Mintball has had an inverter since she was launched. The original one was a 70-100 Watt one from Maplin which was good enough to power things like dad’s shaver.
Then we replaced that with a 300W UPS which worked well but was a bit too big.
We then went to a 700 watt one and that allowed us to put in a full sized mains fridge ( see Gas and Electricity ).
This Easter that inverter died – it smelt of burned electronics and complained of low voltage input even when the engine was running.
So we went for a 1500W (3000 Peak) Pure Sine Wave inverter, but to do that we needed to upgrade the cables from the batteries. So we bought several metres of 50mm cable (it’s welding cable which is made from a lot of very fine strands and is very flexible )
We also picked up some new Battery Master Switches – the plan being to move the BMSs to the Positive lines (rather than having one single one in the Negative).
We made up a new set of cables with brazed connections and redid quite a bit of the existing wiring to tidy things up and improve things in general.
We wired up the inverter (which has a bank of fuses across the back rather than one big fuse) and powered it up.
And it all worked.
The old inverter had a connection for a remote control which we’d basically used to allow us to use a couple of small switches to turn the inverter on from the middle and front cabins, however this inverter comes with a rather jolly remote panel with a battery monitor and a on/off switch. We’ve put this control panel in the kitchen so you can do the whole power up inverter and then power up the fridge all from one central location.
We actually powered the fridge up without the engine running which is something we couldn’t have done on the previous inverter.
The real test is in just under a week when we take the boat out for a few days.