|
Too close to Raleigh, NC | In my bill-paying job I went through qualifying cheap inverters for use with laptop power adapters (an inelegant soultion at best, but when you have 30,000 people who might want to use one and the company is paying for them you look for cheap alternatives). After much testing it became obvious that not all inverters or DC adapters are created equal - we ruined a few batteries of different types by trying to drive the adapters with the inverters (vehicle DC -> inverter for AC -> adapter to DC -> battery/run DC-powered unit under test).
Most modified-sine wave inverters these days have enough voltage steps and are not too noisy so they do not cause problems with most battery chargers. We did nuke a couple of camcorder batteries by accident and overheated a few power supplies in the course of testing. My experience was that the straight battery chargers (dumb converters) for DC-powered tools were fine with even the cheap inverters. The more sophisticated the power adapter the more likely it was to overheat or to not overheat but destroy the battery.
Bottom line is to get an inverter large enough so that under maximum load you are at only about 2/3 capacity of the inverter rated output. There was no pattern to the failures we saw so you are kinda on your own to determine if whatever you have will work for what you need to do. | |
|
How does AC power relate to DC?
