350 watts???

Man oh man. Keep the truck running for that one. Talk about a power drain. Yikes! You could practically plug in a refrigerator!

keep car running?
 

Thanks. At what point do I make sure to keep the car running? If I'm just charging a camcorder battery, is it safe to do it without the car running, and at what point would it be best to only charge while driving?

Absolutely safe. Charging a camcorder battery is minimal usage of the power inverter. I bought mine last year to not only charge my laptop battery, but to run it as well from the AC adapter. Oddly enough, a cigarette lighter adapter for my laptop was three times the price of the power inverter.

-gb-

I mean at what point do it drain the car battery?
 

If I happened to use the 350 watt (assuming I can find & get it) at close to it full capacity for charging something much bigger, will it drain my car's battery if I don't keep the engine running?

Chris, you keep confusing the rating on these devices with the amount of current you actually need to draw. I have a 400 watt "Husky" inverter also - I think it came from Home Depot and it was pretty cheap. It has both a cigarette lighter cable and also a pair of alligator clips which you can attach directly to the battery.

The 350 watt, 400 watt or 75 watt ratings don't mean a whole lot in terms of power draw (well, one design might be more efficient from another, or have a fan inside or something). You only need to draw 25 watts to charge a battery regardless of what the capacity of the inverter is. I think it should be pretty safe to do this without your car running - maybe not for days at a time, but certainly no problem for a couple hours unless your car battery is on its last legs. It would be comparable to leaving your trunk open with the little interior light on.

Right. But drawing 350 Watts would annoy your battery pretty quickly. More like leaving your headlight on. So don't get greedy. Give your car what it needs. If you are recharging all of your electronics at one time, idele the car. One or two low wattage items? No sweat.

clarification on item being(s) charged
 

I got the part about requirements for only charging my one camcorder battery. For clairification, what my later question was referring to was if I wanted to charge other things - a thought prompted by Steven & Greg's posts in this thread.

I started thinking that if it doesn't cost that much, I may as well get something that could also simultaneously charge a battery from my VX1000, or my Bescor 12V 50W NIMH shoulder pack battery (for my light), or who knows what other item may come to mind later that I might want to charge - maybe simultaneously. (I'm not talking about a refrigerator though).

I realize also that my cig. lighter connection in my car is "probably" 10 amps (can't find it listed), so I can use it up to 120 watts. For more watts I would have to connect direct to the car's battery.

I'd take a wild guess that anything requiring high enough wattage to need to be directly hooked to the car's battery might drain the car battery if it wasn't running. That's just a guess though, so if anyone has input on this I'd appreciate it.

i too use a inverter that i bought at costco a few years ago ..
it's a 400 watt (12v to 120 volts) ... you cannot pull 400 watts from cig/data lighter plug ( i believe you can pull 150 watts from cig plug) ... you can get 400 watts by direct hook up to car batt ( comes with cables) ...
i plug inverter into cig lighter then canon batt charger or computer or 1394 drives into inverter ...

I think everyone has pretty much answered this already... just use some common sense. It certainly won't hurt to have the car running if in doubt.

BTW, there are also other options. I recently got a Husky portable power pack that has a fair sized battery inside, a builtin inverter and 120VAC outlet, jump start cables and an air compressor all in one small unit. It cost about $90 and could come in handy for lots of things, like a power outage or a dead car battery. I haven't used it enough to get a sense of the run time, but I suspect it could charge quite a lot of camera batteries and other things before running out. There are other similar products out there, but this looked like a good value and since I live out in the middle of nowhere it seemed like a good thing to have around the house so I bought it on an impulse...

http://huskytools.com/husky/Category.../Product2.html

Don't skimp on the power inverters. I have owned 2 cheapo inverters that burned up on me....literally. Now I have a pro-watt 350. Power inverters should not be run with a constant load of more than 50% of the rated capacity. Now my laptop is 45 watts, cell phone 10 watts, Sony battery charger 22watts. I can run them all safely at the same time, even if it was a 15 watt model. I would not leave them all on while not in the car for fear of a dead battery, but if I am driving for an hour I can charge all of these devices safely. Best to hardwire to a terminal instead of the cig plug. I know my blazer has a fuse box under the back seat that I tap into for that and the sub-woofer.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...ughType=search

fan etc.
 

Goods points. I'm seeing such a huge range in prices and see one for only $40, 400w and has a built in fan, overheat shutdown.

I'll probably just run a load that's acceptable for the cig lighter. For greater loads it might get more involved because I guess I'd have to get special cables or something to go all the way to my battery under the hood of my Honda sedan.

That's what I thought about the power too, but I have a fuse box under the back seat. There are terminals in there just like the ones on the battery. I hooked to thosefor the power. With the cost of the gear that you may be hooking up I would not skimp, especially when a good one is only $130-$140. Not a huge cost considering what you can do with it. The ones that burned out on me were rated at 90watts and I only charged my cell on them at less than 8 watts. I would have lost my car if I wasn't inside--it started smoking and was too hot to touch in seconds. It was similar in style to this : http://www.walgreens.com/store/produ...id=prod2274212

Thanks, I'll check under my seat etc. It would be good to know what specs constitute a "good one" to evaluate at what point I'd just be paying more money unnecessarilly. The specs on the $35 one I described look pretty good to my eyes - though I'm no electrical guru. I thought the 400W with fan and built in overheat shutdown would make it safe.

I don't know if anyone brough this up, but a few years back, I bought a cigarette lighter adapter that plugged directly the charging plug on my Sony Cameras. I used it for my Digital 8 and a still camera, but they all use the same fitting, so I assume it would work with the current crop of cameras. I'll have to dig it out to see if my recollection is correct.

http://www.hawkwoods.com/site_pages/...ttery_pack.asp

I bought this package, and the batteries are great - the charger has also saved my bacon in a few trying circumstances.