About six months ago, I bought a $40 Bestek inverter on Amazon, that claimed to be a “pure sine” inverter. I was skeptical that such a low priced 300W inverter could produce a clean sinusoidal waveform, so I decided to test it with my oscilloscope. I was pleasantly surprised…
I’m guessing that not a lot of you have an oscilloscope laying about, so this is probably something you can’t test yourself. If that’s the case, please check out the video.
I’ve put an Amazon link at the bottom of this post if you decide to pick one up for your own minivan camper.
This may be the least expensive pure sine inverter that is commonly available and I’m convinced that this is the best 300W inverter you can find at any price.
If you don’t know what an inverter is, basically it works as a voltage converter to turn the 12 volt, direct current supply of your battery into 120 volt, alternating current, similar to what comes out of your wall socket at home. You’ll need this 120vac to run any household appliances in your minivan camper.
“Pure Sine” inverters reproduce the type of ac current that comes from your wall outlet and are safe to use with ANY appliance. “Modified Sine” inverters use less expensive circuitry to produce an approximation of the household ac waveform and can damage certain sensitive electronics.
By the way, the type of waveform that you will see in the video is called a “sinusoidal” waveform, or sine wave for short. If you remember your high school trigonometry, this might make some sense to you, but I’m not going to go into it here because it would bore the readers to death 🙂
Here’s a link to the Bestek if you decide to buy your own.
At some point, you will want an inverter for your minivan RV conversion. This one plugs into the cigarette lighter socket, or you can connect it to your solar generator/battery to provide 120v for your appliances
This Bestek Inverter also has a low voltage cut-off so you won’t drain your battery, as well as two USB charging ports on the side. Considering I spent $18 for the crappy modified sine inverter in the video, this thing is a deal at the current $33 price (I think it was $42 when I bought mine). I don’t do a lot of “product recommendations” but I’ve been very happy using this inverter to run my electric blanket and my immersion water heater.
Darren
–Odyssey Camper