installing an inverter

[hoggman]

I want put a large inverter on my boat and wire it in to the electric system any advice on or and done that. thanks

[mmwjr]

Welcome aboard

What do you plan to run as a load on the inverter?

Inverter must be rated for about 10% grater than total load. Also need to calculate amp hours to ensure the batteries will be able to supply power for planned duration and still be able to start the engine.

[hoggman]

thanks just small stuff TV, phone charger, coffee pot, i would like to run the hot water heater not sure about that on. i may try to hook it up the the motor to heat the water.

[mmwjr]

I would recommend heating the hot water off the engine.

Do not mount the inverter in the engine compartment as most are not ignition protect rated.

[hoggman]

i have heard that thanks

[shrew]

You will not be able to run a hotwater heater at all. Any heating element, including a coffee pot will be questionable. Installing an inverter isn't sufficient. The house battery bank needs to be able to handle reasonable load, including the massive loss that an inverter, inverting DC to AC will incur. The smaller the bank, the shorter the period of time on the inverter and the more frequently the bank will require recharging.

A/C and hotwater are unreasonable expectations of inverters.

[Timbo]

Hoggman imo you would be better off picking up a little Honda 2000 generator at least with that you could run everything you need and they're very quite and hardly burn any fuel. The cost for a good inverter batteries and cabling would cost about the same if not more and you won't be able to run everything you want for any period of time.

[capn_billl]

The biggest load I was able to run off of an inverter is the fridge.

After repeated failures, I replaced the "modified sine wave", with a 1.5KW pure Sine wave inverter.

No problems since, but I also installed 4 LARGE deep cycle batteries to power it.

Take the amp hours of a battery, divide in 2, then divide by 10, THEN divide by the total load, (current of EACH device plugged into it). That's how many hours of run time you have.

Small TV's, and laptops, and other small devices that are powered by "wall warts", often are actually powered by 12VDC. look at the fine print on the wall wart.

You can usually buy an adaptor that has a cigarette style plug, and power them directly.

I would save the inverter for a specific appliance that just doesn't come in a 12v version, and doesn't take too much power.

Our current technology just doesn't have the power storage to replace a generator with an inverter, it takes too many batteries.

[shrew]

The fridge already has the capacity to run in dual voltage. There is no need to run an inverter to run the fridge. A hot water heater will have a far higher load than the fridge. ANY heating element will have a higher draw than the fridge over a given time period. The coffee pot simply runs for shorter periods of time, so the total draw will lower despite the draw per hour being significantly higher.

It's the loss in amp hours for that duration that will kill an insufficiently sized battery bank. I agree a Honda 2K is the answer.

If you're talking about a few hours of TV an inverter or a 12v TV would be the solution. However, you're still going to need to increase the size of the house bank and consider how you're going to restore the amps drawn down by inverter use.

Also look at the amp loss of an inverter and consider you're daily average draw.