Guys,
I recently purchased a Xantrex Freedom Marine 3,000 watt inverter. It has a bunch of features that I find really usefull but I don't have much of an idea of how to evaluate its performance. I can have my Bud hook it up to AC and then feed the battery charger 140 amps to a carbon load and verify the charger function. Other than that I don't know. I will try Dick Wright on Friday(cancer surgery Thursday) and get his take. I want to have some confidence before my exchange period expires. Anybody know if Xantrex in Seattle will take walk ins? That would be worth the drive for me. I'll call them on Friday, also.
Thanks,
John
John,
I have the same unit, I think you will really like it. One of the great features is that after it charges the house batteries, it will then charge the start batteries to keep them topped off. I used to have an issue with my start batteries running down unless I hooked up a second charger, but not any longer!
I hooked mine up to the control board that they sell, (link 20 or something like that) it works well and lets you change the input settings of the charge, along with keeping track of what the batteries are doing.
All in all, its has worked great for me for about 3 years now.
Jim
Jim C,
I am especially interested in how well the "Power Sharing" feature has worked for you. While the multiple battery bank charge feature is just great i bought this model to get the PS feature. Glad to hear yours has held up well and you are pleased with it.
Thanks for your response,
John
John, we have had a number of these inverters, including the marine units.
Most have worked without a hitch. We did find that a software problem kept our power sharing feature from working properly on the two lowest settings, 5 and 10 amps. The rest of the settings work fine.
There were some incompatibilities, depending on the serial numbers of the remotes and the inverters. I think that you can call Xantrex with the serial numbers, and they can tell you if they will work properly together.
The problem was actually in the Link 2000 that we used to control the inverter. And I don't believe that you can set the power share without using either the Heart remote or the Link. These units are fairly expensive, but they are necessary to get the value in the inverter features.
For what it's worth.
Tom Caffrey
Tom,
Thank you very much for the information and really nice to hear from you again. Hope all is well with you and you are getting your "chores" done before the cold weather arrives. Alaska...Brrrrrr! Nice people though.
I bought this inverter with a complete missunderstanding of just what the "power sharing" feature is and does. I read up on the SW models that are true sine wave inverters. They have a feature called "load" sharing. That is a sweet feature. It will tap the bats for the extra current to add to the shore powers limited 30 amps. It does this to prevent the shore breaker from tripping and causing profanity. To do that it must sync the inverters wave with the shore power wave and then "blend the two". The SW is the ONLY INVERTER on the market that has that feature and Xantrex has quit manufacturing that inverter. It started out as a Heart inverter and then became a Trace model and finally a Zantrex. The ones out there will be orphans but all the factory authorized dealers have bought up the spare parts at the factory so you will get at least a few years out of them if you have one. Outback and Magnum have inverters with that feature prototyped and will soon be in manufacture. They will be spendy and the Magnum is the winner.
The feature I have is "power sharing" and it alone is worth the extra effort I put in getting a Xantrex model with it. They all don't have it. It allows you to charge depleted bats while you have a serious inverter load that would be expected to trip your 30 amp shore power breaker. The bat charger looks at the AC load and "adjusts" the charge current to keep the total draw under 30 amps and prevent swearing.
With all my electronics experience I let the fact slip by that these inverters are "modified" sine wave inverters and you cannot sync that with the true sign wave of shore power without sparks and smoke.
The sync feature is found on every generator in every power station in the world....I would guess. You need that to bring a gen "on_line" for increased load handling. Some of these big off grid systems "must" also have this capability but not the mobile RV stuff. Except the SW series Zantrex...now orphaned.
Another adventure completed. Thank you all very much,
John