MX65W - Portable and battery powered

[AJ-Acevedo]

Just thought I'd share this with the community. Here is our Meraki MX65W with two AT&T 5G ready cellular modems load balancing WAN1 & WAN 2 over Ethernet and a Verizon LTE USB modem for failover. Completely battery powered.

The MX65W is running off of a 90W 27,000 mah battery and the LTE modems are running off of their internal 5000 mah battery connected to a 20,000 mah battery. Theoretical battery life 16 hours. Real world I expect under 10.

Works great for an emergency scenario. We call it our Crash Kit.

[BrandonS]

Well done. 

Link to the battery I found for anyone else interested: https://www.ravpower.com/ravpower-27000-external-battery-charger-AC-Outlet-black.html

[Steinbep]

How long does this last? 

edit: Nevermind.  Missed the estimated time in the original post

[AJ-Acevedo]

With WiFi enabled, and a few connected clients I'm only getting about four hours. With WiFi disabled I would anticipate getting more than double that. Most of the energy with WiFi enabled is wasted as heat.

[Adam]

Nice setup, I could see some interesting use cases for DR.

[AJ-Acevedo]

Indeed. Hence the name "Crash Kit".

[PhilipDAth]

Great job.  This looks like it is mounted on something fixed. Is this in a vehicle?  Or is this for in a building when the building services have failed?

Have you considered just using a plain old deep cycle [heavy] lead acid vehicle battery?

[AJ-Acevedo]

In the photo the equipment is simply just sitting on a credenza. We use it for disaster scenarios where we need to deploy an emergency network at one of our satellite offices when all else fails or when we need to setup a temp network with little notice to get a circuit lit.

We haven’t really consider a deep cell battery because we need the crash kit to be easily packed up into a bag and deployed. I image a deep cell car battery would easily give you over 24 hours of service.

AJ

[PhilipDAth]

From my calculations, if you added 141W of solar capacity and it was 100% efficient (hahaha) then you could keep running during the day.

You could consider a 200W solar panel.  They are about 1.5m high and a 1m wide - so a tad tricky to carry - but would give you the ability to operate for quite some time - if the sun remains shining - leaving the batteries for when it was not shining.

A deep cycle "gel" battery is only about 20kg.  So not too heavy.  The bonus with this is if after 24 hours or so you start to run low just take it out to a vehicle, start it up, put the jumper leads on - and charge it up on the spot.  Handy huh?

You could also use a much smaller solar panel (say 100W) with a deep cycle battery and leave it trickle charging all the time.  The battery would eventually go flat still (because it sounds like you are using 141W of power) - but it would give you considerable running time.