well welcome back to the Steve Robb show today I'm doing some inverter testing and I thought why not
bring you along this is an inverter that I built my whole garage with up at my camp and I had one
battery on deep-cycle battery and this inverter this is a 3000 watt inverter and it Peaks out to
6,000 watts and of course I had hooked up to a one wire alternator and my two cylinder diesel
Kubota engine I'll see if I can throw a picture at the end here of it now I've disassembled this all
and if you watch my videos for a long time in the beginning I showed me starting it up after about
a year sitting around the side of my garage and I'm gonna have to do it again this year as well
so what this bin is all about is I'm testing this vid this power inverter to see if I can use it up
at my camp and because recently you can see in my previous videos I bought some solar panel kit it's
a 400 watt solar panel kit and I'm gonna be able to have a little more power now so I thought maybe
I would upgrade to this inverter that I have here which is a lot more powerful like right
now I'm running my whole camp off of a 400 watt inverter so this would be a big difference and
what I have to do is I have to actually test it first and we'll get into that right next and but
first I'm going to show you the little booklet that it has and you're going to get a laugh out
of this because guess what when you buy these inverters and they come from offshore mouths
just take them manuals and chuck them right in the garbage because not worth nothing you pretty much
have to test before you put anything into service and that's what I do so let's get to it right now
well what we're looking at here is the factory manual I got it zoomed in there pretty good but
what I want to show you what I'm testing today is the no load current draw so as you can see the
bottom one is 2 amp and the top one is 1 amp now mine is the modified sine-wave which is one amp
and the the other one is a pure sine wave which is two amps so I'm looking for one amp so let's just
take a look at the next page okay so this one here is the spec that comes off their website
and they're saying right there the nolo draw you can see as 0.2 amp at 12 volt so let's go to the
next page so here's the manual rate here position of the power inverter the unit was designed so it
can be placed in a drink holder in a drinks holder so that I found out pretty interesting this goes
into a drinks holder well I thought that was cute okay well I hope you enjoyed that and so now you
know what I'm testing for I'm testing for the no load amperage straw and that's very important
because when you're not using it how much does it actually use and that makes a big difference
especially when you know it's dark a night and you're not producing any power or if it's on the
cloudy day if the ampere straw is too high well you're just gonna drain your batteries and the
one that I have up at the camp now is about 0.3 so say about a third of an amp at the most a half an
amp an hour draw so let's test this one here and let's see what it draws because they're saying
like it's kind of confusing but they're saying one amp but it looks like it's going to be one
amp and two amp if it's a modified I'm sorry it's a 2 amp if it's a pure sine wave inverter and one
amp if it's a modified sine wave inverter and this one here is a modified sine wave inverter
so let's test well what are we looking at right here okay so I've got my meter on the right and
that's going to show you the amp draw zeroed out my clamp meter on the far left you can see
the voltage of the battery 12.8 so let's put the clamp meter on over both of the cables there's
two black and two red so I want to test both of them at the same time and let's take a look and
see what the reading is okay so she's around now let's turn the unit on and guys you could see the
spike that it went up to I hope you can see that it it spiked up to 20 amps when I first turned it
on and that's because it's got capacitors inside and that's why you don't want to try this with
your meter because it'll probably blow your fuse and it looks like it's around 4.9 now that is much
higher than what they were talking about they're talking about one so that's way out of line as far
as I'm concerned and if we were to just like put it on one cable there's two point eight for one
and the other one is say two so let's go with the smaller clamp meter and let's just take a look at
that one and see what kind of reading we get off of that well I got you pretty well zoomed in there
and I'll just show you the meter here there it is and she's pretty much zero it as much as you
really need you don't got to be that perfect but let's put it on and let's take a look and see
okay let's see if I got everything in the
shot there and let's start it up see if I can turn this light on
now I'm seeing two point eight which is two point seven which is consistent with the the other meter
and let's take it off here put it on this side so it's very consistent so it's two so we're
talking four amps a little bit more than four amps while this thing is running and probably
closer to five so that's incredible well it does not look like I'm going to be using that inverter
up at the camp it draws way too much like we're talking about five amps you know over a 24-hour
period no no no no no no that they just wouldn't be acceptable now this does have a remote for it
where you can turn it off and you can turn it on but guess what you're never gonna remember
all the time you turn this thing off and on and off and on every time you want to use it
and yeah so I don't know what I'm gonna do with this inverter I'm gonna probably set it up as a
standalone system where I can power something if I want here and there and then just charge
it up when I want to but if you guys like to see more of this inverter testing let me know I do
this stuff all the time I build stuff with you know small solar panels and inverters and this
kind of stuff for off-grid places and my friends have these off-grid places so thanks for joining
me here today if you never seen this channel before you're welcome to subscribe these guys
let me know if you'd like to see more inverter testing in this kind of stuff because it's cold
here and it's the middle of the winter and I like planning all this stuff for the spring
and I'm glad I tested this out because yeah if I were to just stuck this in there my batteries
go flat in no time so thanks for joining me here today and come back again let's have some more fun