Inverter install

Puppel

Installing a SAM-2000-12 tomorrow and have a couple questions. The neg. battery wire was upgraded to a 2/0 to the inverter but the chassis ground , 6 ga. from neg inverter post to grounding block is unchanged.Should this new inverter be grounded to the chassis in this manner, with this gauge of wire. After the inverter is wired is it against solar law to connect a short pigtail from inverter dc outlet to ac receptacle to energize 3 other receptacles in the trailer two of which are gfi's

Thanks New Guy

Puppel

Re: Inverter install

I meant to say inverter AC outlet to AC receptacle in trailer.

BB.

Re: Inverter install

The ground wire is there to, if something goes wrong, short any stray voltage/current to ground.

On the Inverter output, you are looking at shorting less than 20 amps.

For the inverter, the input fuse would in the range of:

2,000 watts * 1/0.85 inverter eff * 1/10.5 inverter cutoff * 1.25 NEC wiring/breaker deratings = 280 Amp fuse/breaker rating

The "fusing" current for 6 awg copper wire is ~668 amps for ~10 seconds.

So, if you are running a 250 to 300 amp fuse with 2/O cable--I would say that 6 AWG is a bit on the small side. I don't have an NEC manual to see if they list ground wire size based on main panel breaker capacity--but I would guess 6 awg would be the minimum wiring size for a 200 amp panel.

If you can justify (and connect) a 4 awg cable instead, that 10second fusing current is ~946 amps. Or, for sake of sanity, two 6 AWG cables in parallel would be OK too.

If your fusing is less than ~200 amps, then 6 awg should be OK.

There should be a 6 (or 4) awg path from the inverer ground to battery negative post/bus. And from RV grounding to battery negative post/bus. You want to blow fuses/breakers, not any of your wiring paths if there is a fault between hot and ground.

-Bill