to tag on to Nomad's comments about stealing power...I survived sleeping in the 9 day 2004 outage with the use of 12v fans powered by an old Harley Davidson and auto batteries... thanks to having a 12v female receptacle that hooked to the battery terminals with clips...lower left in picture... it allows you portability if you have a storage type battery... I later built a dedicated deep discharge battery with permanently attached receptacle that is kept on a float charger...I would highly recommend one of the adapter cables... check for the lowest wire gage rating ( 14 > 16)