How many amps does my inverter provide

landyacht318 wrote:

You say 80 watts is their continuous duty limitation, I say 60 .Many 12v receptacles will say 120 or 150 watts maximum, but this is wishful thinking and one best enjoy the smell of melting plastic if they are intending to ask them to pass this much current for more than a minute.

In the olden days back when vehicles were built of all steel and the dash was all steel with a little hard plastic top, those cig lighter outlets were truely designed to handle up to 15A.. They had to, since every car which was equipped with one of those came with a cig lighter that you pushed in to heat and it would pop out when ready for you light your cig..

Those outlets were fused at 15A on the BACK of the outlet which is 180W for your information. Pop that fuse and you had to remove the outlet from the dash to replace.

Yeah, I do have a 1970s car with one of those and I still have the cig lighter that goes in it..

Have used heavy spot lights in that along with those 1970s 12V vacuums (they made more noise than they did actual work), 50W Mobile two way radio telephone (think like "5 O" TV series when they wanted a phone patch), CBs, 50W 2mtr Ham radio equipment, .5 cu ft 12V absorbsion fridge and even used 12V air compressors to fill low tires..

I have never had burnt contacts in any of my vehicles or any other calamities that you mention.

Keeping in mind that they were NEVER designed for 24/7/365 permanent high power use, they were designed for a quick high wattage burst then off (think as in how the old fashion cig lighter worked) they provide a universal power port which is readily available, easy to use and pretty much every vehicle in the world built since the 1990s come with at least one as a standard item.

The issue you have had is not the socket but the PLUG, not all plugs are well designed and that IS the problem you have had..

Cheap plugs have very poorly designed negative contacts, often not much more than a light ga wire with barely enough spring load to prevent the plug from backing out..

The fix is easy, change the plug..

There are better plug designs which have a wide contact area on the negative contacts which have a higher spring load.. Those do not backout easy and are often rated 15A or better.



And for the record, a few years ago when "car PCs" were the rage and laptops were insanely priced, I built a poor mans car PC for my DD to use while traveling.. Found a low power system board with a 1.6ghz Atom processor (27W for the system board), 500 GB HD a 12" TV with VGA input and ran it off a 400W inverter.. All told the PC wattage with the TV monitor was just at 80W.. Yeah, didn't burn up the plug or outlet, didn't have any issues with PC quitting either..