Honda EU2000i or A/C issue. Help

okan-star wrote:
Wayne back in 2004 or so I saw a pic you posted of your rig, Ive seen you at the new safeway once and once heading twards Sac on 50 buy El Dorado hills blvd I was in a white dodge dually with an okanagan towing a enclosed trailer to work in the bay area
Sounds like a good time at the rubicon , do you take your camper up and stay around loon lake in it as a base station?
I woulnt be suprised if we know so of the same guys that go to the ruicon
Coffee sounds good somtime , by the way my name is Ed

I worked ar San Quentin for five years, and lived in the parking lot during the week. My 1988 Bigfoot had an inverter (1988) only, and it was almost useless. I setup the complete electrical system, and decided the A/C (polar Cub) and Microwave was the only things that could not run off the battery with small inverters. So I used the Honda, and avoided the expense of the expensive inverters. I did install 130 watts of solar, which kept up with my battery usage. I ran my TV and related stuff and my laptop with $30 inverters. It kept my electrical system pretty simple, and inexpensive with common parts. Perhaps I am old fashion, but to me, it appears to use a big inverter you have to have a large battery bank, then you need lots of solar to maintain the batteries, or run the generator. I prefer to use my one battery, small solar, and run the Honda occasionally.

I drive to the Rubicon with my Samurai, and camp on the trail. My last run, I went in at Wentworth and came out at Tahoe. That was a long ride. The year before I went in Loon to Spider and back. This will only be my third run with my Samurai. I can't say the Rubicon is my favorite trail, but it is convenient.

When I get back from this trip, I will send a PM.

Tim, you have ran quite a few trails that would interest me. The Rubicon is a long drive for you, but if you enjoy beautiful scenery and big rocks it is great. There are quite within 4 to 5 hours of me, and I hope to run some of them next year. It seams I am getting older faster, so I gotta hurry.

I guess we are hijacking your thread with this Rubicon stuff, sorry about that. I am pleased you found and fixed your problem. I have to admit I never would have thought everything would be ran through an inverter. I learned something.

Wayne

Well do a look for on here for which difficult, begin capacitor to get. I got my own on ebay. The most severe, aspect about setting up it was eliminating all the screws from the A/C wrapp.

okan-star wrote:
Ripit thats great that you got the AC to run on the inverter .I looked at the specs for the me 2012 and it is rated at 3700 watts for 5 seconds surge so with what the RVP tech told you- AC start of 3600 that makes sence . It did say the me2012 is a 2000 watt inverter though , the 2500 watt is a me 2512.

I might have to try mine to see if it will work just for sh**`s and grins , I have a zantrex xm 1800 thats surge rated for 3600 watts.
But I dont think I would ever use it that way , because as soon as you give the batterys that much of a hit you have to start the gen to recover anyway , might as well just run the AC on the gen in the first place, more reason since you have a tundra refer
Also the hotter it is the higher the start and run watts for the AC it likly to go
How many batterys do you have , when I had a Apex 9.5 it had space for 2 , 6 volts under the rear dinette seat , down in a box in the basement .Is that how yours it too ?

Wayne back in 2004 or so I saw a pic you posted of your rig, Ive seen you at the new safeway once and once heading twards Sac on 50 buy El Dorado hills blvd I was in a white dodge dually with an okanagan towing a enclosed trailer to work in the bay area
Sounds like a good time at the rubicon , do you take your camper up and stay around loon lake in it as a base station?
I woulnt be suprised if we know so of the same guys that go to the ruicon
Coffee sounds good somtime , by the way my name is Ed

3
Hey Ed, I have Two 12 volt flood batteries in mine. I think they are called "Powervolt" and Yes they're in the same location in the basement under the rear dinette. There is room for 4 batteries in the basement compartment. I haven't used tis camper enough to even know what my daily watt usage is yet and it will defiantly matter wether my wife is on the trip or not. Lol. So time will tell if I should add another solar panel and more batteries or not.
I'd sure like to run the rubicon with you guys. I said I was going to run it a few years ago but never made time. I used to run with some jeepers from here in the Dallas area. We ran Las Cruces Nm, Moab,Colorado and Clayton Ok. I still have my jeep 83 bobbed Scrambler with lots mods, so it's not out of the question yet.

Hope to see you guys on the trail sometime.

Tim aka "Ripit"

Ripit thats great that you got the AC to run on the inverter .I looked at the specs for the me 2012 and it is rated at 3700 watts for 5 seconds surge so with what the RVP tech told you- AC start of 3600 that makes sence . It did say the me2012 is a 2000 watt inverter though , the 2500 watt is a me 2512.

I might have to try mine to see if it will work just for sh**`s and grins , I have a zantrex xm 1800 thats surge rated for 3600 watts.
But I dont think I would ever use it that way , because as soon as you give the batterys that much of a hit you have to start the gen to recover anyway , might as well just run the AC on the gen in the first place, more reason since you have a tundra refer
Also the hotter it is the higher the start and run watts for the AC it likly to go
How many batterys do you have , when I had a Apex 9.5 it had space for 2 , 6 volts under the rear dinette seat , down in a box in the basement .Is that how yours it too ?

Wayne back in 2004 or so I saw a pic you posted of your rig, Ive seen you at the new safeway once and once heading twards Sac on 50 buy El Dorado hills blvd I was in a white dodge dually with an okanagan towing a enclosed trailer to work in the bay area
Sounds like a good time at the rubicon , do you take your camper up and stay around loon lake in it as a base station?
I woulnt be suprised if we know so of the same guys that go to the ruicon
Coffee sounds good somtime , by the way my name is Ed

okan-star wrote:
... I live in Pleasant Valley 8 or 10 miles from you and it would take me less time to old school drive to your house , then to type with 2 fingers and download things to a site and post them. ...

I am very busy the next two weeks, preparing for a three day run through the Rubicon trail in my Samurai. When I get back, we can meet for coffee. I live in the suburbs of El Dorado (Mud Springs).

Wayne

Specularius wrote:

Ripit wrote:
Tada!!!! It's working. Well I call Rvcomfort tech support and the guy said "that Honda 2000 won't run that A/C especially if it was hotter than 85 degrees. He gave me the max start up amps and voltage and told me to call Honda after I reminded him that all of YOU do just fine. He had no answer for that but he said to call Honda and ask them if it could handle the loads. Honda said probably not. So I thought............and thought some more. I just couldn't figure out way the AC wouldn't try to start. So I called Magnum Inverters tech dept and explained what was going on. To make a long story shorter the AC drop out was set too high and the inverter was shutting down the power when the draw was too high on genny. Anyway problem solved. Thanks for all the help guys. Ttyl

So you adjusted the inverter in the Honda?

I adjusted the drop out settings on the magnum inverter in the camper. I have a Magnum ME2012 2500 watt inverter in my camper. My a/c will actually run for about 3 hrs off the batteries with this inverter. But I have a Honda 2000 that works now too.

Reddog1 wrote:
Thanks okan-star. I personally have problems understanding why you would want to run an A/C through an inverter. Maybe there is a benefit I am not aware of. If it is intended to run the A/C off of the batteries, it sure does not look very logical to me. But there are a lot of things that don't look logical to me.

Wayne

Wayne, I think the intent is for the Magnum to function as a UPS. That way if your power source goes away you still run from the inverter without missing a beat. I think the input AC feeds directly to the output so long as the input voltage is "good" so while it goes through the inverter box, I don't think it's running off the inverter.

Properly wired the A/C would probably not be wired to it at all but I assume the install was just done to the incoming power lead to minimize modification to the existing system. The ideal setup would be for most of the AC items to run downstream of the Magnum and the things you know you wouldn't ever run from the interter on their own subpanel directly from shore/generator.

From what I understand to run an air cond of an inverter you need a huge inverter and enough batterys with it , somthing to do with an inverter limited to about 150% of its rated load , but a generator will produce much more than that for long enough to start it, like a 2k inverter compards to a 2k generator .
I wish I was savy enough to post diagrams of things like this, and had a conection speed high enough to do it but Im old school , more hands on understanding
I live in Pleasant Valley 8 or 10 miles from you and it would take me less time to old school drive to your house , then to type with 2 fingers and download things to a site and post them .
I dont know why people would wire that way either
You also said you woulnt buy a newer Cub with the info provided , I would have no use for one either, maybe it would be a good fit with a on board onan gen ,I ripped mine out to use a honda
You for sure dont want to wire an inverter output to a breaker in a panel fed by shore power and just flip diffrent breakers on and off , it may work , but your one flip away from disaster, you need a inverter subpanel and to rewire the circuts you want feed to it . Then when the tranfer switch sences ac power it passes thru the inverter

Ripit wrote:
I'm not really sure exactly how to the drop out works.

I thought I explained it here:

wnjj wrote:
It's all good. Just to clarify, your unit is both a converter (battery charger) and inverter (12v to 120v AC). When the AC input power is good from a shore cord or generator, it charges the batteries along with sending the power to all of your AC circuits. When the AC demand exceeds the supply, it scales back the battery charging. When the AC power input voltage drops too low (dropout level) it assumes the power is insufficient and switches to inverter mode. The idea is to keep AC power inside the camper when outside power goes away without a manual switch. Since the generator was loading down when the A/C started up, the voltage dropped enough to trigger the switch to inverter mode, followed by cutting out since it couldn't power the A/C. Lowering that dropout level allows that temporarily low voltage through long enough for the A/C to spin up and the generator to recover.

Thanks okan-star. I personally have problems understanding why you would want to run an A/C through an inverter. Maybe there is a benefit I am not aware of. If it is intended to run the A/C off of the batteries, it sure does not look very logical to me. But there are a lot of things that don't look logical to me.

Wayne