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Pure Sine Wave?

mwheel

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Oct 19, 2021
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Hi folks. I'll be housesitting for the next few months at my old place. This is an off grid home with solar and wind charging a 24V battery bank. AC is delivered by an old Xantrex Trace PS Series inverter. I bought it used in 2004, and was never sure whether its output was a square or pure sine wave.
Is anyone familiar enough with their older gear to know this? Can't find the answer in the owner's manual.
If it's square/modified, does anyone know whether there's an affordable device which could plug into an AC socket and convert the current to a cleaner sine wave safer for modern electronics?
Many thanks for any guidance.
 
To clean up a modified-sine output you’d need a band pass filter (60 Hz) than can handle heavy loads (1500W). If such a beast exits it’ll probably cost more than a pure sine inverter.
 
If you need a pure sine wave inverter,the better order a new one,it is impossible to converter a modified inverter to a pure sine wave inverter by some small changes,because their inside circuit board and transformer are different.
 
I don't understand why MSW inverters are sold. I don't expect the cost between the two designs to be more than a few percent of the total price. Anybody?
 
I don't understand why MSW inverters are sold.
Agree. I guess that these were quite complicated things to manufacture a couple of decades ago and pure sine wave was almost sci-fi back then but the world have moved forward quite a bit... And the "old goodies" still do the job in most cases... I would never buy other than pure sine wave these days even when there still is a noticeable price gap...
 
Agree. I guess that these were quite complicated things to manufacture a couple of decades ago and pure sine wave was almost sci-fi back then but the world have moved forward quite a bit... And the "old goodies" still do the job in most cases... I would never buy other than pure sine wave these days even when there still is a noticeable price gap...
As far as I know the losses are a bit higher with sine wave so a bigger heatsink. Microprocessor power is very inexpensive these days so that shouldn't be an issue.
 
Xantrex Trace PS Series inverter is a version of the original SW series sinewave inverters.

It is a stepped sinewave inverter. It is not a simple three step MSW inverter. Waveform output looks like following.

SW-Waveforms sinewave combined output.jpg
 
Aren’t ALL inverters step sine? I mean, sure, modern ones are MUCH smaller steps, but I would call that wave a sine, not a modified sine…
I doubt it will harm anything.
 
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