Inverter for 86 Toyota Dolphin
Grateful for recommendations for an inverter. I mainly need something for my laptop and occasional use of a hair dryer. turiyahill
Forum Discussion
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
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
