Help needed for outdoor stereo with no electricity


We have a family lake picnic pavilion about 2 miles from the nearest power pole. I'm no electrical engineer and could use some help.

-for power I have
Sealed Deep-Cycle Interstate battery
12V 33AH
@20 hour rate to 1.75VPC and 77deg. Farenheit


-to convert to AC I have a 300 watt DC to AC power inverter
it has two AC outlets

-for a source I plan to use my Apple Ipod
it is powered by its own battery

I would like to use a standard 30 watt/ channel stereo receiver to power some box speakers.

Will this work?
Could it play for 3 or 4 hours at normal listening levels?
holzhauer
maybe some kind of a car stereo setup would work...funny thing was back in college, a friend of mine lost his liscence for a year because of an underage dui...he had quite the system in the car...actually, he liked the system more than the car...so...he built boxes to mount everything to and ran it off car batteries in his bedroom with a charger to recharge the batteries. Sounds like an interesting proposition you have set up there...good luck...hope it works out.

Ellery
In a word,maybe. But likely not.

The 12vdc battery has, according to your specs, 33ah capacity.
When you convert this to 120vac via the inverter, this gives 3.3 amp/hour capacity at the needed line voltage for the receiver.

If the receiver is a 30wpc, and requires more than its output to drive, then it will be around 100w to run. If you don't turn it up too loud, and it only draws maybe 60 watts, then you might have a chance.

If it draws only about 60 watts at the volume you decide to play at, that would be only about 1/2 and amp at 120vac, so you might get about 3 hours out of it before the voltage drops too low in the battery.

But your other problem will be that the inverter you have is probably a modified sinewave type, which will put all kinds of hash and noise on the line, which will come out the speakers.

I'd try a "dry run" first,in your home, to see if it will work out the way you want.
Thanks guys- the dry run is a good idea. I don't own the receiver yet. Perhaps the car audio components would be the way to go. That would eliminate the need for the inverter.
The Ipod has an accesory that converts the headphone output to left and right RCA plugs. If a car audio component would take RCA's I think I might be in business.
I'm guessing the headphone output wouldn't be enough to go directly to the amplifier. It would be nice if it could though.
If you got some hi-eff horns, you could use a micro-Zotl as an amp. It is set up to run on DC battery power with a flick of a switch.
I was thinking of high efficiency horns as a way to save power and fill the outdoors with sound. The Berning is a mouth watering temptation. Probably more than I want to spend however. Just learned Berning designed a tube amp for the car. That's pretty cool.
how about a simple portable generator for the power for the subwoofer you will need to fill the open soundstage.
Here's the math for a 12 Volt DC battery @ 33 ampere-hour:

If the power draw is:
30 watts - 10 hrs run time
60 watts - 5 hrs
120 watts - 2.5 hrs
240 watts - 75 minutes
300 watts - 1 hr

I rounded off, the actual times are a little more.
Thanks for all the help. It looks like going with low power and high efficiency would be in order.