Houseboat Inverter
Houseboat repair, repairs, maintenance, sales and information
Houseboats for sale, Houseboat for sale
Some boats have inverters and some don't. Most new boats that don't have them are pre-wired for them. Having an inverter has some substantial advantages. I will list a few and try to do it in some sort of order. All of which assume no dock power and generator off.
These are most of the normals. The real plus in an inverter is having vital things working and not having to run the generator. This saves on the fuel bill. The avg. generator will use approx. 1 to 11/2 gallons an hour. If you take your boat out often it doesn't take long to recover the investment. Another real plus is while docked if power is interrupted it doesn't matter the refrigerator keeps operating. At least until the batteries are drained.
Speaking of draining the batteries. Under normal inverter usage a good battery should deliver an hour to an hour and a half of inverter power. Now consider your usage and time needs and start adding batteries to reach your goal. Say we only got an hour of inverter usage from a battery. Two batteries would give us two hours and so on. Most inverters are supplied by 24volts. This is done by hooking batteries together. Here is an example of two 12volt batteries together. This is how it works. One batteries positive terminal attached to the other batteries negative terminal via a metal bar or cable. Each battery now has one available terminal. Positive on one and a negative on the other. Using the available terminals will produce 24volts. That's how you hook batteries together to increase the amount of normal inverter time needed. NOTE!!!! Do not hook batteries together in this manner unless you intend to double voltage output. Now if this sounds a bit confusing it is. But I assure you that's how it works unless of course you purchase a 24volt battery. Now here we go again. If you bought more than one 24volt battery and plan to hook them together you do it differently. We don't want 48volts in this scenario. You would hook the positive from one to the positive of the other and follow suit with the negatives. You still have only 24volts but twice the capacity.
Uncle Ricky says this can be confusing but manageable.