Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire CPAP question

For use in a camper or cabin, take a look at using 2 6v golf cart batteries. That will hold much more juice than any 12v marine battery. Costco sells Interstate golf cart batteries but they don't have much capacity. Interstate makes a much better one that holds 4x more power. I got mine at a company store.

Right. I've spent many hunting days in a tent, several on Kodiak Island. In each case I ran a 12v car battery. As a rule, I pick the biggest (most amp hours or reserve minutes) battery I can find that fits my guide's truck/SUV. I'm not packing it on a plane so why not leave it as part of a tip?

I have a PDF somewhere that talks about this in great detail. The numbers you need are the number of Amp Hours the battery will provide, cross referenced against the number of amp hours the CPAP pulls.

As a general guideline: Reserve Minutes / 2.4 = amp hours. So a battery with 100 reserve minutes would have 41.66 amp hours until the battery dropped below 12v. If the CPAP you are using draws 1 amp per hour, then it would last about 42 hours...or five eight hour nights of sleep.

I found that my CPAP burns .85 amps per hours without the humidifier (*that's the big amp draw). So when I travel for hunting purposes I leave the humidifier at home. I try to find a 120+ minute battery (converts to roughly 7.25 days). More than enough for a hunting trip in general, even on Kodiak Island.

Here is a great read on the subject.

http://www.resmed.com/us/dam/documents/articles/198103_battery-guide_glo_eng.pdf

I tried it for a couple of nights at a mate's cabin a while back, with a CPAP made for mains power plugged into the 4 stroke inverter generator..

It didn't work very well actually. It may have just been the generator, but while it seemed to work fine with a bit more load (lights and such), when it was bedtime and everything but the CPAP was switched off the generator ran badly on the light load, hunting up and down, which in turn made the CPAP unhappy. I'm not deaf enough for the noise not to be a factor either, even with the genny in a a closed outhouse at least 60 feet from the cabin.

A battery-powered travel CPAP is a much better option, and they aren't hard to get. Smaller and lighter than my original CPAP too, and much smaller and lighter than a portable generator.

Thanks for the guide.

I have this CPAP
http://www.thecpapshop.com/airsense-10-autoset-cpap-with-humidifier-bundle

And bought his for an RV trip. It comes with a cigarette lighter adapter and an adapter to clamp directly to a battery. The issue s going to be charging the battery
http://www.cpapxchange.com/dc-power...ABHTDMkNhRC0-HEjnwIkix7N61kaAmm9EALw_wcB

It worked like a charm for me.

Not sure if it's been mentioned but resmed makes a small lithium battery pack that will run one for about 3 days. Costs about 250. You canpiggy back 2 of the batteries for extended time.

My older Philips Respironics can run off a 12V battery with their 12V adapter ($40 years ago) so far the longest I have used it is 8 days. Take it camping and hunting if 120V AC is not available.

Not sure what brand your friend uses but my new fisher & paykel unit is 120v only so when I upgraded to a new unit I kept the old unit for hunting/camping duties.

I didn't mention I currently have a dedicated battery in a sears battery case I carry it in, I can set it up under my cot instead of running a cable from my tent to my truck battery.

Here is the unit I have, this place seems high since mine was half that but that was 10+ years ago..

http://www.cpapxchange.com/dc-power...ABHTDMkNhRC0-HEjnwIkix7N61kaAmm9EALw_wcB

As was mentioned before but just as a reminder the humidifier on a cpap is what will kill your battery. I've gotten used to never using it anymore and it makes things much simpler