Saturday, January 28, 2023

Inverter Review

 Over the course of the last decade I have purchased a few dc/ac power inverters. Here is my take on some of them.

VertaMax 3000 watt pure sinewave inverter, purchased from Windy Nation in 2018. Piece of **** company, inverter was okay until it wasn't. When it worked, it worked well. Did the job I asked it to, which was run a refrigerator from a battery system.  Then a month or so after warranty ended the problem started.  The 110 Volt AC output would stop intermittently. It would stop at all of the outlets. Then restart all by itself a few days later. Or maybe an hour later. Then stop again. The only support I got from the company was rude and condescending. I had an electronics repair company check it out, they had it for four months and could not figure out what was wrong with it. Windy Nation would not supply a wiring diagram for the unit and wanted 60% of the cost of a new unit to repair what they said was the "most common problem." Which they said was something they called a mosfet. Something they apparently knew about. The electronics guy checked out the "most common problem" and replaced the parts, but that did not fix the issue. I recommend do not buy this inverter.

The next inverter for review is the Giandel 4000 watt pure sine wave inverter. I bought this unit in october of 2020 and it has worked well for me. I use it to power a refrigerator from a battery bank. The original battery bank is 8 6volt lead acid golf cart batteries. I was running the fridge 24 hours a day from this until the battery capacity started giving out. Now I have the unit on a single LiFePO4 200 amphour battery and I run the unit all day during sunshine and at night I put the fridge back on grid power because I don't understand the LiFePO4 battery capacity yet. And the meter I bought to help me with that has to be manually reset each morning.

But back to the inverter. I have not had a single issue with this inverter.  Well, I have had one problem, but I don't think it was the inverter. It had a shutdown because it had a high voltage input from the DC system. When the sun is big and bright the voltage from the panels gets higher. I think maybe the battery monitoring system shutdown battery input and then the solar panel voltage went to the inverter maybe, and caused a high voltage shutdown of the inverter.

So far the inverter has performed like a champ.And that may be because I oversized it a lot for the job I have it doing. The fridge typically runs 130 watts when it is on. That is way below the size of this unit. The fridge gets up to 560 watts a couple times per day, but the Giandel handles that like a champ. But the dang thing is heavy. I didn't find the weight in the specs at amazon. I mounted the thing on my outside wall, and I placed a couple of L shaped brackets under it to help support the weight, as I was worried it might fall. Thats just me being a worry wart, it probably would not do that. I think if you are looking at inverters, this one might do the job for you.

I have a few more I can review but no more for this post.

I hope this provides some good info for you.


2 comments:

  1. MORE Reviews please Vern. I was looking at the Windy City solar kit and about to buy it.

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    1. Will do, I have at least one more planned. Windy City solar did not make me happy. Personally, I will never buy anything else from them. That being said, other people have and do and are happy with them.

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