When you decide to go camping, there are always some appliances that you are bent on taking with you and you wanna be able to run them with 110 Volt.
So before you own your first off-grid inventer, you are desperate to know what size inverter you need.
Let’s figure this out today.
The size of inverter you need depends on two things, what you wanna run, and how much battery you’ve got to run it.
Here we’ve got two inverters, fairly common ones in the market. 350 Watt, small inverter, and a semi big one, a 2,000 Watt inverter.
For this little guy, and let’s just using some examples here so that you can kinda get an idea of what you can do with it.
This little 500 watt inverter that will charge laptops, it’ll charge batteries, it will also run some small fridges, and things like that.
Anything that doesn’t move, and doesn’t make heat or cool, is generally a low current draw, and you can get away with a smaller inverter.
A small inverter can work well with a 120-amp-hour battery.
And pretty much if all you wanna do is charge laptops and things like that, that’s perfect.
Most mini-fridges consume 80 to 100 watts per hour when running. A 120 amp-hour – 12 Volt battery pack is equivalent to approximately 444 watt-hours.
So it can support mini-fridges working 5-6 hours.
When we step into a bigger inverter, that’s generally because we wanna make heat, or cool, or a lot of motion.
Such as microwave, heater, or coffee machine.
A coffee machine generally has heat, because it wants to heat the water, and motion, because it wants to froth the milk.
So, most coffee machines actually require quite a large inverter, and 350 watt obviousely won’t support it.
The heat and motion rule really is a good one to stick by to try and get an idea of what you need.
After we go past coffee machine, the next one is air conditioning.
Air conditioning draws a lot. Even this 2,000 watt inverter is really, really gonna struggle with air conditioning,
and most of the systems we do would be two and a half thousand watt inverter and higher, to run an air conditioning at a stable voltage for a long period of time.
Once you move into those bigger inverters, obviously your battery banks are going bigger again, and, you know, up to 600 Amph lithiums,
would be what you want to have behind one of these big two and a half, 3,000 watt inverters.
This comes at a much greater expense, but the other thing, it’s expensive in Amps.
To convert 12 volts to 110 volts, this will draw a lot of current.
If you want to run an inverter like this, or more to the point, you wanna run a unit that requires an inverter like this,
you’ll need a fairly large battery bank, minimum 2x 120 Amp hour, and to be honest, bigger would be better.
Whenever we get a question asked what size inverter do you need, the question that they get hit straight back with, what do you wanna run?
And how much do you wanna spend on batteries? And also, how much room have you got.
Once we know this, we can give advice on what size inverter is right for them.
Here we have sorted out the power sonsumption of most appliances for your reference.
Mini-Fridge 80 – 100 walt
Coffee Machine 500 – 1000 walt
Microwave 1000 – 1500 walt
Game Console 20 – 180 walt
Halogen Lamp 300 walt
Water Boiler 1500 walt
Vacuum Cleaner 650 – 800 walt
Heater 1000 – 2000 walt
Hair Dryer 300 – 600 walt
Laptop computer 30 – 60 walt
Desktop Computer 60 – 300 walt
Wi-Fi Router 2-20 walt
Sarah O'Connell
As a research member with a background as an engineer, Sarah believes we need to know enough about products before we buy and use them, especially those that require some expertise and ability to operate. Sarah is happy to share her opinion and what she has learned with everyone. She believes that conscious consumption is everyone's responsibility and that all content should be complete.