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I have camper with build in converter that also has 120V breakers on it. Recently I added electric element for water heater and hard wire it to AC breaker. The switch on the wall has small light tha...
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The low reading could very well be due to the non-sine waveform. Most cheaper multimeters, and some not so inexpensive ones, do not show accurate RMS values for non-sinusoidal AC waveforms. Typically they are actually responding to either the peak or the average voltage with the output scaled to show an RMS voltage for a sine wave input. (I think the average responding meters are more common.)
Particularly if the glow is rather faint, your guess of the pilot light responding to voltage from the neutral (which is floating on your inverter) is reasonable, especially if the light is a neon light. The pilot should be wired between the switched hot and the neutral, rather than the switched hot and ground; the safety ground should not be used as a current carrying conductor in an AC circuit, even for an itsy-bitsy pilot light. Fixing it would also cure the phantom illumination, assuming that's what the cause is.
Particularly if the glow is rather faint, your guess of the pilot light responding to voltage from the neutral (which is floating on your inverter) is reasonable, especially if the light is a neon light. The pilot should be wired between the switched hot and the neutral, rather than the switched hot and ground; the safety ground should not be used as a current carrying conductor in an AC circuit, even for an itsy-bitsy pilot light. Fixing it would also cure the phantom illumination, assuming that's what the cause is.
