Microwaves on inverters.

time2roll wrote:

Shot-N-Az wrote:
I suck at math, and I’m no electrician, but real world experience is that I can microwave on my inverter but it takes a lot longer than normal.

Is that a sine wave inverter?
Very common for a MSW to cook slower as the peak wave voltage underdrives the megatron.

People might remember my tests on that for PWS vs MSW to heat a cup of water to a certain temp in the MW starting from the same cold temp. Yes it took longer with MSW to reach that temp.

However, in real life cooking a spud, Eg, you stick a fork in it to see if it is soft yet. How soft is soft? It turns out that you can stick the fork in at about the same time with MSW. It is soft "enough".

Same with frozen veggies. How soft is soft enough? Turns out you can over-do it with PSW and that the MSW for the same time is "enough".

So this is not a lab test using instruments.

If you are heating something and you need to let it cool down before you can eat it, you just wasted AHs. However some cooking does require you to heat it up just so, to "bring out" whatever, even if you then need it to cool before you can eat it and not burn your mouth.

I had no trouble with the 2000w MSW inverter to do everything with a newer MW. However, this 1991 MH has a 1991 Dometic "RV MW" that will not run at all on MSW. Turns out it runs perfectly on PSW. I had the opportunity to get a PSW 2000w so I did instead of swapping out the 1991 MW.

Several different brand, newer (say 2003 on?) MWs do run on MSW just fine except "slower" (when lab testing per above), when we tried them out in various RV set-ups in the slide- in camper and 5er we had.

It is only when you are operating on the margins that any of this matters. If you have lots of battery and proper size inverter (MSW or PSW) with proper wiring, you can run any newer MSW MW of the matching watts and not notice any real difference for most jobs.