jojo2130 said:
Trace is expensive. You pay for the name and the advertising
Without getting involved in any arguments, if I may give my opinion on Trace & the imitations.
Having lived here for 15 years, owning 6 or 7 different inverter brands myself and indirect experience with many other "no name" brands, I can honestly say that despite all the hype & testimonials about other brands, they never live up to a Trace/Xantrex.
Not only can they not supply the same power per rating, they are not as efficient, nor reliable.
Furthermore, the lack of versatility in adjustments to suit one's exact needs, make you waste money in many ways.
One example of the problem with the imitations, which, for the most part do not have charge rate adjustments, one could not use a small generator, as I have, to supply power when the batteries are exhausted, and put a trickle charge in at the same time.
Not having an adjustment for switchover voltage can also be costly & inconvenient.
If the unit switches over at 95 volts, for example and you're only getting 92, which is quite frequent around here, you would have to run off your batteries and eventually exhaust your back up power.
Conversely, if one needs the full 110 for a given situation, let's say to run a washing machine, one can adjust the rate to not allow the power to drop below a certain level for the needed period of time.
Not having a discharge protection control, can also be inconvenient at times.
If you have no generator to back up your inverter and you run down to the protection level, on occasion it is nice to be able to turn it off, and squeeze a bit more power out of the batteries.
At that point, one goes into super conservation mode, but can get a few essentials running, like a fan or a light, for hours more, until the power comes back on.
I could go on, but I hope that the point is made that buying the cheaper locally made units lands up costing you more in the long run, not to mention a lot of inconvenience.
The whole idea of having an inverter is for convenience.
Otherwise, everybody would be using generators, as they are a lot cheaper to buy per watt of output.