Quote Originally Posted by samtheman
Thanks for the quick response,
The most I have been out of power during hurricane is been 24 hours, I guess I am lucky. When I get back home tomorrow I will do a test with the SmartUPS backup and see how long I can run the air pump on the fish tanks, I am tempted to get the battery out of the SmartUps and swap it with the 170amp gel battery i have in the garage, it looks like it can fit.

The idea on the solar panels sounds good, right now I use it to power the TV I have in the porch, the solar panels (20watts x 4) came with the charge controller and are hooked up to 2 (six volts in series to make 12volts) deep cycle batteries 250aph each.
Jeeze, you have some nice batteries. I'm not sure what the UPS battery is, but they are usually not a lot of amp-hours. My guess is your 170 Ah battery will be far more than the one it came with. It doesn't HAVE to fit in there either. You can run the cables out. Also, if you wire them in parallel you will get the combined Ah of the batteries. Make sure they are not near dead by testing the voltage because this will kill the other battery if you don't (it will always ruin a battery array).

Lastly, charge your batteries before running the test so you know how long it will last in a real situation. Just wire them up and plug them in for a day or two or three... it depends how fast it charges, etc.