Need a Power Inverter for Your Car?

Would you like to run various electrical devices in your car – maybe charge your mobile phone or plug in a music playing device -  but unsure how? Think it all sounds a bit complicated?

Read on as the use of a car power inverter is not as complicated as you may think.

How Does a Power Inverter Work?

You do not need to be an electrical genius to understand how a power inverter works.

There are two forms of electrical power, not matter where you are in the world – or in space for that matter – and you have heard of them before: AC and DC.

DC – direct current – is an electrical current that flows continuously from a positive pole to the negative pole. DC is found in batteries and in nature. In other words, when you switch on an electrical appliance that uses the traditional battery with a positive and negative terminal, it powers the appliance by the continuous trickle from the positive to the negative. When the battery is empty of charge, there is no electrical flow and the appliance does not work.

AC – alternating current – flows back and forth between the two poles of positive and negative. A handy pattern of behavior for the national grid (the big anonymous ‘thing’ that powers our homes and businesses); effectively, any man-made electrical power is an alternating current.

A power inverter is the fabulous electrical device that inverts (that is, changes) a DC electrical current to an AC electrical current.

The problem with running electrical devices in cars hangs on the fact that there is an incompatible current between the car battery (DC) and the electrical device (AC).

This is why car power inverters were created.

Various manufacturers have since developed a whole range of compact, useful and reliable car power inverters that safely convert the car battery’s current from DC to AC – so you can now plug in your music device or mobile phone to charge, play music etc.

Thinking of Buying a Car Power Inverter?

Firstly, don’t get bogged down in the technical aspects or let the sales person bamboozle you with tech speak. Do your research and make sure you get the right one for you.

There are two ways that power inverters work, hence there are some key phrases you need to be aware of in the effort to fight of tech speak!

There are two factors in how power inverters work – wave output and wattage output.

In order to understand this, you need to picture a screen. A wave output is a description of the physical appearance of the electrical signals as they move across an oscilloscope (a device that observes the exact wave shape of the electrical signal).

Square waves are exactly that – they are squares on a grid.

Pure sine waves (true sine waves are exactly the same thing) would appear as visible waves on the screen.

And All This Means...?

What it means is that pure sine waves power inverters work better than square wave power inverters, especially if you need uninterrupted flow of electrical power.

As you can imagine, a car power inverter that uses the more reliable pure sine wave pattern of electrical flow tend to cost more than a square wave one.

A hybrid power inverter has been developed so that the cost of these handy electrical gadgets is decreased. This hybrid type uses a modified square wave or a modified sine wave. And the great thing is there are very little technical differences in the results produced between the top-end pure sine wave power inverter and the hybrid, modified sine wave power inverter.

Buying a car power inverter should not present too much of an issue for the less technically minded amongst us. Seek advice before you buy to ensure you get a reliable and safe power inverter.

About the Author: This article was written on behalf of Sunpoweruk, suppliers of power inverters.