will do the job. The big issue will be getting the right, often proprietary, connector for your DC input to your laptop. This is why USB-C is gaining momentum, because the connector is standard, the charging voltages/currents are standard, so you can just get any of a number of off-the-shelf solutions for 12VDC or 120/220AC to USB-C. 14.5K views As others have said: You usually need around 19V-21V, so you would need a boost converter at the very least. A boost converter would be more efficient, because instead of stepping the voltage up to 230V (or 120V if you are in the US) and then back down to 20V (ish), you’d go directly from 12V to 20V. Of course it has to be said that many modern/small inverters is in fact a high-frequency boost converter coupled with a final stage that turns it into 50Hz (or 60Hz) AC. So a pedantic commenter might well point out that this setup is still half-an-inverter. But now I am going to tell you why you should — in some cases — forget about all this and just get a small inverter, and why in other cases — with newer laptops — this problem is going away. Many laptop manufacturers won’t let you use a non-approved charger. They have an identification chip inside the charger that tells the laptop what kind of charger is in use, and what the wattage of that charger is. If you use a random 19V-21V supply, those laptops will often lock the CPU to a lower speed and refuse to charge the battery. Dell laptops are notorious for this, but they are hardly the only ones. Secondly, some laptops now have a USB type C power supply, and car adapters do exist. Again, this has an actual output voltage of 20V, so internally it will again contain a boost converter. yes, but you need a voltage regulator, otherwise your $500 laptop could be fried to an overvoltage. Easy. Get a 12 volt charger for your laptop. (Car adapter) Plug that into the battery. Many answers have mentioned the laptops expect 19 to 21 V. You can use a DC/DC boost converter to boost he 12V to 20V. These are available on Amazon. A laptop will more than likely overheat (it would probably shut itself down to prevent damage) in a car if left switched on and the car is parked in direct sunlight, without the a/c running. My phone did exactly this recently, it got too warm and automatically shut down due to excessive heat to prevent damage, but as soon as the car’s a/c was in operation no further over heating issues happened. Try: https://energyintelligence.in/collections/laptop-desktop-tv-ups/products/car-laptop-charger Amazon.co.uk : Universal Car Laptop Charger, 90W 15-20V "laptop car charger" "battery" in-car "cigarette lighter port" "12v" "65w/100w USB-C" PSU (power supply unit) - Google Search Universal Car Laptop Charger, 90W 15-20V - Magnese | CPC (farnell.com)