SpongeBob's Power Management System

[davidbrady]

Thought you guys might enjoy seeing some of the circuitry behind this system:




Hey Chuck,

You must be psyched, a cross country trip has been a long time coming! Bus-ta-move uses an external transfer switch to switch between shore and generator power. From there power is split with a portion going directly to a breaker box and the rest going to the inverter. The transfer switch inside the inverters (yes, the inverters also have transfer switches) is used to decide when to switch to battery power. When on shore/gen all the breakers inside the panel are powered and the inverter isn't participating in 120VAC power delivery. When shore/gen go away, then the inverter senses the loss of 120VAC power and it automatically switches to inverter mode, actually inverter sense mode. When under inverter power only a subset of the breakers in the panel get 120VAC power. BB set it up this way to minimize user power management. They pre-configured which breakers will get inverter power attempting to make certain that the inverters will never be asked to deliver more than their rated capacity. This is a very common way of integrating battery/inverter power with shore/generator, and many Prevost converters use this approach. Vantare is unique in placing the inverters at the center of the electrical distribution and as an arbiter of all power: battery, shore, or generator. The advantage is the user has the choice of powering anything with the inverters; whereas, with BB's approach the choice of what's inverter powered is hardwired. The disadvantage is that Vantare's approach requires more sophisticated load management, whether user involved or automatic load pruning.