Inverter Generators? [RE-wrenches]

Travis Creswell, Ozark Solar ozsolar at ipa.net
Mon May 20 18:26:30 PDT 2002


?...Yeah, that's what I thought when I first noticed them about a year ago. 
But then I recently had the opportunity use one and was quite impressed with
it.  Extremely quiet, very smooth and really light weight.  Perhaps you've
seen the little Honda's with a handle on top?

So I bought one for my self.  A Yamaha 120 v, 2800 watt unit that weighs 58
lbs.  I went with the Yamaha as it's all metal and if you ever worked with
my guys you'd know why.   From what I can tell the 2800 watt rating is
conservative and it appears to have excellent surge power.  Best I can tell,
it's generating AC which gets sent to a rectifier (or maybe just a series of
capacitors to create a DC buss) and feeds an inverter which outputs 119-123
VAC @ 60.00 (that's 60.00 measured with a Fluke 87) cycles no matter what I
do to it.   What's especially cool about this unit is that it continuously
varies the RPM with load.  Way more useful than the units with auto idle,
which don't produce any usable energy until they run back up to full speed. 
At just a few hundred watts of load it is still idling, producing steady
a120v @ 60 hz. power.

I was especially curious about what it's output waveform would do to the
charge rate an inverter so I plugged my Trace Tiger 500 into it.  The
generator was idling and in just a few seconds, dang if the Tiger didn't
lock onto it charge at it's max rate.  The generator never changed speed, it
just kept idling along.  I bet few have ever seen a Tiger charge at it's max
rate on generator power and I assume the DR would also perform a heck of lot
better when using this style of generator.    It's so quiet you can have a
conversation at normal voice within 5' of it.  I power my shop with a SW and
will soon test the SW's charger with it.

These units are touted to as providing very clean, quiet power and are
marketed to the RV crowd.  Anybody else played with these?

Travis Creswell
Ozark Energy Services

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