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I brought my 800watt inverter from Macro £43.

John.

Quote: Originally posted by Andy-M on 18/6/2008

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with running the inverter make sure you have sufficient storage (leisure batteries) if you plan on running high load devices you will need a min of 2 batteries otherwise a single will not last for long

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Very good point: make sure that you have a good split-charge system and a decent set of batteries.

What are you trying to power?

For the kettle, why not use gas, kettles will pull a lot of current from the batteries, Hairdryer is OK for short lengths of time, but again watch the power rating, cd player no problems, why not use the in cab cd, or look at changing the stereo - I have put one in so that it interfaces directly with the IPOD, all controlled and displayed via the stereo . for the tv, again not to much of a problem with current draw but I have just purchased a 12V regulator so that I have a smooth 12V (will also compensate for under voltage) I cut the power lead on the tv (it was 240VAC going into power adapter 12V DC thought rather silly to convert twice) and pluged into the available 12V supply. doing this will use much less current than going via an inverter,

1800W Inverter will do more than you need, 1000W could possible be OK, but check the hair dryer!!

Hair dryers* can run up to at least 2Kw or more: In other words you are going to need a stonking leisure battery bank and a heck of an inverter.

Believe me, the kettle idea is a non starter. You are talking 3000w, 3Kw, for the average kettle.

You will also have a power loss thru the inverter.

* There are 12vDC hair-dryers but the opinion of people on UKCS who have used them is "save your money to go on a hook-up"

You can get hair dryers that work on lower power, my wife and daughter use one, the inverter we have though is 1800, which is pretty large. We also use it to cook with - electric hob style thing, this pulls 1500W but as its usually on for 30 mins make no real issue - saying that do have over 200W of solar panel charging capacity on the roof.

One other point to make about inverters, when you switch them on,make sure that you turn the charger to the batteries off, otherwise you have the inverter trying to charge the leisure batteries from its own power, all that happens is that you loose a hell of a lot of power for gaining absolutly nothing. On my MH I fitted a cross voer relay so that as soon as you switch the inverter on, one relay cuts power to the out side hook up (as you do not want that live when the inverter is on) and another relay turns the power to the charger off. On the previous MH I did do this manually - turning the charging off, but on the new MH decided to make it fully automatic. Works a treat, do not have to concern yourself with anything