Magnum Inverter

The Universe of Energy, Walt Disney World. So much energy there.

At home, last night? Not so much.

We had a power failure. I know when it happened. My son called me at 3:51 in the morning. Again at 3:52. And again at 3:53.

Now it is doubtful that I would have woken up from a deep sleep at that time of the morning. More so when you consider that the smartphone he was calling was charging in our house and I was blissfully asleep out in our coach.

Our son was awakened when all of the “gee we just lost power” alarms starting buzzing from our various technology devices. A veritable cacophony of urgent alerts. I think he was annoyed. He needed others to share his joy of waking up in the middle of the night.

My son decided to exit the house, walk out to the coach and wake us up.

“Power’s gone!”

Aside from notifying the utilities company, there wasn’t much I could do about the power outage.

The coach had gracefully switched from shore power to battery power. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. I decided to activate the generator instead. The energy management system then automatically switched over to the generator.

This got me to thinking about the auto genset feature of our Magnum inverter. I seem to recall reading something about the generator automatically starting when a certain condition was met, like a shore power outage or when the batteries discharged to a certain level.

For our power outage, I just went ahead and turned the generator on myself. I ran it for a couple of hours. By the time I woke up at around 6am, power had been restored to the house and we had shore power available to the coach. Off went the generator.

The Magnum inverter is still very much a black box to me. I did read the manual but it was not very helpful. Lots and lots of settings. Very few tutorials.

This video, on the other hand, helped me better understand the Magnum inverter and how it works. Very cool device.