JimK-NY wrote:
Joe, sorry if I sounded critical. I merely want to suggest looking at using an inverter as little as possible and getting the smallest inverter that will work. As I am sure you know, inverters can waste a lot of battery power but it seems that is not an issue for you.
Quite alright :). Generally, the inverter only gets used while we're driving, as I detailed earlier, or in cases where we either don't have shore power or its outside of generator hours to drive small electronics.
The Going Merry currently has two Group 31 Deep Cycles as her main power bank plus a Group 27 that lives under the hood on the truck and is available when the two are mated.
I designed the current setup after having recurrent problems on a trip I took through eastern oregon where I had difficulty keeping the fridge cold because the winds that would race across the open scrub lands would constantly blow the burner out while we drove down the road.
So, I used the guide from forum member MatthewB's write up on a heavy duty charge circuit and redid the whole base 12volt system in Mr. KIT, my original traveling camper so that it had #4 base wiring and a 100 amp lift gate plug that connected the 12volt charge system straight into the camper.
I originally drove this on a 300watt inverter, but the unit was being run close to its max continuous rating in this setup (And I accidentally later fried it when I failed to notice the feed wires had gotten shorted on the camper), so its replacement was the 500 Peak/400 Continuous Schumacher MSW inverter that's still in the old camper today, which ran much cooler because less of its total capacity was being used.
So, the current sizing was simply based around what we'd already been using to have adequate spare capacity on the unit to prolong its longevity and provide the power requirements we had and this time around cleaning up the power because the draw back on the original setup was the power bricks on a lot of stuff on MSW got hot after running for a while due to the bad sinewave.
