Quote:
Originally Posted by CharlieJ
OK-your concern about stray current is not applicable to the neutral...stray (and more importantly and common, galvanic) current comes and goes via your safety ground wire. This can be mitigated by a galvanic isolator and stopped completely by an isolation transformer.
So for your particular instance, having the inverter supplied by shore power is no different than supplying a stereo from shore power. You have no issues...really.
Hope this helps.
Charlie
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Charlie,
Thanks for your time. I wish I had an isolation transformer, but have not figured out where to put one. I do have an isolator.
The inverter is not supplied with shore power. It won't accept 240 VAC in, at least as its presently wired. If it would, it still would pass the 50 cycle AC to ships
equipment. But everything requires 120 VAC which is not present.
The charger is separate from the inverter in this operational mode. I simply have a 16 amp 220V shore power cord running to the
engine room directly powering the charger. It keeps the
batteries up, and the inverter creates the 120 VAC at 60 cycles for most things. I still have to run the
generator to cook...all
electric boat and the
stove is not wired to the inverter since the load would be too high for more than one
heating element.
The right answer is one of those fancy systems megayachts use to take any power source and convert it to whatever the ships standard is. The issue is they are probably worth more than my boat! At most I figure I might have 6 weeks at docks like this over the next year before I get back to the US. Some will be 127V/50 cycle and again the charger will
work. So something fancy is not in the cards.
The point is, if I ground the temporary charger, I have linked the safety ground from inverted power to the shore based ground system. I'm not sure that's very good either.
There may be no best way to do this....
Regards, Bob