Which Inverter?

[A S R]

At the moment I have a bank of 4 batteries with a total of 440ah. I don’t have an inverter. I want to be able to charge my Ebike and at other times run my filter coffee machine. I want a pure sine wave inverter too so I can charge my laptop and phone etc....
So, which are the ones to look at and more so, avoid?
Sunshine have a 2000w one on offer right now for £299. Down from £479. Are they any good?
Ta

 

[Rob Turner]

Rhino Installs have a good offer on at the moment.
Sterling Inverter wired into the all the sockets. Have a look on their website

 

[DBK]

I fitted a 1500W PSW a couple of years ago. It cost around £180 and is still working but others swear by more expensive well known brands. Whatever you do fit an isolating switch so it can be disconnected when not in use. Some of them draw an amp or so on standby.

You don't mention solar, you ideally need this to replace the power used charging.

For laptop and phone charging buy 12 volt adaptors - much more efficient.

 

[A S R]

I already have a 150w panel on the roof. Going to be adding to that once I've gone up on the roof to see how much more I can get up there.

 

[DBK]

I described my tribulations here:

https://www.motorhomefun.co.uk/forum/threads/fitting-a-1500w-inverter.156023/

The unknown is how good the sine wave is. I think for your ebike charger you definitely want a good wave form. These chargers are expensive!

Victron make some very good ones but they are expensive. Stirling are well known. I fitted one of their battery to battery chargers but the first one they sent me was duff and their instructions are less than comprehensive.

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[two]

You should have plenty of capacity with the bank you describe, but you shouldn't need such a large inverter. Get one which is powerful enough for your biggest single demand (coffee machine) and discipline yourself to run one thing at a time (one socket only, perhaps). You tend to get what you pay for with inverters in terms of the internal electronics and quality of the output. I'd avoid the cheapest.

 

[A S R]

I have a microwave I’ll need to run in the van occasionally. Obviously I’d only run one thing at a time. I actually bought the one on offer ( 2000w ) for £299 so hopefully it’ll be more than up to the job. I’d rather have too much power than not enough and constantly be maxing out a smaller one. I ordered a remote start switch to go with it too. The sine wave is almost as good as you can get so shouldn’t be a problem there either. In my Elegance there are 4 double sockets and two single ones so I think I’ll dedicate one of the doubles to “ inverter only “.

 

[Richard n Ann]

We've got a little 200w Studer psw inverter with manual changeover switch for the toothbrushes, rechargeable vacuum, 18" TV it only takes 0.2 amps on standby so it doesn't matter if it's left on all night (I'll be asleep by the time Ann switches the TV off and she won't bother switching it off ) I can manually switch to EHU for her hair dryer so didn't want automatic.

Then I fitted a cheaper 1000w Meind psw inverter for her hair straighteners which she plugs the things straight into. I've seen the output on a little oscilloscope and it looks perfect to me.

So you could go down the two inverter route.

 

[Bart]

I have a microwave I’ll need to run in the van occasionally. Obviously I’d only run one thing at a time. I actually bought the one on offer ( 2000w ) for £299 so hopefully it’ll be more than up to the job. I’d rather have too much power than not enough and constantly be maxing out a smaller one. I ordered a remote start switch to go with it too. The sine wave is almost as good as you can get so shouldn’t be a problem there either. In my Elegance there are 4 double sockets and two single ones so I think I’ll dedicate one of the doubles to “ inverter only “.

We bought the 1500w pure sine inverter from sunshine solar and it powers our microwave 900w fine.

 

[TheCaller]

At the moment I have a bank of 4 batteries with a total of 440ah. I don’t have an inverter. I want to be able to charge my Ebike and at other times run my filter coffee machine. I want a pure sine wave inverter too so I can charge my laptop and phone etc....
So, which are the ones to look at and more so, avoid?
Sunshine have a 2000w one on offer right now for £299. Down from £479. Are they any good?
Ta

I would agree that a PSW inverter is better (& may well be essential for the coffee machine). But although desirable, everything thing else you mention will almost certainly have switch mode power supplies which are very forgiving about the quality of the supply, although they do tend to buzz a bit on a MSW inverter.

If your power supply/charger says it will accept a wide range of input voltages, then it's a fair bet it will also work with a MSW inverter. Possibly not as efficiently as on a PSW, but then a PSW inverter often has higher conversion losses than a MSW inverter anyway.

The real no-no for MSW are inductive chargers, like those used by electric toothbrushes.

Having said all that, my next inverter will be PSW, even though it won't be essential!

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