Shopping for an inverter: 12 VDC vs. 240 VDC

I admit I did zero filtering for testing/compliance stuff in my "quick google" but yes, that one does have at least the Germans happy.

The on-grid/off-grid thing has no meaning here. You would never feed your grid power through this inverter in a car-hosted emergency application. You would just need to make sure that it could work in a simple off-grid mode, which essentially all of them can do out of the box.

If it's being drained by an ordinary amount- in line with what the traction motors consume on acceleration, then all you'll notice is that it starts the engine to replenish the traction pack. I think you are correct that if the draw exceeds what the motors normally take, you'd probably get an error and the main contactor would open as a fail-safe. This is why the household inverter must be connected on the load side, same as the built-in traction inverter.

Many inductive appliances are fine with a modified sine wave. Some aren't. Sometimes they just make a funny noise while otherwise working just fine. (I got into this back when your choices were square wave and modified sine, no PSW available) It's a dice roll, but somebody out there can legitimately save money with the MSW rigs.

Less and less of a unicorn. Now that people are installing big PV solar systems, wire ampacity is forcing system designers to use higher voltages on the DC side. This means there is a growing market for inverters that use high voltage DC. It's going to get easier as time goes by. It is common to see wide input ranges on DC devices. The main inverter in my offgrid system is nominally a 24v unit but accepts 18-31v without a hiccup.

The Honda eu2000i is frankly amazing. My father has one and it's fantastic. I use a much cruder "jobsite" generator which provides more power overall and is cheaper to buy and cheaper to repair, but it is far louder and burns a lot more fuel per kWh delivered. I keep it because it works fine and it is already paid for.

Another consideration is output voltage: All 4 of your options are based on 120V delivery. Some people want or need split-phase 120/240V power. This is very cheap to accomplish in a jobsite generator. It's substantially more expensive in an inverter or inverter-generator such as the Honda eu7000.

Also, to add- don't forget the connection to your home. While it is easy to unplug your refrigerator from the wall and plug it into an extension cord running out to the car or a genny, that's not going to work for hardwired gear like your furnace. You'll want to do something to easily connect and switch over.

I set my place up with a manual interlock plate on the main breaker panel. This is a basic safety device which guarantees that my house can only accept power from EITHER the utility main OR the generator, and never both. This means I can't accidentally fry the wires in my walls or shock an overworked lineman out of his cherry picker. It's a very cheap add-on to some breaker panels. You can also consider an automatic transfer switch, or an inverter which includes such a switch: grid-tie mode.

 

While the HV battery has robust charging circuit, the 12V is only supplied with a maintenance charge. I had to purchase a smart charger to bring my new Yellow Top to full capacity before I could drive in earnest. Placing the new 12V battery into the car, without topping it off, resulted in the Yellow Top NOT being charged any higher than what the voltage it had shipped with.

 

What you noticed about it not being charged higher has more to do with the car's fairly low charging voltage. On a Gen 2, I don't think that goes much above 13.8 volts normally. The battery itself tapers off the charging current that it will accept at that voltage.

That isn't anything about a limit of the car's 12 volt DC/DC converter output. That can supply around 100 amps. If you connect something back at the battery that will accept that kind of current at the car's supply voltage, nothing stands in the way.

 

What you didn't notice is that this is a 4 year old thread.

 

Threads are available to search engines forever, and if the last post on one has incorrect information, a followup makes it less dangerous to people doing searches.

 

Because this topic comes up so often, but scattered around all the different model/year-specific forums, I started a general one in the "Knowledge Base" forum and tried to collect a bunch of the existing links.

Electric power from a hybrid, connecting inverter to the high-voltage system | PriusChat