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Pure Sine Wave and Surge Protector Power Strips

justoneguy71

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Dec 26, 2022
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I have a Krieger 2000W 12v pure sine wave inverter. It is grounded with a ground wire to a ground rod just outside. I recently went to turn the inverter on (I usually turn it off at night to save standby usage) and it was DOA - no lights, no sound, etc. I called customer support and after some troubleshooting questions, was told that the problem was almost certainly caused because I am using surge protectors that have ground protection plugged into the inverter (GFCI was specifically mentioned or anything with ground protection) and that I should only be using the most basic power strips without reset buttons and allow the inverter to do all of the protecting since DC is different than AC and there won't be the same types of issues that surge protectors are designed to protect against. The CS rep went on to explain that Something in that protection can feed back into the inverter and burn out the components in the inverter.

I am learning as best I can, but my knowledge of electricity isn't nearly enough to understand how a surge protector could interfere/destroy the inverter. With that said, I do use some grid power if the batteries get low and (used to) move the plug of the surge protector from the inverter outlet to the grid outlet. If I switch to using a power strip with no surge protection per the manufacturers suggestion, it seems I now would have to unplug each individual component from the new power strip plugged into the inverter and re-plug them all into a surge protector plugged into the outlet. There are 6 items plugged in in total, not a huge amount of effort, but still 6X the effort of just moving the single surge protector from inverter to grid outlet. Those 6 things that are plugged in are way below the capacity of even the most basic of surge protectors, so there's no overloading in play.

So, first question would be could someone give some background or a link to where I could learn more about how a surge protector can interfere/destroy an inverter and second question, is there a better/more efficient method of having my 6 items plugged in and be able to switch between the inverter and grid and having them protected from AC surges with a surge protector when on AC, but not having surge protection when running on solar.

I do want to give a big thumbs up to the Krieger support, they very easily provided for me to return the inverter (at their cost) and shipped out a new one very quickly.

As background:
600W solar panels, feeding a 40amp Renogy Rover MPPT controller. 3 100AH 12v Chins Lifepo4 batteries wired in parallel with a shunt installed for battery %.
 
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I have a Krieger 2000W 12v pure sine wave inverter. It is grounded with a ground wire to a ground rod just outside. I recently went to turn the inverter on (I usually turn it off at night to save standby usage) and it was DOA - no lights, no sound, etc. I called customer support and after some troubleshooting questions, was told that the problem was almost certainly caused because I am using surge protectors that have ground protection plugged into the inverter (GFCI was specifically mentioned or anything with ground protection) and that I should only be using the most basic power strips without reset buttons and allow the inverter to do all of the protecting since DC is different than AC and there won't be the same types of issues that surge protectors are designed to protect against. The CS rep went on to explain that Something in that protection can feed back into the inverter and burn out the components in the inverter.

I am learning as best I can, but my knowledge of electricity isn't nearly enough to understand how a surge protector could interfere/destroy the inverter. With that said, I do use some grid power if the batteries get low and (used to) move the plug of the surge protector from the inverter outlet to the grid outlet. If I switch to using a power strip with no surge protection per the manufacturers suggestion, it seems I now would have to unplug each individual component from the new power strip plugged into the inverter and re-plug them all into a surge protector plugged into the outlet. There are 6 items plugged in in total, not a huge amount of effort, but still 6X the effort of just moving the single surge protector from inverter to grid outlet. Those 6 things that are plugged in are way below the capacity of even the most basic of surge protectors, so there's no overloading in play.

So, first question would be could someone give some background or a link to where I could learn more about how a surge protector can interfere/destroy an inverter and second question, is there a better/more efficient method of having my 6 items plugged in and be able to switch between the inverter and grid and having them protected from AC surges with a surge protector when on AC, but not having surge protection when running on solar.

I do want to give a big thumbs up to the Krieger support, they very easily provided for me to return the inverter (at their cost) and shipped out a new one very quickly.

As background:
600W solar panels, feeding a 40amp Renogy Rover MPPT controller. 3 100AH 12v Chins Lifepo4 batteries wired in parallel with a shunt installed for battery %.
Interesting story. The picture in the link to the surge protector showed 3 varistors so my bet would be that it is wired like this:

1672693200759.png

In normal operation, the varistor will be extremely high in resistance, and the current through the varistor will be very small (typically well under a mA). However, if the voltage gets too high between any two lines the varistor resistance will drop in order to suppress the spike in voltage.

I present all of the above to lead up to my next statement: I believe that either the inverter is flawed in it's design or the surge protector was not the problem. I just don't see how a surge protector would give a properly designed inverter any problem.
 
Thank you. I'm wanting to do as the manufacturer suggests, but struggling because it seems to me that probably *everyone* is using a surge protector somewhere in the solar setup - either directly into the inverter or somewhere along the line. They did mention specifically GFCI, so perhaps it's more related more specifically to ground fault detection?
 
Surge protection power strips and UPS units with built-in surge protection should be avoided like the plague around green power systems and switched power systems. Most have one or two additional red or green LEDs.
Problem is they will clamp down on the circuit and blow fuses and inverters, many have tried solar and failed and never knew what went wrong.

I had to remove 5 of those surge suppressing power strips from my home and use an expensive UPS elsewhere to get my new directly driven solar power system to operate correctly.

If you're having problems start looking and replace with normal 15Amp power strips, cheap inverters blow up, expensive ones blow fuses or shut down for the clamping event.

Hope this helps someone, every time I expanded the system ran into another.

Bad news in pictures.
 

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