Luxury Coach Lifestyles - View Single Post - Inverter Installation
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Old 05-13-2008, 07:42 AM   #8
fulltiming
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Texas
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Please give us some insight into what you are trying to accomplish. It is certainly easy enough to add a sub-panel for the inverter. I am surprised that you have acquired such a large inverter.

I indicated that 4-6 hours with the ice maker, in addition to my other loads would pull down my 2-8D batteries. There are a number of loads on most coaches that can be noticeable. For example, lights, computers, TV's, satellite receivers, the DC power to a propane refrigerator, as well as coffee makers, hair dryers, microwave ovens used for a few minutes at a time conspire to suck current out of the battery bank quickly (and heavy power draws such as coffee makers, hair dryers and microwaves are typically limited to use one at a time with the other loads on the inverter).

It appears that you are proposing potentially running an air-conditioner or electric heaters off the batteries. Although running an AC unit off the inverter has been done on some Marathon Prevost conversions although they are using 24 volt systems, it requires a significant increase in the number of batteries and a significant upgrade to alternator capacity to effectively meet the loads when the engine is running and to recharge all those batteries if the units are run when the engine is not running. Driving down the road with the air conditioner powered from batteries will work but needs an alternator sized to handle the load being placed on the batteries by the inverter. A friends Marathon has 6-8D house batteries and a 270 amp 24 volt alternator.

A new all electric Newell uses a pair of 2800 watt inverters, 6-8D house batteries, 2-8D starting batteries, a 400 amp alternator and a 20kw generator. Certainly if enough money is thrown at additional batteries, larger wiring, larger alternators, etc, it can be done but large loads run for an extended period of time, such as heaters and air conditioners are the reason 12.5kw - 20kw generators are used.

I am confused as to why you would want to be able to draw 40+ amps AC through an inverter from your batteries unless you have a 120 volt residential refrigerator. Your chart indicates you could be drawing as much as 57 to 64 amps through one leg which would be feed from your inverter. Certainly even your 4.8kw inverter would not support that load without tripping it's internal breaker.

EDIT:
As an example of the load of one air conditioners, my coach has two 8D AGM batteries. These batteries are rated at 250 amp-hrs each. In parallel, these would provide 500 amp-hrs. Since you don't want to draw down a battery bank past about 50%, this is a usable 250 amp-hrs of 12 volt power. Assuming 100% efficiency from the inverter, which it isn't, that would provide 25 amp-hrs of 120 volt AC power. A single air condition using approximately 13 amps at 120 volts would run for less than 2 hours with NO other loads on the inverter before needing to recharge the batteries. Adding additional batteries will extend the operational period but then the issue of recharge comes into play necessitating increasing the alternator size proportionally. I hope that helps some.
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