

4 Comments
Andrew Addison
Hi Peter, Does this give me a way to provide the same 50A supply that I get from the shore power and generator? I currently have an inverter that can provide 30A on each leg but it drives me nuts that I have to be careful what I run before popping the breakers, whereas on shore power I can run the lot - stove, AC, microwave, etc - without worrying. It would be great to be able to run the stove to boil the kettle without having to switch on the generator. Clearly the battery bank needs to be fairly large - we currently have 880ah of lead acid batteries but it is looking like when they need replacing lithiums are going to be a sensible price. I've been told that getting a separate charger to the inverter makes more sense especially if we take the boat from the US to the UK/Europe - is that still the case or can the inverter chargers cope with different input voltage/freq? Cheers, Andrew
Peter Kennedy
This Autotransformer is for a special purpose only as described above. If you read the manual there are a few other specialized applications. It isnt intended for use to change the voltage of shore power for international voyages and it certainly isnt an isolation transformer.. In some applications it doesnt really behave as a transformer at all because the two input wires go straight through to two of the three output wires. Victron have two transformers that can be used for international voltage conversion, 120 to 230 volts and vice versa. They are both limited to 32 Amps at 120 volts, 16 Amps at 230 volts. Neither convert the frequency. One version has automatic voltage detect for the input and a predermined user adjusted output voltage. The other version has to be set up manually. You will find both of these in our SHORE POWER > TRANSFORMERS section.
MICHAEL SHORE
I have been thinking of using my camper system as emergency power at home. .Sadly my domestic water well pump needs 240VAC and the van system produces only 120VAC. I have read that I can add one more multiplus in parallel to create the needed 240VAC . Will I then go nuts as the poster above describes and wish I had chosen and tweaked a single 230v viltron inverter?
Mark
This is all well and good but what do we do with the neutrals? If I'm looking at a not so typical scenario where I have an RV with 240V loads mixed with 120V loads on either phase, how do we handle the neutral ground bond with a Quattro in the middle? It's not really clear from the datasheet and manuals how that works. To further complicate matters, how would we change things if we had a second set of inputs from, say, a single phase 120V source (such as a 30A/120V connection or a single phase 120V genset). Stepping that up to 240V seems straightforward enough but I'm pulling hair out trying to keep the neutral/ground bonds straight. Thanks!
Peter Kennedy
I didn't go into the details of grounding and neutrals in the article because it is quite complicated for boats, easy for RV's. I can answer questions from prospective customers on an individual basis.