SW Compatibility Was: MonitorÆ =?ISO-8859-

Sat Dec 9 07:51:11 PST 2000

Bill, Travis and other wrenches,
   I was the one with the Breadmaker problem with the SW4024.  It would shut 
down when the total load on the inverter was down to about 40 watts.  If 
another load was turned on, the breakmaker would come back to life.  Trace 
said that the SW creates fewer steps at the low end to conserve power at 
idle.  It is, in effect, becoming a mod sine wave inverter at idle.  Their 
solution was to leave a load on to keep the steps working.  Kind of contrary 
to our efficient way of life.  The other solution was to get a different 
breadmaker, which we did, and that solved the problem.  The Magic Chef 
breadmaker had the problem, and the Regal works fine.  Just by coincidence 
(or not) the Magic Chef has an LCD readout (more energy efficient) and the 
Regal an LED( higher power consumption).  I don't know if that makes enough 
difference or not.  
    I also have a gas forced hot air furnace (high power consumption-450 
watts) that did not work on mod sine (Powerstar 1300)   That is what got me 
to upgrade to the SW4024 in the first place.  The controller on the furnace 
was made by Honeywell so I called them and actually  talked to the engineer 
who designed the controller.  He agreed that a mod sine signal would not work 
with the controller as the counting circuit to start the blower uses the 
peaks of the AC signal to count and the Mod sine is clipped below the pickup 
level.  He had no quick fix to the circuit but said he was very interested in 
the problem and would consider mod sine sources in the future when designing 
controllers.  Looks like we need to educate all electrical engineers too that 
there are varied power sources out there.  Oddly, my UX1112 did run the 
furnace though I only tried it once and it may have been a fluke.  The DR1524 
will not run the controller.  I have a DR1524 running my house now.  It's a 
long story so those inclined to read novels, please continue.  

The DR1524 does run my Roper (made by Maytag I think) washing machine which 
was a surprise to me.  It also seems to run everything else in the house.  I 
do notice some faint lines on my computer screen and some of my old magnetic 
ballast compact fluorescent lights struggle to start.  

The arrival of the DR.
I have had a nagging problem with a customer's SW4024 (4 years old-my first 
SW sale) .  The fans will not shut off.  It was an intermittent problem at 
first, then chronic.
He kept calling, saying all his power was being eaten up by the blowers.  We 
decided to put in a relay to turn the blowers on only when charging from his 
generator.  To install, I needed to solder those tiny wires to the relay and 
since he didn't have a transfer switch, we had to work on it live so we would 
have light and be able to solder.  Unfortunately, I accidentally shorted my 
needlenose pliers between the 12VDC supply to the fan and the chassis and 
POOFFF.  No lights, no inverter.  It was dead.  

 I HotWired the generator into his breaker box so we could run the house off 
his generator and talked about what to do next.  We had talked about sending 
his inverter in to troubleshoot the fan problem anyway but running the house 
was the problem.  I had just received a DR1524 for another job so we decided 
I would hook that up to run my house and bring my SW over and hook it up for 
him til we could get his inverter back from Trace.   Hence the DR1524 tests 
listed above.

Cheers
John Blittersdorf
CVSolar

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