Is it safe to use a car outlet inverter plugged directly into a car (12v) battery?
sableisland asked:
I was wondering if you can do this safely, because I think that it could be useful as a small backup power supply. Would this work with any other batteries? Thanks.
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I was wondering if you can do this safely, because I think that it could be useful as a small backup power supply. Would this work with any other batteries? Thanks.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:41 am
It will work. You have to be as careful with it the same as with a plug on the wall in the house. Now, nothing is free, and what I mean by that is, the battery has only so much power- volts X amps= watts. When you use more volts the draw on the battery is more, so don’t expect the power to be endless. If the inverter is a 400 watt inverter and your battery has 400 watts (for example) and your AC appliance draws 400 watts, in one hour your battery will be all used up. You will have to run the engine to keep the battery up. What you use has to be paid back.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:22 am
A good inverter will have an onboard fuse (and certainly won’t be able to fry the battery) regardless of how it’s connected. In fact the larger inverters (like the 400 watt one mentioned above) recommend connecting directly to the battery because they draw more amperage than the power socket in the dash can handle. Do bear in mind that most engines only produce 2-400 watts of spare power at high engine speeds, let alone at idle… this is a good way to get a bit of emergency power fairly cheaply, but if you want to run more than a couple lights and some electronics off of it, get a real generator. It’ll be a lot more efficient too.