A customer was considering two different off grid inverters from the same company at the same price. He wondered what the benefits and drawbacks were, given that one was higher wattage and needed 48 volts, and the other was lower wattage and needed 24 volts. He would be using the same number of batteries, just wired for 24 or 48 volts.
I spoke to Outback and they said that any unused wattage from the inverter would be wasted because it still draws from the battery. Even though the "load" may be only 1000 watts, the inverter is creating the maximum watts of the inverter, and the inverter was drawing power from the batteries even if the "load" was not using all the power.
Is this true?
Submitted
13 years 1 month ago
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That doesn't sound right.
The larger inverter gives you the chance to connect more load to your system. You'd also spend more money on a larger size inverter and that's the only disadvantage.
Having a 3000W inverter doesn't necessarily mean that you have to run 3000W constant load on your system. You can run 1W LED lights, or just your laptop. The energy conservation rules apply.
There might be a slight efficiency loss in the operation of the inverter, because the inverter is designed that way. But I do not believe that an off-grid inverter's efficiency of 93% would reduce to less than 90% just because you don't have enough load.