![]() ![]() The solution to this obscure problem is to apply a voltage REDUCTION when operating at 50hz, intentionally bringing the voltage down to 200V - at least for the HVAC. Running the HVAC directly off 230V 50hz would appear to be really bad for the compressors and fans. ![]() The key is that if you reduce the frequency, you need to correspondingly lower the voltage or you risk overheating and burning out the motor. What's with that? I started hunting around and found this article which explains it in more depth. But there is another more subtle part to the fine print. OK, that's not a bad price to pay, and something I can live with. They warn that when run on 50hz, their output is reduced by 17%. The first bit of fine print is on the HVAC components. The above appliances will run at 50hz, but there is some fine print involved, including one little tid bit that was completely new to me. As a side note, the charger-feeding-inverter combination is a mini version of the bigger universal power converters that I talked about earlier on. They key is to be sure the battery charger can keep up supplying all the DC power needed to run the inverter. 120V appliances are fine because they all run off the inverter which will continue to operate at 60hz. All other 240V appliances like the washer, dryer, watermaker, and oven can't be used unless we run the generator. This means that when plugged into 50hz power, we will only be able to run selective devices, and the list is short. Not only is there a voltage difference to deal with, but some 60hz devices can handle 50hz, where others can't. We have elected to make this feature part of our build so we can run on 208V shore power without stressing any of our electrical appliances.ĥ0hz operation is a lot trickier. Several different companies make them, and the transformer used on the N60 can be adapted to do this as well. The cases above can be handled with a boost transformer. Many appliances will work fine on this, but the lower voltage means that those appliances will draw more current than normal, and that means more internal heating, and possibly shorter life. Given the way the N60 is wired, this turns into 104/208V on board. For a variety of reason that I'll skip over, some marinas only have 120/208 shore voltage. This one is a bit trickier, and represents a 15% voltage boost. This one is easy since it's the power that the boat is designed to use. Given all this, here's what I think we need to be able to handle for shore power, and what it needs to be converted into on board. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. To do that, the bare minimum is to be able to run the HVAC so the boat doesn't become a Petri dish, keep batteries charged up, and run whatever alarm and monitoring equipment is on the boat. At a minimum, I want to be able to leave the boat in a foreign marina on shore power for extended time while we are away. After all, firing up the generator is always an option to get exactly the power we want. As a result it's a partial solution, but for me, it will have to be close enough. 60hz power will remain 60hz, as 50hz will remain 50hz. This is a much more cost-effective approach, but it only matches voltage, not frequency. The other approach is to use boost/reduce transformers to match up the voltage. If for no other reason, the cost eliminates them as a possibility for me. But they come at a high price in $$, space consumption, heat dissipation, and complexity. They take in whatever you give them, and put out exactly what you want. If you really want to go all-out, there are companies that make universal shore power converters. The challenge for a boat that will travel all over the world is that it needs to be able to run on all the different forms of shore power, or at least some reasonable subset of them. Other parts of the world follow one of these two standards, or variations on each. In North America, that would be 120/240V 60hz. For boats that only travel in one part of the world, their shore power is set up for that particular region. Boats all have the ability to be plugged into shore power to run everything when at dock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |