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Wiring Safety Issue
I purchased the Ampeak 2000 watt inverter and remote. This inverter had a design issue that forced me to return it as I felt it would be unsafe to leave installed in my RV due to the standard wiring conventions not being followed on all 3 plugs. Detailed explanation below and in video. In my case I was trying to wire it into my RV so that I could easily flip a switch and feed the inverter into two different circuits. One was for the auxiliary outlets so I could use a coffee maker with it. The other circuit was for the microwave. The inverter seemed to work fine when I bench tested it so I installed it in the RV and wired up 3-way switches so I could switch back and forth between shore power and the inverter. First circuit went fine and everything worked but when I installed the second circuit I got an OOP indication for an overload condition. Thinking I had wired something wrong I went back through all of my wiring and everything seemed to be fine until I plugged in both circuits to the inverter and it would cause the hot and neutral to be shorted together. Further investigation found that two of the plugs on the inverter have the hot and neutral swapped from normal convention. Now this isn't something most people would notice if they had individual appliances connected. In my case going through the circuit breaker panel it ties the neutral and hot together since the neutrals are all tied together in the panel. Being a retired electrical engineer I figured I could just pull the front panel and swap the leads on the plugs but what I found was the plugs were soldered into a circuit board so there is no way to swap them and also leads me to believe they are all wired that way which could be a safety hazard or cause a failure like I experienced. I also contacted their customer support and the phone number listed on the website was out of order. I did get a response from an email and while it contained a lot of nice words about how they were there to help they wanted videos to show the inverter working and not working to pass on to their technical staff. I sent them that along with the explanation of what was wrong. Their "technical staff" still couldn't understand it so asked for an additional video showing something different. At that point I was done with their stall tactics of asking for meaningless videos so I decided to return the inverter. While I could make this inverter work by changing my wiring to match their incorrect layout I don't want electronics in my RV where the design has a blatant flaw like this and the technical staff can't understand what is wrong or catch it in the first place. Their last email did say to return the product but nothing about a replacement so I will be ordering a different brand of inverter. I read a lot of reviews but very seldom write one. This time I feel the need to warn people about a design flaw or at least give others the reason they would see the same problem I had. If you watch the video it will fully explain what the problem is.
September 2019 · Automotive · verified purchase
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