I’ve recently had to make this decision. I went with a Luminous 3.5kVA inverter and 4x Amaron Quanta 100AH batteries. I’ve always been a huge fan of Amaron – I’m swayed by branding/marketing and their introduction in the Indian market was memorable. My second preference was Panasonic VRLA batteries. Exide has caught up quite a bit these days as well.
The inverter was 15.5k and the batteries were 8.5k each. I intend to add four more batteries in parallel when funds allow. I’ve seen used Quanta 100AH batteries go for around 4k. I was in a hurry and needed it immediately so I didn’t ask for a better price, and I installed everything myself that same day. The inverter and the batteries weigh over 30kg each so it was a fun workout getting them up the stairs.
Inverters of this capacity do not have sockets or plugs, they have terminals for you to wire directly into your switch board. I opted to wire into a power strip with a three core 4mm cable. I soldered the cable into a six socket Bull/Gongniu power strip that I got from Amazon, after removing the resetable fuse (the inverter has it’s own MCB’s). The brass strips of the power strip should be able to handle the full power capacity of the inverter but the 10A rated switch may not. The power strip has tri-wing Y type screw heads, the same kind that Nintendo uses for their handhelds and Apple for their laptop batteries.
This particular Luminous inverter is a bit dated because it doesn’t display time remaining and it doesn’t have wifi, but I’ll be adding Tasmotized power/voltage monitors so this didn’t matter much to me.
I got about 7 hours of back up with a ~600w load and an average power factor of 85. Fans would definitely reduce the power factor.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the entire setup. It’s placed on a couple of Ikea BROR shelving units that are rated for 130kg per shelf.
Attachments:
