Bouncy castle fan and a car inverter

[lost in espace]

We operate a finish line gantry for our running timing business, its currently run off a noisy lpg generator. It is rated at 750 watts. Is it possible to run it off a hard wired car inverter, we need to run up to 3 hours. This would be so much quieter. A decent one is about £150 by the look of it.

I suspect the fan has a high loading until the gantry is inflated, I tried it on a cheap ebay chinese 1500 watt one but it just turned the fan once and the red led came on.

[Phunk]

You'd need a pretty meaty Inverter to run 750w, probably £300-400. You'd also need to keep the engine running.

There is also a bit of a grey area as you start to run into having to comply with BS7909 regulations which you really don't won't to have to deal with. (Jail time if it goes wrong)

Stick with a generator.

[lost in espace]

Phunk said:

You'd need a pretty meaty Inverter to run 750w, probably £300-400. You'd also need to keep the engine running.

There is also a bit of a grey area as you start to run into having to comply with BS7909 regulations which you really don't won't to have to deal with. (Jail time if it goes wrong)

Stick with a generator.

Thanks Phunk, looking at lpg silent ones right now. :-)

[TooMany2cvs]

lost in espace said:

We operate a finish line gantry for our running timing business, its currently run off a noisy lpg generator. It is rated at 750 watts.

750w at 12v is 62.5A

A battery for, say, a Discovery is about 100Ah. So, theoretically, with beefy enough cable and a mahoosive inverter, and allowing for the losses in the conversion, you'd get about an hour out of it.

But you'd utterly kill the battery in doing so.

Get a 24v inverter, though, and a few big batteries (24v in parallel, or pairs of series 12v then paralleled)... You instantly halve the current, and give a much greater reserve. It's very doable. How much money do you want to chuck at it? A quieter generator might be cheaper, less hassle and longer-lasting.

[PositronicRay]

A few yrs ago @ boat show in Southampton, a stand selling generators had a sign on one.

"this generator is running"

[blueacid]

I wonder whether you could, as a side project, use a car radiator fan motor in a bouncy castle fan housing, giving a 12v bouncy castle fan. Would save all the faff with 240v conversion, but the aforementioned power requirements might require a fair old stack of batteries to overcome.

[clived]

Is the important question here not what the generator is rated at, but what the current draw of the bouncy castle blower thing is?