I see that Maplin have a 5000watt mains inverter on offer for £350 instead of £600
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What possible use is it? How many people have got 12v batteries capable of delivering 500 amps for more than a few minutes (more likely a few
*seconds"!)?
It worries me that the uninitiated are going to buying these things to run lots of mains equipment off their car batteries - only to find that they're totally useless. [I note that there are no reviews!]
On Tue, 17 Mar 2015 20:52:19 -0000, Roger Mills w= rote:
I had a 3kW one. I often used it to run things like a lawnmower or a he= dge trimmer from the car battery instead of finding the extension cord. = If I had a huge place, I could have a few people all mowing and trimmin= g at once. Just leave the engine running.
Sounds a bit expensive as well even with the discount. You would need some serious sized battery leads and about five heavy duty lorry batteries to stand any chance of being able to use it near its limit and of course what about charging them up? Brian
In message , at 20:52:19 on Tue, 17 Mar 2015, Roger Mills remarked:
Stick it in a canal boat, or note that some of the smaller models are in Maplin's "trucking products" category. In both cases much bigger batteries available than in a car.
It's often a square wave with the addition of an elongated zero section at each zero crossing. Sometimes, there's the addition of one extra voltage step between zero and the peak.
Fine for resistive loads.
Works with many inductive loads, but may run at reduced power, and cause extra eddy current heating in laminated cores (with audiable noise).
Not so good with capacitive loads and capacitor dropper supplies, where the impedance of the capacitor is reduced by the high frequency components, causing higher current than appliance designed for, and usually extra power dissipation somewhere.
If you need them, pure sine wave inverters have come down very significantly in price over last couple of years. They are basically a sine wave generator coupled to a power amplifier with a 230V RMS output. The amplifier is class D, i.e. high frequency switching, so the efficiency is almost as high as the "modified" sine wave inverters (or it can even match, as they're generally better designed, and the efficiency of the appliance can also be higher in some cases).
boats I know someone that brough £10K worth of solar panels for his ~70f t+ steel canal boat.
I think he had 4 gel batteries of about 800Ah each.
I'd have thought they'd be of limited interest, but still a possible bargin g especailly if you want to run anything decent from wind or solar. But as you say of very limite duse for the average maplin shopper.
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