The Steamboating Forum

Anyone care to state their preference in inverters? There are a couple of brands that I have not had good luck with especially in a dirty/dusty environment. I have dealt with multiple brands and not sure I have a favorite so looking to see what is used and why.

I've gone through several inverters in an under hood environment. Like you, I've had trouble with dirt and dust building up on the PC board. Poof!

The problems stopped when I found some open cell foam and covered the air intake of the unit. This one has a fan. You have to wash the foam out once in a while with soap and water so make it removable. Velcro.

As important was my giving up on cheap inverters. Any unit that does not have a sin wave output is poison. I went nuts trying to get things like a soldering pistol to work right. Just loud buzzing and no heat. Other units, ditto. As soon as I bought a sine wave unit, everything started to work. Also, the old units jammed my ham radio and car radio with noise.

Humidity problems, No advice. I suspect that you could open up the unit and spray both sides of the PC board with clear acrylic. This solution has been around since WW2.

I had one unit that wouldn't work in a larger boat that had ground fault interrupters. The neutral output line of the inverter was at a different potential than the ground. This was an expensive 6000 watt marine rated unit. A volt meter should show no voltage between the ground and neutral.

I settled on an AC Tech brand drive that is NEMA 4X rated. https://www.valinonline.com/products/esv222n02yxc I thought the price was reasonable for the specs. I'll update the thread once I install & start using the drive.