Update: I finally had time to get back to the
boat. After several more hours of trouble shooting and getting the "wiring error" again, and other oddities, I finally realized I had a bad ethernet cable. I replaced that and viola', no more
wiring error messages and I had good comm with the
control panel.
However, I still had trouble running the Air conditioner. The big problem is that the Multiplus would - according to what I saw on the
control panel - kick the AC-in offline when the demand was highest. It was as if the
current limit you set is the point at which it cuts this out instead of adding the boost to it. It would read zero for more than 10 seconds, while the AC ran off the
batteries (drawing 120 amps), but then the
compressor would try to kick in again at the 10 second point with still no AC-in, at which point the
inverter would overload and shut off.
I did set the "Dynamic
Current Limiter" to on with the DIP switches and it did not seem to make a difference. I got the same result. I did run the
Honda with the auto idle to "off" - there's no way it can
ramp up in time for a
compressor kick-in with it on.
Interestingly, I pulled the other
Honda generator out and hooked the two of them in parallel (4000 watts total) and set the current limiter to 40 amps and got mixed results (before installing the
inverter, the two generators ran the air conditioner just fine). Sometimes I got the same result (i.e. ac-in kicked off and then inverter overloaded) and sometimes it worked (it may have been when I set the current limiter to 50 amps, but I can't remember).
I re-wired it so that the air conditioner was connected to the Multi-plus' AC-2 (the original topic of this thread) and results were even worse. With this, when the compressor kicked in, the inverter would shut off the AC-in for about a minute or two and of course the air-conditioner got no inverter
power from AC-2 because it had shut off the AC-in! So I re-wired it back to the AC-1 mains.
I was really frustrated so I went and sailed around for a few hours and then came back and tried just one
generator again.
The
batteries were fully charged at this point ("float" mode when charged with the inverter) and I set the current limiter to 25 amps. It managed to
work the one time I tried it. Previously I had only waited through "bulk" and well into "absorption" charge mode.
This time, the control panel showed (momentarily) 646 amps coming from the generator (obviously impossible) before it kick off the
shore power (generator in). But because the batteries were more fully charged, the inverter was able to
power through the wait until the inverter kicked back in the
shore power at about 15 seconds.
It would appear that having an absolutely fully charged
battery bank (of 5 large batteries) is the only way it will
work with my air conditioner. But that doesn't explain why it would kick out the AC-in when under high demand, just when it needs both the shore power and the inverter boost.
I really want to like this inverter but it seems to me that the current limiter is not functioning properly.