Golden_HVAC wrote:
I have a total of 415 rated watts on my RV. I get about 21 amps peak, or about 100 - 120 amp hours per day. Not nearly as much as the rated output, but that is what it is.
My RV uses about 35 amp hours per day to run the refrigerator, CO detector and propane detector. I have changed over several lights to LED, and have a 300 watt inverter to run the TV and satellite system when dry camping. I can camp for about 5 days before needing to recharge a little bit, or can avoid recharging at all by not watching so much TV.
To run a refrigerator, you will first need to figure out how many watts the refrigerator will use. Say it is a 2 door with a 300 watt compressor without ice maker (probably don't want to use the RV water to make ice anyway). It can run about 5 hours per day, for a total use of about 1,500 watts.
If it has a ice maker, then the 300 watt heater in the ice maker will need to be taken into account, along with a lot more run time on the compressor, so figure about 3,000 watts per day, and minimum 1,800 watt pure sign wave inverter.
Even the smaller refrigerator would require about 1,000 watt pure sine wave inverter to run the compressor. Start up wattage is about 3 times the running watts, and might drop the voltage to low if the inverter is not large enough.
A low cost modified sine wave inverter is not going to work. They do not produce a sign wave clean enough to run a high torque motor.
I would recommend Outback, or another higher quality inverter. After all you want it to last for many years, and provide reliable power.
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Fred.
Very useful, thanks.
I don't mind getting a good quality components up front - this rig will be used for 8+ years so I'm trying to get everything as close to ideal as I can get. I'm trying to install the maximum (within a sensible limit of course) amount of solar system on this rig. I may still carry a generator for emergency use though.
