Improving Reliability Of Low-Cost Power-Source Inverters

Focus:

In hardware and automotive stores you can find inverters that supply 120 V ac rms from your vehicle’s 12-V battery bus at various power ratings. To be price competitive, they have often cut corners in the design, resulting in unreliable products. Engineers and others with electronics knowledge may be tempted to repair these products when they fail, and may even want to make upgrades to improve their reliability. However, the manufacturers do not support either of these activities. In this article, the author examines some inverter product examples, discusses why they are unreliable, and proposes some possible options for improving their reliability. This article includes the schematic for a Vector VEC034D 225-W inverter that was reverse-engineered by the author. This article sets the stage for an upcoming inverter design article series.

What you’ll learn:

• How to understand the possible causes of failure in low-cost power inverters
• How to improve the reliability of low-cost power inverters

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Author & Publication:

Dennis Feucht, Innovatia Laboratories, Cayo, Belize, How2Power Today, Oct 15 2020

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