Practical advice about a car battery 12VDC to 110VAC inverter typical length of time to last without electricity Featured

Jan 03, 2023 24 Replies

Yes, but one page I read says that modern cars also continue to run longer though the oxygen is depleted.

This is mostly about people in the car, but my point is that the car will run longer than an old car maybe would because it knows how to compensate.

"The car will continue to run on what oxygen remains in the air in the garage, but by the time that there’s not enough air ( oxygen) for combustion to continue, you’ll most likely be dead. The electronics of a modern car are designed to compensate for less than optimal conditions. It will adjust injector bandwith and timing so as to keep running. At worst ( or best, depending on how you look at it), it will just produce more carbon monoxide and Co2,, Until there’s virtually no oxygen left in the garage, or until it runs out of gas. By the time your car can’t run, you’ve been dead for a while.

People die every year from the tail pipe of the car getting plugged by snow in a snow storm, and excess exhaust gasses building up in the car. Given that a garage is a controlled environment, it’s almost impossible that you wouldn’t die from starting your car in a garage with the door closed."

I may have been wrong when I said 2 hours. I was in a rental car and had no tools and didn't want to run the battery down using the computer and listening to the radio in the middle of a March night, then try to start it to get warm again and find the battery dead. So I was being very cautious.

At my house in Kansas and, later, my house in Texas, my garage doors had a pair of 8x16 vents installed into the bottom-most door panel. Some of the houses we looked at in the Florida panhandle had vented garages by way of a couple of decorative bricks that allowed air to pass through. My current home has an unvented garage.

Wow. What's the point of the vent?

If this is a regional or climate thing btw, we never found out where the OP lives.

I don't know. I report, you decide.

According to Mike "Do It Right" Holmes, an attached garage should not 'leak' into the living area because the garage could have CO from a running vehicle, but I haven't seen anything that says a garage should not be vented to the outdoors. Maybe it's a safety thing.

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