Lloyd Sumpter wrote:

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 17:31:30 -0800, Walt Bilofsky wrote:

Has anyone had experience trying to drive a Xantrex inverter/charger
with a small gas generator?


I tried it with little success. I tried to run a Statpower 40 (40Amp)
charger with a Honda 1000. 40A at, say 15V is 600W, and Xantrex say
they're about 90% efficient, so no problem, right? WRONG! Talked to the
designers (right here in Burnaby, BC, it turned out), and the problem is
the Power Factor: about .6!! so it's drawing around 11A at 120V: too much
for my poor genset!

Looking at an EU2000 to drive it, but too many other things to spend money
on right now...

Lloyd Sumpter
"Far Cove" Catalina 36

Thanks for the info, Lloyd. I have a Statpower Truecharge 40, and am
shocked to hear that 1kW is not enough to drive it.

If I go ahead with this project, I'm planning to replace it with a
Prosine 2.0 inverter/charger. It claims a better power factor and
some other nifty features. From the manual:

"Because the usual AC power sources (marina and campground outlets or
small generators, for example) often have limited current
availability, having the ability to manage your AC loads is extremely
valuable, and therefore the 2.0 provides a number of features to
facilitate this:

.. The charger is power factor corrected to use AC current as
efficiently as possible and only requires 15 amps to provide rated
charger output; some other chargers require as much as 22 amps to
provide the same output.

.. The PROsine 2.0 uses a Power Share feature which senses the AC load
on the system and gives priority to your AC loads, thereby reducing
the charger current to avoid nuisance tripping of the breaker.

.. Sometimes the usual AC shorepower sources have low voltage. To avoid
loading these weak sources any further, the charger automatically
reduces its AC current draw as the AC voltage approaches the minimum
acceptable level (as set by the user)."

I talked to a tech at Xantrex who said that the Prosine 2.0 also has a
setting for the shorepower breaker. In other words, if you set that
value to 8 amps, for example, it will never draw more than 8 amps for
the charger, and will reduce the charge current as needed to do that.
So the 1000i would be able to drive it, at a reduced charge rate.

- Walt Bilofsky