subject: Where To Plug Your Laptop Ac Adapter In The Wild. [print this page] AC adapters for laptops are designed to be plugged into an office or a home power outlet but this is not always possible and because of the portability of laptops, they have a tendency to travel around with us and often the places we go may not have a convenient power supply. If we travel abroad then it is usually quite easy to get a mains plug converter so that we can plug our laptop ac adapter into the foreign wall sockets.
Cars, other road vehicles and even boats present a somewhat different problem. Although it is possibly to get an adapter that plugs into a car's 12v (or in the case of a truck, a 24v) power outlet, these can be quite specialised and expensive and often it is hard to find the one for your laptop. The easiest way is to get hold of a 220v (or 110v) mains inverter which plugs into the cigarette lighter or attaches to the battery terminals and then plug your existing laptop ac adapter into the mains socket of that. The only thing you need to be careful about here is that the power drawn by the the laptop's ac adapter is within the power range of the inverter. All ac adapters for laptops will have this written on the bottom and most will draw less than 200w which means you can get away with quite a small inverter.
It is also possible to plug your laptop ac adapter into a petrol or diesel generator although it is well worth plugging a surge protector in between them. When powering a laptop from a generator you should always keep the battery in the machine because generator power often dips below the levels required by the laptop so without the battery the machine would switch off every few minutes.
