Inverter plugged into battery when on shore power
Dumb question Is it ok to have an inverter hooked up to your battery when plugged into shore power?
Forum Discussion
Assuming it's a good quality inverter, it can be used as a power conditioner. If you have lousy power coming in, the battery charger may still work OK but sensitive electronics won't like the bad power. By using the inverter, the electronics only see the nice clean power coming out of the inverter (buy a piece of junk inverter and this doesn't work so well).
As someone else mentioned, if the inverter can handle the startup load and the battery charger is big enough, you can run heavy loads like air/con off lower amp connections. It may take 25amps to get the air/con to kick over but once running it may drop back to 10-12amps. If you have a 15amp outlet, you may be able to run the air/con without popping the fuse.
One thing to be careful of is to make sure the inverter is wired so it can't supply power to the same circuit that is currently powered by shore power.
As someone else mentioned, if the inverter can handle the startup load and the battery charger is big enough, you can run heavy loads like air/con off lower amp connections. It may take 25amps to get the air/con to kick over but once running it may drop back to 10-12amps. If you have a 15amp outlet, you may be able to run the air/con without popping the fuse.
One thing to be careful of is to make sure the inverter is wired so it can't supply power to the same circuit that is currently powered by shore power.
