3000W Chinese Gensets Info.

Wayne Dohnal wrote:
...The converter that was in this experiment was a PD9160a. The three conventional generators were Coleman, Power King, and Honda 2800 watt units. The converter delivers 60+ amps form shore power or a Honda inverter generator, but only 25 to 50 amps from the 3 other generators. The other person experimented with resistive loads. When he added a 1400 watt heater to the mix, the max converter output from the Honda (conventional) generator went down from 45 to 41 amps, but with the Power King it went up from 35 to 58 amps. ...

Interesting. I have a PD9145 in my camper that I installed to replace an old ferroresonant converter. I have had no problem with the 9145 operating from shore power or generator. In fact, the reason I installed it was because the old converter would NOT charge the battery when running from the generator, at the most I would only get 6 amps from it. The 9145 gave me over 40 amps when running from the generator, a 1994 Onan.

I'm sure you already know this, but when performing experiments such as this you have to be sure that the output voltage from the converter is below the regulated output level, otherwise you will not get full output current. If the optional Charge Wizard is installed, that voltage could be one of three levels (13.2, 13.6, or 14.4). When I was running the experiments, I would turn on all the interior 12v lights and let them run for an hour to drain the battery, then connect the converter to either shore power or generator and measure the output current.

It ended up that the output voltage of the generator was not the problem with my old converter, it was the waveform. I took the old converter and connected it to shore power through a variac, and was able to maintain output with the input voltage down to less than 100v. The peak of the waveform from the generator was good (greater than 160v) so the PD9145 was happy. I have not tried connecting the PD9145 to the variac, that would be a good experiment.

Bob R.