inverter question

Ok, thanks for the input.........I have been turning it off, and now will continue........I was just hoping to be lazy and not have to get up out of bed at night to turn off the invertor after I turn the TV off. Oh well......so I won't be quite so lazy LOL.
Brian

The idea in the Mootorhomes is the same with RV Trailers to never let your batteries get down below their 50% charge state which is around 12.0VDC. If you have enough battery capacity to not let that happen then by all means leave your INVERTER on.

When I am running on my batteries I keep a good eye on the DC VOLTAGE PANEL and when it get to 12.0VDC then I start shutting things down. We RV trailer guys usually have to wait until 8AM the next morning before we can use our generators to re-charge our batteries...

If you are continuing to drop your batteries below the 50% charge state then I would power down things. Your batteries will not perform well for you if you constantly let them get below the 50% charge state and not get re-charged right away. You will eventually have to replace them or suffer big time poor performance.

I suspect your battery bank is a large one so do the tricks of the trade to take care of them. Worse nightmare for us is when it goes dark on us at 10:30 at night haha...

It would be neat to have an alarm go off when the battery DC voltage drops to around 12.0VDC like the BOGART Trimetric TM-2025-RV monitor does.

Roy Ken

When bondocking I shut mine off at night and when I leave the MH. If I put in a home refer it will be on it's own 1000W PSW inverter that will stay on all the time. My bedroom clock has a battery back up so it's only the micro that needs resetting if the blinking bothers me enough.

Our inverter was on when we purchased the coach in 2004 and has been on ever since. We don't boon dock very often but when we do our batteries still have sufficient power for the coffee maker in the morning before starting the generator. I like the inverter operating to keep the electric clocks (bedroom and microwave)and my computer running during the night.

Lots of people leave the inverter on permanently. Full timers who use residential fridges, solar power and boondock a lot, for example. It all depends on your set up. If you don't have something using the inverter for power, and you have a small battery bank, by all means turn it off. Many inverters power themselves off in that situation, and draw very little power until they detect a load.

Brian

1BryNelson wrote:
You definitely want to turn the Inverter off for the night. As stated before, the Inverter itself puts a drain on the batteries. Most appliances like microwave have built in power draw also. Ain't nothing like gettin woke up in middle of night by low battery alarm.

What he said!

You definitely want to turn the Inverter off for the night. As stated before, the Inverter itself puts a drain on the batteries. Most appliances like microwave have built in power draw also. Ain't nothing like gettin woke up in middle of night by low battery alarm.

I only turn on the inverter if I need it to power something as it has it's own parasitic load on the batteries even when nothing is calling for power. Can be from 1-5 amps depending on the inverter.