Inverter Mounting Considerations

We're getting a lot of questions again on inverter installations so we're going to try and answer some of those. It's really tough to draw a graphic on this one but one of the questions we're getting is: Where do I install my inverter? Where is the best place to install it? Ideally we want to find a clean and dry location to mount that inverter. That’s an electronic device and if it gets wet it's going to fail prematurely, so we need to find a clean dry location for that unit. The other consideration is it needs a space where it's going to have room to properly vent. So if it's in too small of a compartment the inverter is going to overheat and the other consideration is when it's in a compartment, how close to the battery bank are we? Ideally, we want to be as close the battery bank as possible, Why is that? Well, typically we're operating at low DC voltage, we're typically feeding that inverter with 12-volts DC so we'd get a lot, the longer the cable is the more voltage drop we get. The more voltage drop we get the bigger the cable we have to use so we have to oversize the cable if were running at longer distance. The other consideration is AC cabling. This depends on if the inverter is hard wire capable. Most, I'll call them industrial inverters and most of the Xantrex units are hard wire capable and because of the distance, you may have to wire AC plugs to the inverter.