# What size inverter??



## fdhadi (May 9, 2005)

Bit strange this one. 

Our local ice cream lady was asking me about inverters and if I would know what size inverter she would need to run a slush machine in the ice cream van. I wasn't sure myself so I thought I would ask on here. 
The Slush machine is 530 Watt 230-240 50 1 what ever that means. 

Could anyone help please?


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## Tezmcd (Aug 3, 2009)

Watts are amps x volts 


in very very rough terms (no calculator to hand) 500 Watts are about 2 amps at 240V


So simple maths means 500W (Volts X amps) at 24V means about 10X more amps than at 240V - so that is say 20 amps


But at 12V we can double that to 40 amps


So a 530 watt machine will probably need a 1000W inverter because of inefficiency and other magic stuff that gets too boring


Her Ice cream van battery "might" be a 80Amps per hour battery or similar


She could probably run it for about 45 minutes from a fully charged battery and after that it would fail and she would need the AA to be able to start her van and get home


................all the above posted whilst slightly drunk, not allowing for the engine to be running all the time and many many other factors that I cant even think of 


bottom line is probably a bad idea ................ but as I said I'm a bit drunk


I'm sure someone will be along to tell you that if you put a 1 megawatt solar panel on the roof and possibly a wind turbine too its all quite possible


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## Pudsey_Bear (Sep 25, 2008)

Simply put you need to have an inverter twice the wattage of whatever you intend using at max usage, then once you've worked out the amps, you then need to have the correct size battery bank to run it.


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## fdhadi (May 9, 2005)

Thanks for the replies Tezmcd & Kev. I'm still not quite I understand but will pass this info on and hope it helps.


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