Serene
Senior Member
[SNIP]
Good luck with however you proceed. Inverters are great whether whole house or select circuits.
Peter
Thanks Peter. Appreciate your responses.
[SNIP]
Good luck with however you proceed. Inverters are great whether whole house or select circuits.
Peter
One caveat with inverter/chargers: always turn the inverter or master selector switch off before connecting to a new shore power outlet. If it's a newer installation with an ELC (kind of like the GFI outlets in your home) installed, it might trip the ELC. Depending on how they set it up, that might take down just your outlet, or the whole dock, or the whole marina. You won't make friends that way.
Another thing I hadn't thought about! And yes would not want batteries drained when plugged into shore power that fails. But am assuming an inverter can be smart enough to be set to a mode to not invert, just pass through. So can enable this mode when alongside and the boat is left for any period of time.
More research needed.
. One caveat with inverter/chargers: always turn the inverter or master selector switch off before connecting to a new shore power outlet. If it's a newer installation with an ELC (kind of like the GFI outlets in your home) installed, it might trip the ELC. Depending on how they set it up, that might take down just your outlet, or the whole dock, or the whole marina. You won't make friends that way.
If an inverter is wired properly there is absolutely no need to turn it off before connecting shore power to avoid a trip. The big thing is that the neutral bus for loads run from the inverter MUST be isolated from the neutral bus the inverter draws from. If they're not, the inverter will have the neutral bus grounded before it switches to shore power. The GFCI / ELCI will see this and trip.
So if you have a single shore power input, you'd have 2 neutral busses. One for the shore input pre-inverter, one for things run through the inverter.
Sounds good but reality intrudes. Not all older vessels are wired perfectly. Not all inverters have a switching relay that is as fast as the 30ma dock relays.
Turning off the inverter before hooking up to shore power is so easy. Once shore power hooked up turning the inverter back on is usually ok, it’s just the initial plug in that sometimes proved troublesome.