Need Help on Inverter

I am needing help. I had bought a Powerbright PW3500-12 Inverter. My trailer is a 50 amp. I went to one of the battery direct place and was told that my inverter is not set up to run a 50 amp trailer and only good enough to run a 30amp trailer. He was tying to sell me a different inverter that would hook up to a 50 amp trailer.

Hi ZAZ,

What exactly are you trying to do with the inverter?

I looked up the unit and the spec sheet says it has the capability to provide 29.2 Amps. So technically the guy is right. But like Dan I am curious what you are going to power and for how long do you want to power it?

I want to get it installed in my trailer with solar panels and all that

Like Dan asked just what are you expecting to run with your inverter and as Gary said for how long ??

You can run just about anything except the air conditioner with that inverter, but be aware that when you power something of 10 amps AC draw, but you will draw approximately 100 amps DC from the batteries at that instant. You CAN supply a 50 amp AC service (its really 2 - 50 amp services - 100 amps) with the 30 amps AC you get from the inverter. You just won't have 100 amps available like the shore power is rated, just your 30 amps from the inverter. And those 30 amps from the inverter will be gone in short order, if you don't substantially up your battery capacity.

Well...it depends what you want to do with that inverter...it will take 12 VDC and
change into about 30 amps 110 VAC (3500 is 35 amp max, 30 amp constant)...

Your trailer plugs into 50 amps AC of course..but are we talking running your entire trailer off
this inverter from a battery bank? If you want to run a few things totally less than 50 amps
your model 3500 is fine...if you want to run your entire trailer including AC and microwave you
need another trailer full of (very) large batteries to draw 50 amps for any appreciable length of
times...When I dry camp with my 500 amp hours of batteries I run just the lights, sat, tv, and microwave
(micerowave for just 3-5 minutes is all..pulls 10 amps)....

Remember that 1 amp of 110 VAC power is about 10+ amps of 12 VDC battery power

the equation is simple, power from a battery is volts x current and power out must equal power in
minus any inverter inefficiency..sometimes 80-90%....so to run a 1000 watt microwave means
110 VAC times 10 amps = about 1100 watts and therefor from the battery you need 1000 watts
that mean 1000 divided by 12 = about 85 amps from the battery...that will drain a bank pretty quickly...

Bottom line is add up everything you wish to run off batteries and how long you wish to run them and
come up with a power plan...lights+tv+sat+computer+water pump...etc...

And if you dry camp a lot I would install 500 watts or more of solar panels...

My rig consists of 30amp Xantrex PSW inverter/charger/converter/switchover with 750 watts
of solar plus Xantrex solar PP controller...can go for week without running the generator with
very little microwave use of course..I have upgraded solar but cannot figure how to
change my signature yet..


Rich

BTW, I neglected to tell you to turn OFF your converter AC circuit breaker whenever using inverter power. Why? The short answer is that if you leave your converter ON (Normal) you are using battery stored power to try to charge the same batteries, an attempt at perpetual motion, which is impossible due to less than 100% energy efficiency of components. For instance, transformers are about 90% efficient, losing some energy to heat.

You should use a sub-panel and an inverter with a pass-through circuit. In this manner you can wire your system where the air-conditioning and your charger are run on shore power only and the rest of the rig runs either on inverter or pass-through power when on shore power. Look around for illustrations for this type of installation. It's much easier than one might anticipate. BTW a microwave will draw down a batt in a hurry but the rest of the rig will perform quite nicely. I chose to eliminate my charger and install a inverter/charger with pass through. It made for a cleaner install. Heartland provided me with a state of the art charger which is now on my bench, it comes in handy if for some reason I want to work on my batteries outside of the fiver. Solar is the best battery charger. I recommend you check out my list of mods for the panels I used. I got down to less than a dollar per watt when you consider the tax credit I will receive for the install. Spend your money wisely on this install, you will receive a substantial CREDIT on your taxes. A $3000 system might cost you only $2000. With that kind of break you can buy a really nice worthwhile system. Save your receipts. AND GOOD LUCK. It's looks harder than it is. Here is a great link to study. Xantrex has a great sight and each product has the spec sheet and install instruction that you can view before you can buy. You tube is a great source also. Here is the link I was telling you about.

http://www.jackdanmayer.com/rv_electrical_and_solar.htm

Looks like some serious mods here, Bill and Rich are correct on numbers, very impressive. I thought about doing some similar mods but really don't see the need to have ac when dry camping as we do so little of that anyway, i have a small pop up i kept and use when out in more remote areas. I could see the front storage being filled with several batteries, and while solar and wind generators would work excellent for charging them, running 50 amps could and would drain batts faster than the charge rate from either system or both together so a generator makes more sense from my point of view anyway, just mho.
I am not 100% sure but the rebates vary by state as well so depending on where you live and if that state will allow solar or wind power on an rv to qualify for the rebates since the mods are not on a permanant home.
I see how the mods can add up in a hurry as well, for the money there are deals to be had on generators and a person could end up with a little money ahead, especialy if you are only looking for 30 amps, again just mho.

Your lighting refrigerator and furnaces are all 12 volt powered on a Cyclone, so you can dry camp without any inverter load for these items. You can even get 12 volt TV and not even have to run that off the inverter. So you can add up the watts of all the 120 volt items you want to operate at the same time (microwave, hair dryer, DW / kids hair flat irons, etc.) to size the inverter. The current one is likely already over-kill, as the number of solar panels and storage batteries needed to size up to run air conditioners is pretty much impossible for weight and space reasons, even if the inverter you bought can handle it.

You may want to consider a solution with a 120 volt generator to charge batteries and provide AC power while dry camping, augmented with some solar. Solar alone might work for you if you never need to run your AC units. When camping at Yellowstone you did not need any alarm clock, you could just wake up by the sound of everyone's generator being started at 8 am when quiet hours ended LOL.