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Message |
Stephen Fessenden (63.27.88.124)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 - 7:54 pm: | |
I am about to install a 24 volt 1000 watt Heart inverter-charger. I currently have two 12 volt battery chargers charging the 12 volt and 24 volt terminals. Each receives power via two 14 ga wires from the power panel next to the driver. The 14 ga wires are run in a 24 wire cable and I have four spares in that cable. Since the run is about 40 feet, maybe 50 feet, each way I plan to double up the 14 ga wires each way. I was told that the code allowed paralleling wires to get the required current capacity.
DO I NEED TO DOUBLE UP THE NEUTRALS ALSO (TOTAL OF FOUR), SINCE THEY ARE ALSO CONNECTED TO A COMMON BUS AT THE PANEL? OR CAN I RUN TWO NEUTRALS AND TIE THEM TOGETHER AT THE INVERTER SINCE THEY ARE ALREADY TIED TOGETHER AT THE PANEL. That would leave me two spares which I may need one day. Battery cables will be extremely short. No problem there.
The primary purpose of the inverter is to get a good three stage charger hooked up to the house batteries and to replace a 24 volt motor generator. (The inverter will run a separate three breaker bus for microwave, TV and icemaker. It will be necessary to turn off the icemaker and TV to run the Microwave. We are used to power management.)
Steve Fessenden |
Tom Caffrey (Pvcces) (12.146.33.27)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 24, 2001 - 12:56 am: | |
Steve, we have a 1000 watt Trace, an old one, and one day, we were running the refer and the washing mashine (about 3/4 load size). Without thinking about it, we turned on the microwave.
Everything ran just fine, so we are much less nervous about what the inverter will carry. We never have turned off the refer to run the microwave.
Doubling up the wires can be done, but you should give some serious thought to how to prevent one wire from carrying more than its share of power. If it was me, and I thought I needed to do that, I would probably solder them together.
To figure out if you need to have all four conductors for the "neutrals", you need to figure out what the peak current at any one time that may need to run through each of the "neutrals". You should try to keep the maximum current in a 14 guage wire down to 15 amps.
I couldn't tell if you were saying the battery chargers are connected in series to charge the 24v batteries and you didn't mention the maximum current that they can put out.
If the chargers are connected in series, then no more than one doubled up pair should need to go to the batteries as a common conductor(provided the other pairs are not overloaded).
That's because the current from one charger would be deducted from the current from the other at the common terminal on the batteries, so the maximum current on the common pair would only occur if only one charger was at full output and the other was putting out no current.
Be careful with your thinking about this stuff. It's easy to overlook combinations that can cause overloads. And two 14s do equal one 10.
Hope this helps. |
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