trace inverter

JohnEd · April 22, 2009, 06:09:52 PM

Cody,

Go to Zantrex's site and look down the list of features. One feature that I thought I NEEDED was the "load sharing". With that you can run down your bats and start the gen with ac loads active. In this scenario the ac loads are significant and when added to the bat charger load, at full charge, an overload condition should exist and the geny breaker or the 30 amp pole breaker should trip. Now imagine it is 40 degrees, 20 mph with gusts to 35 and it is pouring rain....the circuit breaker keeps tripping and you need to get the batteries back up. With LS your inverter looks at your load on the AC side and only lets the charger load rise to a level you select....say 29 amps. No more breaker popping! There are a lot of Zantrex models that will do that SL and the 458 is one model series that does. The "Freedom Marine" and freedom does also and there are more. Most of the Zan models do not but they are one of the few that offer it at all.

The one you are looking for is the Full Sine Wave Zantrex that5 has the "load Splitting", or whatever they call it. In that scenario you are hooked to the pole at 30 amps and you turn on the third roof AC unit when you get home. A 30 amp breaker will not handle that load but the FSW will go to the bats for additional power and with phase synchronization it will combine power from the inverter with the pole and give you, say, 42 amps of power total and do it automatically and when the load drops the inverter will take some of the pole power and charge the bats as fast as the avail power will allow. Whew, what a yarn.

Dick Wright has given up his franchise for Zantrax products and has gone over to Magnum. They also will do the load sharing and load splitting stuff. Last I checked the sophisticated FSW model still had not made it into production. It sure does have a lot of sweet specs and features. It is also brand new and there are none available at "used" prices. Set your sites on a FSW Zantrex 3.0 to 4.0 with full features....like Sean has. Name dropping here and I hope it was him I'm thinking about.

Good luck Cody,

John

cody · April 22, 2009, 07:00:06 PM

Another question that has come up now is whether the oxygen machine requires pure sine wave or not, that I'll try to find out tomorrow. It would be so much easier if i could just stop at a truck stop now and then and just air her up lol.

JohnEd · April 22, 2009, 08:54:04 PM

Cody,

Tom Cafferty clued me in to some things. Namely that all MSW aren't created equal. The Zan 458 and Freedom seem to run stuff that is supposed to take FSW. If you can, that saves a lot of money in Inverter costs. Most of the incompatibility has been with cell phone chargers and tv's and specific typo\es of motors like split phase or capacitive start. I don't remember it all but some motors fry on MSW and somebody with a better memory will have to advise you on which is which. I have concluded that the Zantrex has finer steps in their MSW so it must look more like FSW to a lot of stuff. Still, want to be sure the inverter will be compatible with any load? FSW!

Anyway, Good luck,

John

JackConrad · April 23, 2009, 05:05:21 AM

We have the HeartInterface Freedom 12 volt 2500 watt inverter. The only thing in our bus that will not work properly on our inverter is the digital clock radio in the bedroom. When on inverter, the clock runs fast. Since our microwave/convection oven is not wired to operate off the inverter, I cannot comment of how well it would work. The only things in our coach that are not wired through our inverter are the ACs, water heater, block heater and microwave/convection oven. YMMV Jack

bobofthenorth · April 23, 2009, 07:03:06 AM

We have the same unit as Jack and the same experience with one bedroom clock. The one on my side of the bed works just fine but the one on Marilyn's side goes absolutely schizo on the inverter. It is so far out of touch with reality that I really couldn't say whether it runs fast or slow - its just plain wrong. The clock on the micro/conv oven works fine as does the oven. The only items onboard that don't run through the inverter are the water heater and the a/c. All our electronics (DVD, TVs, computers, photo frames, external hard drive, photo printer, cell booster) seem to work just fine.

Jerry32 · April 23, 2009, 09:42:31 AM

I have the zantrex SW plus 4024 for a little lesss than two years and it just went haywire. It decided to change it's me,ory to a 5548 and reads the battery volts as 53 instead of 26. every twenty or thirty minutes it turns off for a few seconds and then back on . Untill I reser the memore it would not charge the batteries. Called zantrex about it and they said they never heard of such a thing and thought I was unable to hook the batteries up correctly. I told them It had been operating very well for over a year and half and I had not changes any battery config and the digital meter said the batteries were reading 24 volts. Jerry

JohnEd · April 23, 2009, 11:25:48 AM

Jerry,

Word on the street is that Zan has become less responsive to the customer than it used to be. I haven't had that experience, personally. Would seem to follow as they have eaten almost every other mfr out there and you know what happens "when you become too big to fail".

Zantrex repair seems to be done only by auth repair stations. Two brief conversations with them leads me to believe that they are hungry. They wanted more to repair than a new item costs LIST! I forget their address....sure you are disappointed.

I have had great success with their "EMAIL" problem consult system. Maybe my q's get to more or better people....don't know. I do know that the advice was solid and they invited me to get back to them with any other questions. Didn't sound unresponsive to me. YMMV

Good luck with this,

John

cody · April 25, 2009, 06:16:47 AM

I found out the the electronics inthe oxygen machine will function just fine on MSW so that widens the area for me to look at.

buswarrior · April 25, 2009, 07:38:42 AM

cody, why not buy the 2000 watt unit for its features, and keep the 1000 unit in the mix to support some of your loads?

A bit of redundancy, the 3000 watts of power output you want, all for under $500?

happy coaching!
buswarrior

cody · April 25, 2009, 07:59:53 AM

BW, thats exactly what I was thinking, I'm looking into several ways of doing it, the 2000 lists being stackable as one of the features but not sure if it's stackable with the 1000 watt system, it also has a duel output so that may be a problem as it may want to split the power into 2-1000 watt systems that would make it a 3-1000 watt system or possibly it could be run with separate systems, I also found a magnum 2000 watt inverter that has the single output which might work out as well, I'm thinking that I could run some of the smaller circuits thru the 1000 watt one and leave the 2000 one for the heavier loads. I don't think the magnum is stackable with the 1000 watt but i've got some emails out with questions on it. Another possibility is to keep the 1000 watt inverter cause it has the battery charger built into it and then go with a higher output system that is inverter only, some of them range as high as 6 to 8000 watts, not sure if they are any good or not but looking into all kinds of possibilites, what I don't want to loose is the ability to maintain my batteries, I'll probably have to add to my battery bank, I have 4 now but probably should have 8 or even 12.

JohnEd · April 25, 2009, 10:10:39 AM

Cody,

There are some areas where you can be penny wise and pound foolish in a heck of a hurry. Inverters are one of those ares.....I am pretty sure. People that are living with Zan 2KW units have told me, point blank, that I should not get less than 2.5KW and I should really try for 3KW. I got a 2.5 because it was a heck of a deal but I was taking their advice and looking for a 3.

You are talking about getting a large bat bank and that will probably involve at least two banks....start and house...that are kept separate under normal circumstances. Large means that you want a lot of charging current in order to recover in less than 48 hours of charge time.

I think my 2.5 came in at 140 amps charge AND it would charge two separate banks at the rate needed by each. If you go to a large bank, and I think you should, you need the charge capacity.

The 1KW unit has it's place. Some use it to power their refer and configure the inv to get power ONLY when the refer thermo calls for cooling. I did the same with a freeze protection circuit where the heating pump only got power when the thermo called for heating. That worked well for me. Don't throw it away as you might find the perfect use for it.

Look at that Zan chart of features I mentioned...great for decisions.

HTH,

John

cody · April 25, 2009, 10:25:22 AM

We've used the 1000 watt unit for 6 years now and it does what we want it to do but what I'm trying to do now is add the oxygen machine to the mix, the 1000 watt unit does a good job of the charging, it has a 100 amp 3 stage charger built in so that works pretty good, what I'm trying to do is increase my capacity, mostly I run the generator when we're on the road anyway, what I have in the bus is the 2-15K carrier heat punps, a microwave, household refridgerator, household 30 gallon water heater, a couple of tv's, outlets, a washer/dryer, assorted stuff like that, the generator is the honda 3000 inverter generator, we have a battery bank of 4-92AH AGM's, as you can see we've gotten fairly good at managing our energy usage lol.