I am scheduled to go on a Girl Scout camping trip with my daughter in a week and a half (sleeping in cabins, no electricity). I was assuming that I would just suck it up and (not) sleep without my CPAP for a couple of nights. But my doctor recommended that I look for an external battery pack for it. Has anyone done this? How did it work for you? They’re not cheap, but I found a place (thebatterygeeks.com) that rents them. Any recommendations?
A lot of guys I know use CPAP and camp.
One has a battery pack. Good for one night at most.
Another uses a deep charge marine battery & his unit will run on 12VDC. Can get 3 days off that. Think about recharging for more days.
I have an old one that needs AC so I carry a long extension cord which works in most public camping places. When not near AC, I use a car battery & an inverter like many people use with cigarette lighter plugins to produce AC. ( 2 good 100 foot cords will still work without too much line loss on a CPAP unit.
Where are you camping & for how long?
Any power options at the camp site at all?
My wife uses a CPAP, and we went camping a bunch of times. We had two portable batteries (primarily emergency jumpstarters for cars, but they also had cigarette-lighter ports on them). One was a high-quality model from Harrod’s, a Christmas gift from my mom after my wife mentioned we were having trouble with dying batteries, and the second was a cheaper, local model of some sort. The places we camped always had some power available to recharge them during the day (if we couldn’t run an extension cord to our tent, which was usually the case). The two batteries ran the CPAP overnight, but I think the cheaper one was really only good for a couple hours.
If you pick one up and you’re only going to be there overnight, it should probably work. Also, if you have access to your car, you might be able to recharge it, but it’d cost you some gas to run the car while charging.
You could try calling the campsite ahead of time. Maybe they have a solution, because this has come up before. It might turn out, for example, that there is electricity not far from the cabin, and they can run a power line. They may have to be able to accommodate people who need oxygen, or need to charge electric wheelchairs overnight. I’ve been camping with a friend who uses an electric chair, and the place was enormously accommodating.
I also had a friend whose son went on a BBYO retreat, which was 0-electric, and the kid took medicine that needed to be refrigerated. The campsite was very helpful to him as well.
I could be wrong, and you may need to find your own solution, but I think it’s worth a phone call.
Without wanting to sound like a plug, but my business rents Goal Zero solar chargers and portable batteries. I have a customer who rents one 1-2 times per year specifically for his CPAP when he’s with his son’s boy scout troop camping out. Look into Goal Zero, or other portable solar/battery/power options.
How near to the car will you be?
I think a lot of cpap machines (Resmed anyway) are actually 12 volt, except for the heater element. There are plenty of online places you can get a cheap connector that runs it from an auto battery*. I got mine at cpap.com. In my case, I spend a lot of nights on my boat at anchor with no electricity source. I plug the cpap into the cig lighter, and run it all night. I haven’t had any problem starting in the mornings, but I make sure and run the engine for a while each day to charge the batteries. I carry one of the emergency start power packs with me, but only to start the boat if I run the batteries too far down with the cpap. So far it hasn’t happened.
*you can’t use the water heating element. It’s disabled when these are plugged in.
I have 2 batteries that I bought from cpap.com. I use them all the time when we go campling and have had very little problem with them. The one thing that they caution is when you use the batteries, don’t use the humidifier portion of the CPAP if it has one, because that is a big drain on the battery.
I find that the charge on one of the batteries will last almost 2 nights, so I usually swap them out after one night, and hopefully by the third day I’m able to find someplace with an electrical outlet to recharge them. It takes around 8 hours for a full charge with the adapter supplied.
You will also need a 12 volt adapter for your CPAP, which plugs into the unit just like your AC adapter, but has a 12 volt cigarette lighter plug instead of the AC plug.
Again, as others have stated, you can take a 12 volt car or marine battery and use that if you don’t have anything else. That’s what I used to use with my trailer.
Good luck, and happy camping.
Missed the edit window. Here is a link to a 12 volt adapter for my ResMed S9 CPAP. If you have a different model, your adapter may be slightly different.