Stone,
An Inverter is a electronic device that converts the 12 volt, direct current that comes from our batteries, into 110 volt, alternating current the kind we use in our homes.

These wonderful devices have come way down in price over the past few years and you can buy them from Walmart to KMart and every place in between.

The quality of the units has improved over the years with units providing an excellent quality AC current, suitable for almost every device you can imagine.

Just plan your use carefully, they draw down your batteries pretty quick.

Pay attention to wattage of the item you plan to power and be sure your inverter can handle the load.

Other than that, connect them to you battery and plug your 110 volt device in and your set to go.

They are particularly good for recharging your cell phone, laptop, portable vacuum cleaner, rechargeable flashlight etc.

The West Marine cataloge has some pretty good data on inverters including a guide as to what may best suit you.

No recommendations can be made with out knowing what you are doing with it if you just want it for a TV, computer or other small appliance or are you lookikng to drive a large microwave will dictate the output size. You will need to evaluate your house battery bank as well if you are looking for high output.

Many of the new marine inverters will also include a low voltage alarm, these are a good idea. All the convenience of having 110 volts available for things diminishes if you run out of 12 volt power for everything.

I have an older Heart Interface inverter/charger. It was on the boat a year ago when I bought it. I'm told Magnum makes a good inverter/charger that has modern charging settings that the Heart does not. I'm kinda hoping mine dies soon. It's located in the storage area on the port side of the quarter birth - right where I want to install a new Wallas forced air heater. I'll probably replace it with a Magnum, assuming I can find the right piece of real estate to place it.

All that being said, I really don't need a built in inverter for my use. One of the smaller portable devices would probably be just fine.

Stone:
I am in the process of doing the same thing. I have quite a lot of Xantrex equipment on board and have been very pleased with it. I am going to go with a Prosine 2.0 unit and hard wire it in. So if anyone needs a 3 step charger that is about 3 yrs old, contact me.
Randy

Yes I am going to replace the charger and go with the prosine invert/charger 2.0. What I want to do is to power up the whole boat 120 circuit when needed.

This will take planing to do but if one has trouble they have a great support system and lots of info on the web. I am actually setting the boat up to take off in a year. This is why I will go to the prosine. I too have a dual bank set up but only need to have one 12 volt charge outlet from a charger.
Randy

Caprice has a 1,000 watt charger/inverter. I use four golf cart batteries for the house power. I can run a 13 inch TV/DVD player and a small microwave at the same time or the TV/DVD and a four cup electric coffee pot at the same time. However, I can not run the coffee pot and the microwave at the same time.

At anchor I can cook or make coffee alternately, burn the cabin lights and watch TV all at the same time. Also burn the anchor light all night. Although I do not normaly try it, but a couple of times I started the engine in the morning using my house batteries. Caprice does have a separate starting battery, but I wanted to see if I had enought power the start the engine on the house batteries if I had to.

When deciding on an inverter for your boat, you'll need to think about one more factor: the SHAPE of the AC wave coming out of it. Some inverters output a chunky, squarish voltage wave, and other, more expensive inverters, output a nearer to pure sine wave that looks like the wave coming out of a wall AC outlet. This is important because some loads, like a hairdryer, may not need a sine wave AC supply. But other loads - like some computers and possibly a flatscreen TV - won't run on a chunky waveform, and may even be damaged by it. I am sure this topic has been covered in the sailing mags, and it would be worthwhile to check old issues to get a thorough explanation of the topic.

Try this link.

[url]www.westmariine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servket/westadvisor/10001/-1/10001...

It does not look as though I am able to display the full link, if you cam search westmarine, go to advisor, select inverters. You will learn posibly more than you want to know.

I have an Exide 2000 watt inverter. It came with the boat I bought 5 years ago. I like it. Some points to know about my electrical system is I have 2 banks each containing 2 105 A-H series 31 AGM batteries. That's each bank has 210 amp-hours. I don't like to go below 105 A-H. I have solar panels and a 105 amp alternator. I think 2000 W is a good size for short bursts. As an example we have a Mr Coffee 8 cup coffee maker with termal carafe, no hot plate. It consumes 10A-H to brew a pot of coffee, our toaster uses 6A-H.

Generally we use 12vdc plugs for recharging small thing such as cell phones and VHF radio and the like. The larger the inverter the greater the battery charging capability. We more often use our of inverter as a charger than as an inverter. I would recommend a good monitoring system. Ours has four channels. Two for the baterry banks and one for the load and one for the charging system from the alternator and Solar panels. I infer the charging from the inverter/charger by viewing the input voltage and amps on the battery banks.

Hope this helps.

Lou Bruska
Lake Macatwa (Holland), Michigan on Lake Michigan