Is an RV generator worth it?

HadEnough wrote:

CoeyCoey wrote:

2oldman wrote:

HadEnough wrote:
Yikes. 00 is where I'd be. At least.

Yeah. His post seems to indicate he's running 4 separate #10 to the inverter. Length of wire, connections and TIME are what make #10 for 30 amps risky. Running high-amp draws requires extra due diligence. Charts are one thing, operation is another. I speak from experience.

I'll go by what engineers have discovered rather than the anecdotal experiences of someone online, thanks. Also, been an aircraft mechanic for over 25 years, and never have I seen an issue from using the wire sizes stated in the charts.

Well, you didn't name the distance yet, now did you?

If we're having a pee niss contest here, things I've designed and built are still in space and make the news on occasion, as they send data back to Earth regarding plasma levels in the heliosphere.

But I do stand corrected in the sense this is an inverter connection you're talking about. I had thought this was your run from the monster alternator you'll need to install to the battery bank.

In any case, get the generator fixed. As an engineer you should already see that you absolutely cannot run your air conditioner off the setup you propose.

Your LRA is around 3500 watts. At 12v that's 291 amps between the inverter a d batteries not counting losses from the inversion process. So round to 300 amps on those wires.

You're at 1500 watts all day long running that air conditioning. That's 125 amps per hour battery draw all day long. Or... If running that engine you need to increase the idle and have about a 200amp rated alternator to keep up. With no other load. Except at idle, even high idle, a 200amp alternator puts out less than half its rated current. Or put another way, you can't do this. You can't get an alternator that will keep up with an RV air conditioner. You'd have to use a belt driven compressor.

By the time you Rube Goldberg all that together, you would have made a far better choice just fixing the Onan.

Listen genius. It doesn't matter the length, because even at 24 feet, the gauge for 30 amps is still 10 gauge. And if you had any reading comprehension skills, you would have realized I am not the one with the broken Onan, and that I mentioned the alternator would be 120vac for my setup, and that my batteries would be 24vdc. I will have 20kWh of battery power and run the AC for over 10 hours, and use the 120vac alternator to produce 3,000W at 1,200 rpm if I need it. Also, the intermittent LRA would only require a 12 gauge wire from the batteries to the inverter. If you are such a great engineer, how come you don't know that continuous current requires larger wires than intermittent current?

So, go take your know-it-all self and join the club of the other know-it-alls with poor reading comprehension skills I have already admonished for spewing ignorant **** on this forum in the week that I have been here.