Sunday, Mar 14, 2010 at 10:41
240VAC gennies with an additional '12VDC' output generally produce a raw rectified sine wave. You could call this a pulsed DC voltage.
Your 12VDC/240VAC inverter most likely has some smoothing capacitors on the input side.
This means you can start the inverter, with a very small load of say less than 0.1A on the 240VAC (<25W)
Any more load, and the inverter will probably undervolt.
One trick you could do is to wire a flooded type battery of any capacity in parallel to the inverter input which effectively smoothes out the high ripple from the gennie and your inverter will be happy to produce the Watts needed by the 240VAC appliance.
Just be aware that the '12VDC' output won't give you a lot of juice, maybe only 4 or 5 amps, before the voltage becomes too low to charge the battery and supply the inverter.
This means you have to limit the 240VAC loads to around 40 Watts time averaged (this allows for ~20% inverter inefficiency), or the battery will get drained.
Because of the battery acting as an energy buffer you can draw up to your inverter's maximum rating, but only in spurts (keeping the time averaged draw to below 40 Watts).
Hope this gives you some fresh ideas.
Best regards, Peter
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