How to Hook Up a Power Inverter to a 12V Battery

hello this is Jill hey look what I have here I have a 1000 watt best ski pure sign inverter so what does an inverter do well an inverter does basically the opposite of what a Transformer does if you're familiar with Transformers what Transformers do is they take the AC current or alternating current from your wall socket and converts it to a direct DC current so instead of It kind of alternating back and forth kind of in a kind of sinusoidal wave it'll just be a one directional current in One Direction so it won't be reversing but now inverters do the opposite so if you have a 12 volt battery let's say from your car and you want to make AC current to power something like a drill some equipment even a computer well you need an inverter to convert that direct current from your battery the 12 volt battery direct current into a alternating AC current and that is what an inverter does now this one happens to be a what's called a pure sign inverter so it is a little more fancier than typical inverters this one will uh convert the direct DC current into a pure sinusoidal wave which is basically what your outlet provides in AC current it's it's it's just basically an up and down wave as you see here now uh most uh most inverters do more of a kind of a box shape uh convert conversion which generally works for most things but for let's say uh sensitive Electronics iPhones computers other types of sensitive equipment you kind of want a pure sign inverter so uh the kind of squared off uh typical AC current can damage some equipment but not most so pure sign inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard inverters and that's because it does do that pure sign for sensitive equipment what I recommend is if you are not running sensitive equipment and don't need a pure sign inverter just get a standard inverter they're much cheaper and you can get much more wattage this one's only a thousand Watts you can even go to a 500 watts or less for the pure sign if you uh but for a higher power let's say you want to operate really heavy equipment or let's say a heater you can just get a standard inverter with 3000 Watts for about the same price as this thousand watt unit so what I recommend is if you do need to run sensitive equipment let's say a computer uh just get take what you want in terms of wattage let's say you need 600 or 660 watts and just add a third to that and that will bring you to let's say a thousand Watts if you need let's say a thousand watts to run add a third so get a 1500 1500 a watt inverter and so that's I I kind of like to add a third uh they usually do have surge protection so when you turn on your uh your your unit either a drill or a computer it does make a surge initially and so you'll need more wattage and they usually do Art built in with surge protection but it's kind of nice to add a third to the wattage that you actually need so that's my recommendation but today we're going to just show you how to hook this up to a standard 12 volt battery and so I do have a standard 12 volt battery right here uh I don't think this one has a lot of amp hours but it will do for this demonstration I did put a couple of terminals on I believe this is positive this is negative but um if this is in a car uh you can just use those little clamps that you kind of use let's say for jumping uh your car but make sure that they're secure I like to use these terminals because it really does secure the connections so you don't get many Sparks when you're running your unit you can also in your car if you want to hook this up you can actually even run your car to continually charge uh your battery because this is out of the car I will only have a certain amount of power before this drains and fortunately this inverter does have a digital display it'll generally tell you uh what you're generating the input in terms of voltage and the output in terms of wattage and so uh it's helpful in that respect and so how do you connect your inverter to your battery well it's pretty simple is just plus the plus minus the minus and you have your plus terminal here in red minus here now this is more of a portable unit right here some of them actually have most of them actually have little screw holes where you can actually screw the unit into a car or a building or a platform but this one I like to just carry around so this might look a little different than yours just because you might have some screw holes basically what you need are some nice high gauge wire to connect to your battery and I recommend your unit should be off so it it's definitely off it's not powered of course no power in and so I would connect your terminal or your wires or cables to your inverter first so we'll just start with the Positive n right here foreign and then your negative end and then to connect the positive end to your positive side your battery so we'll just stick that there again if you're just using those clamps you could just connect it with those like battery cable clamps and again if you're connecting it to your car you can you don't have to disconnect anything in your car you could just use those clamps for your car but make sure your car is not running when you are actually making this connection and then on the negative side since the unit's off I shouldn't get a spark but you might get a little spark on the negative side when you connect this and we did but that's fine we'll just tighten it down now as you connect one to the other you definitely don't want to touch anything grounded let's say you have a watch or something you don't want to accidentally touch something which is grounded also you don't want to cross connect these terminals [Music] okay so we have plus the plus negative to negative and so we could just go ahead and turn on our inverter you can hear the fan uh powering up and the display showing up and it's showing I'm not sure if you can see this it is giving me 12.5 volts from the battery and 115 volt uh available once I plug it in when I plug it in and start powering something up you should see the wattage that it's generating here okay I'm just going to test it with this Grille here's the plug for the drill I'm just going to go ahead and plug this in to this the light on the drill thing lights up and so I could just test up my drill here and sure enough it works now I do have a digital display which will show wattage when I'm running the uh the drill here and so just keep your eye on this as I run this you can see the wattage needed for the drill and there you go that is how you hook up a power inverter to a 12 volt battery now if your battery is in your car just make sure that you don't run it down to zero and you can't start your car you may want to actually turn on your car so it will continually recharge your battery and you can run your inverter at the same time now if you're using a standalone battery here you will have to recharge the battery uh once it's dead and so just get a battery recharger I just have a small little one here that will charge up this battery slowly but you can get um Chargers that will charge more rapidly than these Brands but this works fine for me so there you go I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please hit that like button at the bottom of the screen and even consider subscribing to my channel I have many more videos to come bye bye

Channel: HowToWith GEO

Views: 107,775

Keywords: 1000W, 110V, 115V, 12V, 4.2A, AC, Alternating, BESTEK, DC, DIY, How to, USB, battery, car, charge, current, direct, do it yourself, inverter, modified, power, pure, sine, transformer, watts

Id: MePJtM7c3II

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2022