Thor Forums

[Chance]

Originally Posted by RvEd

Beau, just one thought on this? Unless you plan to run that one thing, and one thing only, I believe you have to add up all the things you may run at once and size the inverter to that. For example, I like to brew a cup of coffee, make a couple slices of toast and catch the morning news all at the same time. To do that, and only that, I would need at least 2000w.

Coffee Maker ..... 600w
Toaster ............. 750w
TV .................... 600w
Total ............... 1950w

Hope that helped?

What kind of TV uses 600 watts? The latest 32” Samsung I purchased uses under 50 watts.

Anyway, inverters are not most efficient at 100% of power rating — it’s much less than that. For that reason oversizing some won’t be that bad. A good point was made about idling power consumption, but there is a lot of variation between brands and models. Make sure you check into specs in detail.


My technical opinion is that there isn’t much of a middle ground on how to approach your original question. If you want to wire the entire coach to run off the inverter (and some Class B coaches are doing it), you need a very large inverter and huge battery bank; otherwise it makes little practical sense.

In most cases that’s not practical, particularly as a retrofit on an existing motorhome that wasn’t designed to optimize limited battery capacity. Like stated previously by different people, there are so many high-power items you’d never want to power off batteries that it makes no sense to connect them to the inverter. You always have generator as a backup.

The only coaches I’ve seen that have the entire coach powered from an inverter are those that have no generator. And even those only replace the conventional Onan generator with an engine-powered alternator.