Inverter for 86 Toyota Dolphin

We are talking about a Toyota 1 ton 4 cylinder (I suspect) small class C. Doubt it has a battery bank that could possibly support a 2000 watt inverter.

Hi,

For the hair drier a Xantrex ProWatt 2000 watt unit. $355 from bestconverters.

You don't have much carrying capacity in your Dolphin. Adding a large enough inverter and the batteries it would take to successfully power a hair dryer would NOT be a good idea from either a weight or cost standpoint.

Laptop and TV are completely different and are quite reasonable to power from a small inverter. Add up the total load and double it for size of inverter, as they are more efficient when NOT at 100% of capacity.

Hair dryer, Go Power 2000 watt and four batteries to power it.
Laptop, Go Power 300w sine wave, use existing battery and 12v connection.

A hair dryer is actually a quite heavy load, one of the highest that an inverter will see. My wife's hair dryer is rated at 1500 watts on high. So you'd need to be looking at a 1500 to 2000 watt inverter, pure sine is best, and around 300 AH of batteries. I'd personally let my hair air-dry, but I am about bald, it takes about 3 minutes... :) The main issue with batteries is actually less the amount of energy you will pull out of the batteries, which will be 125 - 145 amps at 12 volts nominal, since you will probably only use the hair dryer for 5 - 10 minutes a day, but the quite high rate at which you will drain the batteries for that 10 minutes. That needs good batteries and quite heavy wiring. This won't be a plug into the cigar lighter kind of deal, it will be custom made cables that are about a half inch in diameter.

Once you get into that kind of inverter you need to deal with the battery charging, you may already have a good modern 3 stage charger in your converter which would do fine, but if you have the old style Magnatech converter still installed you'll want to either look at inverters with a built in charger or a converter upgrade. You'll want around 45 - 55 amps of charger to charge the batteries you'll need reasonably quickly.

Hope this helps

Brian