Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:07 am
Out of curiosity, I tried turning off all the other loads on my inverter and tried running the fridge freezer off it for a while. I had to pick a time when the compressor had stopped and then swapped the power over to an extension from the living room solar sockets. I plugged it in via one of my Watt meters. I'd previously run the fridge from the mains via a meter to see how much it used and it only consumes about 110W when running and 3W when stopped.
I knew these things have high surge starts but didn't figure it would be so high... Nearly 1,100W! The inverter beeped and the power gauge went right off the scale for a second or so before settling. If I were to run the fridge from my inverter I'd have to not run any other loads as the start-up surge plus any other loads would blow a fuse (or worse).
So, I'll have to content myself with running the upstairs firewall / browser PC on solar power. It also uses about 110W (140W with the screen on and the extra hard disks whirring) but at least it doesn't surge so I can use my work laptop and the small kettle at the same time and still keep within the 1,000W continuous power limit.
You'd probably have to run at least a 3kW inverter to be able to run a fridge-freezer reliably and allow for the compressor surge while using other things at the same time. Just an ordinary 2.2kW kettle running at the same time that the fridge decides to start up would still cause an overload though...
I'm going to run a single extension into the kitchen though (just by the counter) so that we can use the small kettle in the kitchen and while the fridge is a no-no, I did discover that the rice cooker only uses 400W for about 20 minutes so that would also be a good candidate for solar powering.
We're currently enjoying a run of clear blue-sky days (up to 27C today) and the battery bank is bursting at the seams by lunchtime so I'm getting about 1.8kWh per day out of the system (up to 15% of our daily power requirement).
I knew these things have high surge starts but didn't figure it would be so high... Nearly 1,100W! The inverter beeped and the power gauge went right off the scale for a second or so before settling. If I were to run the fridge from my inverter I'd have to not run any other loads as the start-up surge plus any other loads would blow a fuse (or worse).
So, I'll have to content myself with running the upstairs firewall / browser PC on solar power. It also uses about 110W (140W with the screen on and the extra hard disks whirring) but at least it doesn't surge so I can use my work laptop and the small kettle at the same time and still keep within the 1,000W continuous power limit.
You'd probably have to run at least a 3kW inverter to be able to run a fridge-freezer reliably and allow for the compressor surge while using other things at the same time. Just an ordinary 2.2kW kettle running at the same time that the fridge decides to start up would still cause an overload though...
I'm going to run a single extension into the kitchen though (just by the counter) so that we can use the small kettle in the kitchen and while the fridge is a no-no, I did discover that the rice cooker only uses 400W for about 20 minutes so that would also be a good candidate for solar powering.
We're currently enjoying a run of clear blue-sky days (up to 27C today) and the battery bank is bursting at the seams by lunchtime so I'm getting about 1.8kWh per day out of the system (up to 15% of our daily power requirement).