danielThis post will cover the modifications I made to the AC side of the RV. This is made up of three main components.
- Inverter – The inverter is added inline with the incoming shore power. In my install a 10/3 SOOW cord carries power from the factory shore power wiring under the fridge to the inverter. A 6/3 SOOW cord then carries the AC power from the inverter back to the distribution panel under the fridge.
- Change over / transfer switch – A manual switch allows for the inverter to be bypassed. In position one shore power is routed to the inverter and back again. In position 2 shore power goes directly to the distribution panel bypassing the inverter input and output.
- 50a upgrade – Since the inverter can add 2,400 watts of additional power on top of the shore power I wanted to swap from a 30a main breaker to a 50a main breaker. This requires the use of 6awg wiring on the output side of the inverter. This is not the same as a traditional 50amp RV hookup since a 50amp RV connection has two legs of 50amp for a total of 100amps of capacity and my system only has one.
- Total power available from 30a shore power connection = 30a * 120v = 3,600w
- Total power when boosting 2,400w in hybrid mode = 3,600w + 2,400w = 6,000w
- Total amps at 6,000w / 120v = 50a
- Total power available from 50a shore power connection = 50a * 120v * 2 legs = 12,000w
The transfer switch allows for power to flow to the inverter and back in position 1. In position 2 the shore power is sent directly to the original distribution panel, bypassing the inverter. I also added a 50 amp DC breaker to function as a DC disconnect and a second 15 amp breaker for the fridge which did not come with an option to turn it off from the factory.
I originally had setup the change over switch with bare wire in the terminals. I decided to redo the connections with ring lugs to make things more resilient to all the shaking a RV goes through.