Inverter Advice

[StephenA]

Our inverter (which has done a good job of running the fridge for several years) has just gone bang and smells rather unpleasant.  At the moment we've got all the 240 lines running off one inverter but when we put it all in we made it so that we can easily separate the fridge circuit from the rest of the sockets.

So we're considering buying two inverters (a pure sine for the sockets which run the TV and laptops etc) and a quasi sine for the fridge and are looking for sensibly priced suggestions ... there is a huge choice out there but reviews are mixed and its hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

 

 

[Johny London]

No suggestions I'm afraid but that idea makes a lot of sense. If you are going that route, then there is a member on here who hooked a dedicated inverter up to the thermostat of his fridge so the inverter only got powered up when the fridge called for power - thus saving any self consumption of the inverter in between times (so if necessary you could use a pure sine?).

Sorry I don't know who it was though!

[cuthound]

The two inverters will not be in phase, so it is possible to get a 440 volt, rather than 240 volt shock by getting across the outputs of both.

To avoid this ensure that sockets from the two inverters are at least 2 metres apart.

[Detling]

The start up current on a fridge is huge. My 300 watt 600 peak quasi wouldn't start the fridge. Also noticed when running from a 600 watt quasi current on the 12 volt was 10 amps on the big pure sine (Victron) it used 7 amps on 12 volts.  For various reasons went no further with the idea.

[StephenA]

16 hours ago, Detling said:

The start up current on a fridge is huge. My 300 watt 600 peak quasi wouldn't start the fridge. Also noticed when running from a 600 watt quasi current on the 12 volt was 10 amps on the big pure sine (Victron) it used 7 amps on 12 volts.  For various reasons went no further with the idea.

We've noticed that it is the startup of the fridge that knocked the old inverter off line. Our existing one was a 700 (1000 peak I think) so we'd be looking at putting something at least as big or bigger on.

So it looks like pure sine uses less current.... interesting.....

[OldGoat]

1 hour ago, StephenA said:

We've noticed that it is the startup of the fridge that knocked the old inverter off line. Our existing one was a 700 (1000 peak I think) so we'd be looking at putting something at least as big or bigger on.

So it looks like pure sine uses less current.... interesting.....

PSW units tend to be more efficient that QSW as the latter are built down to a price. Also a Quasi doesn't give the same peak voltage - which is necessary (for a few cycles) to get the fridge motor spinning. My tests (see another thread) used a QSW inverter rated at 1600W with no problems at all and that with a twin motor FF.