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With the increasing popularity of power inverters in recent years, your options have become more and more abundant. With the cool looks of inverters, a wealth of features, pure sine waves or modified sine waves, and a dizzying range of power segments, you may find it difficult to decide which inverter is really right for your truck and car.
After we concluded that most truckers are prone to fall into the following three misunderstandings - like inverters that look powerful (actually not), like inverters with wrong waveforms but cheap, and like inverters with useless functions.
Have you also fallen into this misunderstanding? Don't worry, this article will popularize the above three misunderstandings for you from a professional point of view, and recommend several inverters suitable for trucks.
If you've bought inverters for trucks many times, you must have been scammed a lot. The actual power of some products is much lower than the marked "rated power". When you call for help with underpowered/damaged, and the dealer tells you to run at 80% of the marked "rated power", you didn't read the instructions carefully (some instructions don't say this at all).
"Come on, so why not just label 80% of the rated power? You're just covering up the poor quality with a literal rule." Review from a real buyer on Amazon.
In fact, most dealers will not show you the proof of the actual power test of the inverter, because they are reluctant to admit that the inverter is much lower than the nominal power. We present to you two common under-power situations:
- Increase hardware performance: use larger electronic components. Professional manufacturers often deploy components at 100% to 130% of the rated power, so even if you overload the inverter, you will not experience a noticeable lack of performance. Many manufacturers reduce hardware performance to cut costs, so you need to be wary of cheap inverters on the market!
- How to test inverter hardware performance? Take the Erayak 1500 watt power inverter as an example, the design rated power is 1500 watt, and the manufacturer uses 120% performance hardware. We can know through testing that when the operating power is within 1500 watt, the output voltage of the inverter is always stable. When the operating power is between 1500 watts and 1800 watts, the inverter is overloaded and the output voltage does not change. Therefore the inverter performance is excess. Under-performing inverters can experience significant changes in output voltage as they approach or exceed rated power
- No protection function: Well-manufactured inverters are usually equipped with automatic protection procedures to prevent damage to inverter components under prolonged overload stress. Some manufacturers will increase the protection power threshold or even not set the protection power in exchange for a seemingly higher power. Manufacturers allow you to overload the inverter by not putting in protections at the cost of broken components and fires!
- How to test the inverter protection function? Take the Erayak 1500 watt pure sine wave power inverter as an example. When the inverter is overloaded, the actual output power is inversely proportional to the operating time. Between 1500 watt to 1650 watt (100%~110%), the inverter can still run for a long time. Between 1650 watt to 1800 watt, the inverter operation time is less than 5 minutes. Above 1800 watts, the runtime is less than 20 milliseconds, and the manufacturer sets the saver to allow the user to take advantage of the excess performance if necessary without damaging the circuit. Some inverters without protection function can be overloaded for a long time, but the overload current will damage the circuit, cause safety problems and shorten the life of the inverter!
(2) Modified wave and pure sine wave
There are only two types of circuit states of the correction wave inverter - switch, so it is not perfectly compatible with motor products or products that often impact the circuit, but it is relatively cheap.
Pure sine wave inverters are more compatible with products with motors (the characteristic of this type of products is that the starting power is much greater than the rated power), such as air conditioners, coffee machines, chainsaws and other equipment with better pulse circuits. Therefore, if necessary, you should consider switching to pure sine wave inverter at extra cost.
How to choose? When the inverter power is much larger than your required power (at least twice or more), you can choose a cheap modified sine wave inverter. When the inverter power is similar to the required power, the pure sine wave circuit can save the follow-up maintenance. 's concerns.
(3) There are too many functions.
Inverters are naturally welcome as they look full of technology, but the more functions they have, the more they drain, and useless functions can quickly drain your battery and possibly cause the car to not start! For example, the standby consumption of the display screen, remote control, inverter itself, etc., if there is no solar panel to charge the battery at any time, the battery will be consumed at any time.
The minimum standby power consumption of the inverter is the most important characteristic because you don't want the inverter to consume power all the time. The natural loss of most 12V truck and car batteries is 0.3A~1A, the result is 3.6W~12W, the inverter standby power consumption should be less than 12W, otherwise it will be higher than the battery loss!
It is worth noting that the inverter equipped with a display screen will generally consume more than 30W of standby power, and will consume more than 0.5 kWh of electricity a day, so when the battery capacity is not large, the truck is always on standby and there is no solar panel to charge at any time. , you need to consider whether you really need this feature!
