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[Music] good morning everyone good morning thank you for a Bluewater cruisin association for hosting this event now we're going to talk about inverters or inverter chargers a little bit more complicated and I saw another spec sheet from another builder we do a lot of design work and I was looking at a spec sheet from a builder reputable builder and in the spec sheet there was talking about a magnum inverter charger with three outputs I was like wow that's amazing doesn't exist sounds promising there's no such thing and even builders sometimes it's confusing honestly you can't be everything to everyone in life and when you have any River Charger unless you have an old freedom inverter charger which had echo chargers on there 99% of us have a single output inverter charger meaning you can only charge one battery bank and only one battery bank alone is charge from an inverter charger directly ok there's other ways of sharing that charge through other devices but the inverter charger is a single output device Magnum Victor on master volt there's no such thing as two outputs on an inverter charger it's an inverter charger it doesn't do multiple battery mechs and so if you look at this inverter here it's only going to be connected to one battery bank and one battery bank alone okay this is very important your inverter does not or inverter charger is not going to be charging especially multiple battery banks it can only be connected to one battery there's only one DC supply so when it inverts it pulls when it charges it pushes right here I'm showing what an inverter service disconnect is by the way an inverter manual is about 70 to 100 pages that is way too much reading for anyone okay I would say that about 98% of all inverter chargers are badly installed on all boats so if you have an inverter charger on your boat i high-five an owner when i find a boat with a properly installed inverter charger i lately if I had champagne I pop a champagne bottle open that is how rare it happens I get to see a boat with a properly installed inverter maybe once a year maybe every inverter charger I've ever seen is badly installed doesn't matter whose did it what it is there's no way they're gonna read their manual it can't be bothered it's a hundred pages it's so complicated why do they and it looks so simple I mean it came in the box it seems so innocent it's like the person that doesn't read the IKEA instructions when they're building a piece of furniture hey this is easy I got this how many of you have successfully built anything with IKEA without reading the instructions it's impossible you can't do it it's impossible it's never happened you miss a step you're screwed you missed a step you didn't read the instructions you're screwed and so we'll talk about all the screw-ups ago with inverter chargers and there's so many because the manual is just so damn thick all right so what's the purpose of an inverter first we talked about the word converter before remember I said converter goes this way inverter goes this way right so an inverter creates AC that's the purpose AC is like outlets in our houses all our homes are run on AC right so you're gonna do it to run microwave you could run it to run a TV you could like we have a Nespresso machine on our boat it could be whatever you could even run a hot water tank you shouldn't but you could you could run on some big boats we'll run air conditioning units off of it can do it now it gets a huge inverter system but you can do I have got owners that have 80 90 footers we wash washing machines dryers but they have a battery bank and they're like the size of this area you know of course it's doable and we run you know you can run a town on an inverter it happens you can do whatever you want it's definitely doable but you need a hell of a battery bank to do it for most of us we're gonna reduce our consumption by looming the amount of things that we can do off an inverter right it's like having a black Amex if I had a black Amex and I could spend as much money as I want it'd be fun for a little while until I realized that I'd have to pay the bill and the problem with an inverter is that draws power at a very very high rate and so you want to limit your ability to not do things that would be foolish like running a heater off an inverter right we're running a battery charger off of an inverter right is the opposite of da Vinci machine right you can't create AC to give back DC you're just gonna go into a spiral of death and your battery's gonna drain itself and I see battery chargers running off inverse all the time about 10% of the boats have battery chargers connected to the inverter unrelated their batteries die all the time and they don't know the owners don't know it's unbeknown to them they thought that whoever did it would have done it smart you know you wouldn't run a battery charger from an inverter because you're literally taking money from yourself to pay back yourself and there's a middleman in the middle and every time you do a transaction they're taking 15 points so you lose 15 points 15 points and eventually you run out of money so you can't have certain loads running off of an inverter okay one of the questions I got on YouTube was well what's wattage what does that mean so 2000 watt 200 watt 3000 watt some people have 6000 watt inverters we stack them I was on a boat it had 20,000 watt inverters it was like like crazy does it matter is the question is what are you gonna run on your boat right what do you need to run on your boat some people like they say to me they say Jeff I want to run a coffee pot or a microwave well that's less than 2,000 about 1200 1500 some people say I want to run two things at the same time I want a convection oven and I want a coffee pot at the same time now you start adding up maybe four thousand right or Jeff I just want to run a TV and I just want to charge a laptop nothing else 300 watt right so all our appliances have wattage readings on them and so you end up sizing all the things you might load on the inverter and you decide am I gonna run them concurrently like a hair dress a hairdryer and the microwave and a coffee pot at the same time why will you do on a sailboat which I encourage people to do is like well how about you run them sequentially you know do the hairdryer first then say okay we're done with a hairdryer then we'll do a microwave once we're done with a microwave then we'll do a Nespresso but running them concurrently means you get a huge inverter large battery bank huge cables and so it sounds great until you realize the price you have to pay okay so that's really essential is the wattage of the inverter and they from as low as a hundred watts up to single units or even 5000 and there's bigger commercial units there's no end but on boats it's about five thousand and then after that you end up stacking them you'll end up stacking multiple them together that they work together to make you run larger loads okay so on the AC side the diagram before that was showing that's just the DC side but look at how complicated the AC side of an inverter is right an inverter is one of those things that come off of the main AC panel it goes into this device and then it goes back in and it goes through what are called inverted lows or AC pass through these lows over here the fridge they see outlets of microwave they can run off the inverter or they can run off shore power or they can run off the generator and so do you notice how these two items are sort of a why right two inputs going to one output and then this goes in and if this sense is AC it says I know you told me to be an inverter but that's silly you don't mean it you mean when you lose AC I'll invert for you it's a conditional inverter and that's called pass-through that is probably one of the myths understood items on boats and inverters by far number one there's no second place you need you can have your inverter having loads go through it even when you're on shore power because they want the ability of having automatic switching right there on it they're doing basically an automatic why if I sense AC and you ask me to be an inverter I won't do it you're silly you don't really mean that because I've got AC I'll just let it through pass through if you ask me to be an inverter and I don't have AC I'll invert for you so inverters are generally conditional they're only inverting if they don't sense AC and that's pretty much like 95% of all inverters okay remember Chargers have to be marine I can't emphasize that enough inverters have to be marine if you take a shortcut there welcome to a world of hurt world or hurt and if you have a powerboat and you got two props and some props are not like $100 there are thousands of dollars your shafts are big you are in a world of pain a world of pain and when that happens by the way you don't lose a weak K like we do a lot of galvanic surveys and you know for insurance companies when you lose all your underwater medals you miss your boating season like it's done so it's over like it's the repair is not gonna happen overnight you're on the HAR before the insurance the adjuster comes in they all agree for the damage and they start and then they have two other people a check that it's not going to happen again you're out of commission two months three months four months that summer you lost your boat and you're only going to find out when at the start of the season when people start boating when you put it in gear and you don't feel anything you're like it's not going what's going on I have no props is my transmission not working it's your prop is evaporated okay the other big thing too is inverters have this thing cheap and voters have really high idle draw meaning that even when you're not using it and nothing's plugged in the wall and you said invert it's going to draw a lot of amperage just to have it on waiting for you is huge some of the inverters are going to draw more power than your refrigerator just when they're on idle that's huge remember I told you a refrigerator is like 80% of your income and inverters another 80% of something you didn't have so I have some inverters that draw an idle for 4 or 5 amps just sitting there just waiting no they're not doing anything they're just waiting for you to put a load which is equal to more than what the boat is drawing for refrigeration so you've got to make sure that you have low idle draw inverters well you just don't buy a cheap one anything that's brand name is fine anybody any again this is the thing people think that there's a deals nobody shops with cars looking at least expensive and like babe's I found it a dollar my god I have no idea why people who spend 20 grand on a car we found one for a dollar smoking no no there's no such thing they're just removing all of the features that you would in a good one but you just don't know if P can you wait for the N or is this relevant now yeah just a couple I'll come back to you ok so pop models that Trax is really popular it's a budget inverter and then other ones are Victor on zan tracks master volt is amazing Magnum is really good again brand names okay like there's lots of choice lots of choice there is no place on a boat for a modified sine wave inverter period it's a black and white statement that choice was possible 20 years ago when they were expensive I've been in the business for only 12 years I have never installed a modified sine-wave I choose I refuse to in the beginning I just I said no I can't do it it's not sound it doesn't make sense modified sine-wave inverters are okay so it's sign sign is us the moon the seasons like our moods are sinusoidal everything in life the tides everything is sinusoidal that's it it's slowly fall spring winter summer all of that is sinusoidal a sees the same thing and what they did in in the late-1990s and early-2000s true sine wave inverter x' were expensive and they started making what are called square waves so it would be going from high tide to low tide in an instant nearly like the water is Scott I can be suddenly it's low tide and then somebody's high tide no change over what happens is that's okay modified sine-wave square wave is okay for resistive loads resistive loads are your toaster heater anything like think about a toaster it's just a heating element no problem on a square wave no problem inductive loads do not like modified sine-wave and what's an inductive load your microwave a TV a sound system power tools battery chargers an espresso machine blenders it's pretty much everything that you want other than toaster is as true sine wave and I had an order once call me Serena's Russell's burned out first I decided it's not a client first an espresso goes out this is ridiculous I bought an espresso and it failed this is this isn't come on brings back the Nespresso machine puts it back on and you went on board fails again I rate this is bad this is ridiculous like come on people it's a Nespresso you can't know quality-control brings a third one on board blows up again hmm I wonder if it's me yeah yeah yeah what's the only thing that's common here oh you imagine the manufacturer had to eat two inverters there's not thinking it's going on a modified sine-wave right cuz I get a call he's like - pretzels are blowing up I have no idea why can you come in sure enough running a modified sine wave inverter mind if I tell you we have an order if you have one your microwave doesn't work as well you're on show power while it warms up in two minutes or whatever you're putting soup you put it on modified sine-wave you don't have to show a power it takes you five because the microwave hates it some people are gonna see lines on the TV you know they're you know they're refresh rate some people just have a really amazing eye they'll see a line go down the TV like I can't see it but I've had a lot of boaters like yeah I'm seeing a line come down the TV only on the inverter as soon as you go to shore power the line is away because again it's a square wave there is no reason to put a square wave inverter on your boat and square wave inverter czar about like five times as inefficient inefficient I've had an order once where the fridge was almost built around the boat like if you take the fridge out you first cut it off like you can't take it out there's no door that's gonna I mean they literally probably like haha you know this Ridge is going it I don't know where you gotta take it out but this is hilarious then we put the fridge in they did the cabinet's around like this thing is in there like it's built in the boat he's like changing the fridge would be like like a mountain it's like you got to cut it up there's no it's a custom size there's no replacement it'd be crazy and so the owner had a modified sine wave inverter and the only reason we change the inverter was a for a true sine wave because a good true sine wave inverter is only about 5% inefficient and that modified sine away was 35% so he saved 30% of his power draw to run his fridge just by going with true sine wave and that's made safe suddenly the fridge got 30% more efficient and so I've done that on a trawler was about a 55 foot trawler we just changed the inverter for no other reason then I can't change my fridge and I want the power efficiency so no.4 modified sine-wave you go true or don't do it just don't do it there's no reason honestly you're gonna hate yourself you're gonna honestly it's gonna be a bad decision there's not a lot of shortcuts in life that lead to good outcomes okay very few and this would not be one of them okay this is the list of things that are required to properly install an inverter and believe it or not that's what six items not one percent of motors have that it's too many variables it's like 649 it would imply reading a manual and nope nobody nobody can do it and the challenge is the boat builders would do it but very few boat builders install inverters of the factory inverters are generally a add-on at the commissioning stage very few boats come with inverters very few and if they do sometimes what the boat builders do is they do it but they don't really have it as part of their spec sheet they added later and so it doesn't go through the same tech department it's sort of like get a done Department and the get it done Department is not really bound by having an tech read specs and tell you what to do they just need to get it done and when you get it done you basically remember forget to put a caste fuse that's super common or wrong fuse tight they don't put you see you can see one over here it's an on/off service disconnect they don't have that because you know it works without it like my car true story I can drive my car without ever puck buckling into my seatbelt and it works fine but the flip side is I also know through horror stories that you're probably good idea to buckle up and so you want a fuse and an inverter disconnect the inverter only neutral bus well that is way off people's pay grade it's way too complicated and involves surgery so nobody does that so it's hope that's the AC panel that it works there's magic happening on the AC system unrelated but it works so they just let go chassis Graham again it's like a seat belt you don't really need it or it's like you don't really need till you're an accident and your chassis ground I've seen that is over like 95 percent of boats have it or don't even have the right wire size again all of this is in the match by the way but is a 90 page manual DC wire size again too expensive can't be bothered didn't read the manual and so they end up having the wires that are connected to inverter charger or under sized and the distance of the inverter to the battery bank is too long again all of this in the manual I'm not making this stuff up but they don't do it and then lastly is you can never ever ever ever ever have an inverter charger in a gasoline engine room and I see that in about at least 20 percent of the gasoline boats we survey and the reason is they didn't read the manual and if I had a charger there and this is an inverter charger same word must be the same and hence they install it and an inverter there is no such thing as an ignition protected inverter charger no such thing it does not exist there's not a single one out there and then what people do is they get creative they don't install an engine room but they create a huge hole in the install and above and sort of where the let's say their fridges and they're like well it's not in the engine room I'm like yes you've met this the letter of the law but the spirit of the law is that your engine room is just there like they're communicating the vapors don't stop at the arbitrary ceiling like if it's an open hole it's gonna go up he's like yeah I guess I didn't think of that I'm like yeah you did and I mean now you can go out and I tell people all the time you got to remember this this is the craziest thing about boats is that all of us have a different risk profile in life all of us some people are pretty safety-conscious some people aren't the challenge with a boat is you can go skydiving by yourself but when you go boating you're bringing other people for the ride and they don't know what your risk tolerance is right they're not sort of questioning like are we doing skydiving are we gonna have one parachute or two are you are you trained do you know what you're doing right they assume and that's what happens is that's what's so disconcerting for some of us is you assume that this other boater is sort of like the minimum bar like they're not gonna be willing to do things just for time or money to sacrifice their lives but you'd be surprised that if people didn't have to have a seat belt in their car and it was an option and they could remove $75 off the build most people would choose to remove a seatbelt parking brakes airbags they would remove the options because they figure well it's not gonna happen to me and that's why a lot of stuff on boats are shortcuts but if you're super safety conscious maybe for yourself or maybe because of your loved ones it depends some people are some people aren't you got to ask yourself and you worry about the previous owner that wasn't and so when I tell people you buy about don't just buy the boat by the previous owner his philosophy or her philosophy of boat ownership is what affects everything that they did from a maintenance perspective on that boat and I always tell you should make sure you buy a boat from someone who's like minded to you because if they took shortcuts they didn't and they're taking shortcuts and they didn't let you they're not putting tags everywhere or here's a shortcut I took I showed it shortcut shortcut shortcut shortcut it's for you to uncover that over time and then you end up spending crazy amount of money to undo the shortcuts and that's where boat ownership is so expensive is because you end up fixing other people's mistakes so our with that I'm gonna open the floor to questions any questions on inverter inverter Chargers when I'm sure power generator should I turn should I close off or turn off my inverter so the answer is yes and no at the same time at the same time and this is very important remember most in voters nowadays are inverted Chargers so on your AC panel you should and if you don't you need one and that's another thing that's missing you should have a breaker that says inverter on your AC panel there should be a breaker somewhere that says inverter you should have that that breaker should never ever ever ever ever be turned off because if you turn that off you're not just shutting off the inverter you're also you're shutting off the AC going into the inverter which is feeding either pass-through or charger you're not actually shutting down the inverter you're shutting down pass-through and charger hence why it's so complicated because an inverter Chargers two things unfortunately a lot of the manufacturers of panels don't have inverter charger as a sticker and so the only sticker they have is inverter so you should never ever shut off your inverter at VA cpanel because when you do that you not only stop AC going through the inverter you stop AC going to the inverter charger and the charger needs AC to recharge your batteries so that's the no part never ever disconnect your inverter charger the AC panel ever its circuit protection it's like your breakers in your house somewhere in their basement how often do you go turn those on and off never unless you're playing with something but they're always there their protection it's a thermal circuit breaker that if it trips you can reset it's only there for protection it's not they're meant for be a switch okay yeah that's right that's right but then Verta gets complicated too but let's let's do with inverted charger because it affects 90% 95% then then ad mean rotor you should have a remote panel or the inverter itself should have a button and if you don't you need one that you can disable the inverter on a little on/off button you say to the inverter over a telephone wire I want you to stop being an inverter so yes you should you should disable your inverter at a control panel or the inverter itself when you're on Shore power or connected to a generator if you want it because you don't need an inverter at that point and you don't want your inverter to turn on when it doesn't need to so it's complicated right this it's not easy but that's the rule never disconnect at the AC panel ever ever that's a black and white and at the remote panel you can turn it on or off but do so like I always encourage people to not have the inverter enabled when they are away from the boat for months on end because you know why your inverter to turn on and run your fridge or your heater for two hours and kill your batteries you're going to lose what's in the fridge you're gonna lose the heat in your boat anyways an extra two hours won't make a difference don't have your inverter keep your boat warm because I told you you can't make hot water with batteries you can't certainly heat your boat with batteries it's not gonna work inverters also have pass-through so if it's an inverter that has passed through you want to leave that inverter breaker there as well because that's the input which means if you don't have a see going in there's no a/c going out the way to shut off in a small little inverter is to stop the DC sight on the supply because an inverter pulls DC pushes out AC right that's what an inverter does a converter does the opposite it takes AC makes DC and inverter takes DC and goes to AC remember they're opposite directions and so I know I'm here myself I'm like oh my god this is so hard with so mental but that's the rule so the question is if I have an inverter charger and I have two battery banks on my boat I have simply a house battery and an engine battery and I have an inverter charger and my inverter charger only has a single output how will my inverter charger charge back my engine battery if it's connected to my house one way would be having another AC to DC device which again is a charger a single output charger just for that battery or one thing we're going to talk in the afternoon because we're going to stop after this another way would be a battery combiner would be a way to share a charge from one battery to another battery and that's how you would do that and that's a battery combiner okay so either a battery charger a dedicated battery charger or battery combiners let's be back for 1:30 okay