What's the point of this

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!]

Reply to
Roger Mills
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Could form the basis of a serious home brew UPS for prolonged power outages - if you collect a load of batteries....

Reply to
Tim Watts

Mate of mine almost entirely solar powers his entire house that way, with a load of free batteries that have come out of telephone exchanges.

The 5KW is used to do the cooking electrically using conventional appliances.

Reply to
john james

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.

-- =

Paper clips are the larval stage of coat hangers.

Reply to
Tough Guy no. 1265

Well yes, you probably *could* use it for that - but that's not the way it's being marketed.

It would also depend on how sensitive your electrical equipment is to waveform. It claims to produce a "modified" sine wave - whatever that is.

Reply to
Roger Mills

It?s a set of steps that are close to a sinewave than a square wave is.

Reply to
john james

You find it easier to lug around a car battery - and faff around connecting an inventor - than using a mains extension?

Figures.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Lug around? No, I turn the key in the ignition and it moves itself.

Reply to
Tough Guy no. 1265

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

Reply to
Brian Gaff

But those tyre marks on the other end of the lawn are a bit awkward... Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

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.

Reply to
Roland Perry

Run a battery charger off the inverter output.

Reply to
HarpingOn

Not if you don?t need a network connection.

Yes.

Or some decent deep discharge batterys for free.

Use the solar panels.

And get paid for what comes from the solar panels even if you use it yourself in places actually stupid enough to have a gross feed in tariff.

Reply to
john james

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).

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

That's not modified sine wave.

Sometimes, there's the addition of one extra

That's not modified sine wave either.

Reply to
john james

'Tis, Google it. Rectangular pulses +ve and -ve with gaps between. I designed one - filthy noisy thing.

Cheers

Reply to
Syd Rumpo

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.

Reply to
whisky-dave

An outdoor concert, run from a van with its engine running, fairly quickly?

They say it's ideal for running mobile phones!

I agree, they've given an extremely poor indication of its use.

Cheers

Reply to
Syd Rumpo

Yes, there's no point in buying the non-sine ones nowadays.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=15P13_W4_D3&utm_content=Product-1&utm_campaign=15P13-20

"Ideal for powering devices such as laptops". Fuck me, that's overkill isn't it?

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

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