Inversion Therapy

I figured out what has done-in my inverter.  But I am a little confused as well.  It has to do with last weekend while I was home.  I had the van plugged in and I was running an electric space heater inside.  I had run out of propane and the back doors were all iced up.  So it was the electric heater that was keeping the whole van from freezing up.  When I unplugged from the house, it didn’t occur to me to unplug the heater inside.  My inverter is not an on-demand type, I have it on a control panel switch.

I even thought about it at the time but I knew it would stop running as soon as I pulled the plug.  I just didn't care beyond that point.  Those Monday mornings, leaving bed and the warm beautiful wife it contains, are not my best times.

Fast forward.  The next night I was hungry and turned on the inverter switch.  What I noticed was it dropped my battery voltage more than I expected.  What I didn’t notice was the little electric space heater must have kicked on.  I popped my food in the microwave and started cooking.

The offending heater...

A little side note here.  When you live with the limitations of batteries it changes your life.  Every time you turn something on you check the battery power level.  Every time. You think of what you are consuming.  I know turning on the inverter means when I flip that switch my battery level drops 1%.   I am trading that for something else. Its one of the great things about living this way.

My inverter is a Tripp Lite APS 1250, so 1,250 watts with the ability to supply up to 2500 watts for a short burst.  This was one of my early investments after buying the van.  I read about it on some van life blog and the author sounded so convinced it was perfect.  And who knows, maybe it was for him.  But for me, not so much.

Inverters come in three types.  Their basic function is to turn the 12 volt DC you have coming out of your battery bank into 110 volt AC just like you have coming out of the wall at home.  Here is the thing though, not all electricity is created equal.  We don't need to get into a bunch of complicated electrical theory here…

What comes out of them is what makes them different.  —The type of alternating current, or wave.  First off, the cheapest, is a square wave.   If you are paying less than a hundred dollars you might be thinking you are getting the deal of a lifetime.  You aren’t.  Unless it specifically mentions one of the other two types you are getting a square wave inverter.  It won't work for you.  You will regret it greatly. Appliances can’t consume this type of power without damage.  Electric motors in particular.  So don’t go here, it won’t work for you.

The better inverters have a remote control panel that
will let you turn them on from inside.

Then there is the type of inverter I bought which is called a modified sine wave.  These tend to be in the $300-$500 price range and are certainly much better than the square wave type.  But, they are not perfect either.  I could tell my microwave didn’t like it.  It was very noisy when I was running on inverted power.  Even unhappier was my guitar amp.  The electrical buzz coming out was even louder than the music.  Totally unusable, I ended up buying a small practice amp that would plug into the 12 volts.  That did solve the amplifier problem.  What I couldn’t buy at twelve volts though was a loop pedal.  They all run at nine.  So I wasn’t too happy with my purchase.  Honestly though I don't amplify much anyway.

What I should have bought was a pure sine wave type.  More expensive (naturally) but your appliances and electronics really don’t notice any difference between this and electric company power.  My microwave won’t sound like it is in agony and I will be able to hear every single missed and out of tune note on the guitar.

Yes, it is cold in my water storage area!

Finally, the APS 1250 I bought was really too small.  It can really only run one thing at a time.  Here is what happened this week when I turned on the inverter.  The space heater started running.  That little unit sucks up a lot of juice.  It is 1500 watts.  Already it was overloading my inverter by 250 watts but still within that the 2500 watts peak.  Then I started to heat up my plate of spaghetti.  The microwave add 900 more watts.  Now I am sitting at 2400.  The inverter handled it but maybe 30 seconds in it couldn’t take it any more.  Poof.

Something happened I just don't know what.

The inverter has a couple of pop-out fuses.  One on the input side for the charger (this same unit charges my batteries when I am plugged in)  Then the other fuse that should have popped out because my load was too high.  The thing is, that fuse never popped out.  So what happened?  The inverter seems totally dead.  Pushing on the fuse does nothing.

I did some inverter shopping today and it seems like getting what I want is going to cost me six hundred and change.  Plus I will have to wire in a new control panel which won’t be the most fun job ever.  But it will be the cat's meow system. The control panel will give a lot more information on my batteries and their condition.

I am still holding out thinking maybe there might be some other solution that proves my existing system not dead. That would be the best possible outcome. Van life might be cheap compared to domestic alternatives but it sure isn’t free.