O.K. to use LOR with power inverter?

[Guest guest]

EAB wrote:

jeffostroff wrote:

Ok, let me complicate matters some more.

Has anyone ever tried this on a gas powered generator? Wonder what that sine wave looks like!

I could try, but pretty skiddish about potentially ruining a board... Maybe with a good UPS? They're known to clear up sine waves.... Thought?

Theoretically you could use a ups to clean up an inverter as well.

[Guest guest]

Ok, I got my new 1000 Watt inverter in the mail today from Costco.com. It's nice, it has 3 outlets. But just like we all predicted, the LOR can't handle fade down very good with this "not quite AC sinusoidal signal".

In fact, all the fade downs tended to just flicker a bit. For my LED trees, the flickering was more of a strobe and the LED trees never quite turned off, and nearly renders your sequence useless, except for the lights that are just going on/off. Not sure I want to drag it to my church for the Harvest Party, it's not looking good enough for my perosnal quality control metrics.

THe inverter output is what is known as a "modified sine wave", which means poor man's sine wave, which means it's a bunch of square waves shaped sort of like a sine wave. It's tricky and you have to use a true RMS meter to take readings on the output. A regular meter will not cut it.

I still don;t know why LOR has a hard time with it, it's still a 60 cycle signal, so what f it has edges. Perhaps a good product feature on upcoming boards might be the ability to handle and condition input sinusoidal sqaure waves, otherwise, how can anyone take their LOR on the road?:devil:

Tomorrow if I can free up some more minutes on my schedule, I'll hook up my high end Tripp Lite UPS and see if it too conditions the output of the inverter, to give me clean 60 cycle alternating current, or if it is putting out a modified sine wave (square wave) also. Wish me luck!