Did my 18 year old Xantrex Freedom 20 just die?

[Dougtiff]

Thanks Capt. Bill, as i have a freedom 20, so making a note for that hack, on another note, mine will not power my micro wave, dont know how BILL O makes his work.

[Bill O]

Originally Posted by Dougtiff

Thanks Capt. Bill, as i have a freedom 20, so making a note for that hack, on another note, mine will not power my micro wave, don't know how BILL O makes his work.

Actually, it is one of those black box mysteries why the "vintage" microwave works so well. The MW technology is so old, the bottom glass plate is stationary and the wand in the inside top moves. The inverter is also old, but not as old as the MW.

We tested the efficiency by heating a cup of water (exactly 1 cup in the same mug) for 2 min. and compared the temp. of the water using the shore power and the inverter. The experiment was done several times and surprisingly the water temp/efficiency was 89% of the shore power. This was much better than we expected.

As mentioned previously, we don't use the microwave that much, except for popcorn on movie night and other light use.

[gonesail]

the reset or reboot works on a lot of modern appliances when they get confused. sometimes you forget to do it. we had a robotic vacuum cleaner that woke up every night. very irritating to say the least. I was ready to toss it but tried one more thing. remove the onboard battery and then reinstall. that fixed it.

[waterman46]

Originally Posted by Dougtiff

Thanks Capt. Bill, as i have a freedom 20, so making a note for that hack, on another note, mine will not power my micro wave, dont know how BILL O makes his work.

Microwave oven is an essential part of living aboard! Seriously, for us.

We found that there are some microwave ovens that will not work with the Freedom 20, I suppose due to the waveform not being perfectly sinusoidal.
I am not sure how to tell the difference when you buy the microwave. But for us, over these 20 years, two out of three microwaves did work fine, but one of them did not work at all. That "bad" one worked fine on shore power. It may be telling that the one that did not work on inverter was a very lightweight one, while the ones that did work were heavier. My guess is the type of power supply in the microwave, where the good ones use a heavier transformer.

[waterman46]

So, I found this link which will explain the differences in the power supplies used in microwave ovens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3w-6bh2sok

Unfortunately the newer microwave oven models may be most susceptible to problems operating from some inverters. Many use a DC-DC converter so the transformers in them are operating at 20KHz or so, rather than at 60Hz, and that lets them be much smaller and lighter. Too bad, these also seem to want a pure sine wave at 115V for proper operation.
BTW the Freedom 20 manual says it's output is "modified sine wave" (recalling from memory here).

[Nauti-Nauti]

My Xantex 2000 was installed in 2008 and gave good service until 2018. The charger side failed. We were able to install a 60Amp ProNautic 12-60 Universal Charger and still used the Xantrex for Inverting. Now we have done many other upgrades and have installed a Victron Multiplus 3000. This gives us greater inverted power and more charging power. We also have a selector switch and have kept the ProNautic charger. This gives us the ability to plug into 220/240 VAC or 120 VAC (50 or 60Htz) shore power whenever necessary. We have found this very beneficial for passing through Indonesia to South Africa where we have been stuck now for 8 Covid months in a marina.