well welcome back to the Steve Robshaw today we're going to have some fun then we're gonna
have some fun with electricity AC and DC the whole purpose of this video is to explain a
little bit about electricity and how there's a huge difference between AC and DC when it comes
to using a power inverter now the one I got here is the one that I show a little while ago is my
3,000 watt power inverter it's kind of a unique inverter different than other inverters and I
do own and have used and today we're going to hook it up to that machine right there like the
Walt 12-inch chop saw and it's rated at 15 amps and it's completely wrong it's completely wrong
from the manufacturer 15 amps a lot of people look at that and say oh it runs on 15 amps well no it
doesn't so let's get down to some little bit of experiments here I think I have a little bit of
a fun and we'll look at some meters and we'll see how you have to actually test every piece
of equipment you want to put into service when you're using an inverter and most people don't
think about these things and a lot of people just would like to know a little bit more information
about inverters how they actually work how you use them and you're gonna find out little more
about the ratings on power tools so let's get to that right now well here we go right here with my
Dewalt chop saw rated at 15 amps and this is a terrific saw I love this thing but no it's not
15 amps so I'm gonna show you the kind of testing we're gonna do here okay so here we are here I got
my meters all lined up this one here is going to measure the amperage I got my amp clamp on
here you don't have to spend a lot of money on an amp clamp guys I just got that one here because it
attached to the meter this one here is perfectly fine this the fluke 322 and it does not test DC
but this is a bulletproof plant meter I've used for years and this one here is going to be used
for testing the voltage and we're going to test it on the chop saw and we're gonna review the
readings and you are just going to be amazed so let's get to it right now okay you ready I
got one camera on the meters and one camera on me we're gonna pull the trigger just pull the
trigger I'm not gonna cut me wood right now and we'll review the meter eating's let's take a look
okay so I couldn't see the screen but youse guys could and you could see that it is a
maximum there of the amperage of 53 amps and let's take a look at the voltage here now I
have to say hit the min/max here to adjust it but it was that started at 120 that's the the
highest went down to 107 and the average is 119 so you could see there is a huge drop in
the voltage when it first starts up and you can take a look at the amperage and you could see
yeah 53 amp starting now of course it drops down as you run the motor longer but nothing
is under load rate yet so let's do the same thing except this time we're going to cut a
piece of wood okay this time let's do the same test except we're going to cut a piece of wood
as you can see right there there's not much of a difference and change is there but you're still
the amperage is still pretty high you're not when they're showing 50 and let's look at the
voltage here went down to 107 and not much of a difference was there so once it gets pulled
up it seems to run just fine so now let's move on to testing off the inverter okay so here I
am here and I've taken the power part out of the electricity outlet for the garage and I'm
going to plug it in from the inverter the only thing I've added is this meter right here that
you'll see on the other camera is the voltage for the battery but what I'd like to do first
is just show you before we get started how many amps are actually in this battery I like to test
the amperage that's shown in the battery first and then we'll do some cuts and you'll see how
it affects the battery okay so let's just hook up the battery here well we've got a lot of cables
going on here don't wait I hope you can see that let me see if I can get that in the shop for you
I hope you can see that but it's showing twelve point seven eight so I did have this on the back
to charge or charge it up so it's fully charged and cold cranking amps I picked eight hundred
but this is a battery from 2011 and it's an old battery and it's not a motor battery and it's not
about you should be using to to use for a power inverter but this is for demonstration purposes
only so let's see how many cranking amps are in this well we've got cold cranking amps 806 so
that's not too bad is it so that's our baseline 806 okay so for the first test we're just going
to pull the trigger and take a look at the meter readings and see if you can punch the blade here
so I'll hold the guard up here and we're going to fire this up now the first thing I did is I
notice that I'm only getting like a hundred and twelve volts you'll see but it's only about a
hundred twelve volts under the inverter right now so let's pull the trigger let's see what happens
stalled right in his face stalled right in its face so let's pull the trigger again except this
time same thing stall on its face let's take a look at the meter readings and let's see what's
going on okay so if you take a look at the meter reading there yeah but you can see the battery's
down to 12 - and we got a maximum amperage of 29 amps and the voltage was at 112 let's see
how much it dropped four point nine volts an average of 107 highest was 112 but this is the
killer four point nine volts nothing can run on four point nine volts that's a 3000 watt burner
if you're going to do Ohm's law buddy you'd be shaking your head wondering how come this thing
won't run while I'm going to explain it okay so I'll just review what happened there most
people when they go buy an inverter they look at the inverter rating this one here is 3000
Watts 6000 Watts peak it's got four receptacles on the front and this inverter is different than the
other ones I have because as you can see it's got four back four cables so I've got a positive and
a negative on the two receptacles on the left and it's duplicated on the other side so it's
split right in half fifteen hundred Watts aside but that's not another utility that is running
off of a battery and guess what happens when you run stuff off of a battery like that you have peak
current so the peak current on this was 29 amps so 15 amps is 1800 watts and you figure okay that's
a 3000 watt inverter it should run it no no no the majority of the time when you're going to
look at an inverter the amount of outlets on the outside is divided by the total amount of wattage
provided by the unit and that is no guarantee that it will still run because you have a lot of
machines or you know whether you're plugging this into a you know a light bulb is fine 100 watts is
100 watts but that there is not 1800 watts 15 amp you know motors and some kind of things
that spike up high you need an inverter you could imagine how big inverter you need for to run this
I would probably get three times the size just so you don't burn the thing out constantly and
so this is the thing that a lot of people get confused with when they're buying an inverter
yeah you just can't look at the amperage rating and figure you're gonna do a little bit of Ohm's
law and say you know what this thing here runs at 1800 Watts but no no no as you can see here
it don't quite work like that so do you want to take a look at the battery now and let's just do a
another check on the battery and see how many amps are left in that battery now we'll test it again
now it does say charge and has gone down a little bit well hope you like this little experiment on
inverters and a little bit touching on electricity a bit and it just goes to show that you have to
actually test and it's nice to have some of the test equipment you don't kind of spend thousands
of dollars to test this kind of stuff just a regular client meter and a digital multimeter
and test stuff before you actually put it into service because a lot of bad things can happen
when you're using a battery and as far as I'm concerned I believe there's more danger involved
in a battery that size then your wall outlet so yeah you can really get hurt bad you know
with battery and if you don't know exactly what you're doing so I hope you enjoyed this a little
bit of difference of you know of a vid and if you haven't seen this channel before you welcome to
subscribe and come back again let's have some more fun and let's do some more testing Cheers
you