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What an inverter buyer must know about sine wave inverters

If you are planning to buy new inverters for home, chances are that you have already read "pure sine wave” feature in inverter catalogues everywhere. But what does it mean?

You want to know what pure sine wave means but you are not interested in technical details? Fair enough. An inverter buyer is not expected to understand the technicalities anyway. But yes, making an informed decision is equally important.

For the starters, let's take a look at the side effects of using home inverters that are NOT pure sine wave. A square wave inverter or a modified sine wave inverter, when connected to home appliance, can possibly have following side effects:

Unwanted noise in background:

Best and the most common example to begin with is ceiling fan, most indispensible appliance found in ever Indian household. Fan running on square wave inverter makes constant irritating noise. Even tube light makes that similar background noise. If you decide to suppress this noisy interference by playing some good music and switch on your audio system, the noisy band will expand. Even audio systems will bug you with a constant buzz in the background. Caveat: There could be other reasons why your fan is making noise, sq wave inverter could be just of the reasons.

Visible distortions:

Switch on your television connected to your home inverter which gives output voltage in square waveform, and you can expect to see wavy picture on screen. Try to work on your desktop or laptop, and don’t be surprised if the monitor is wavy too. So any screen based equipment can have visible distortions when the attached inverter for home is not since wave.

Damage to components:

Coming back to the ceiling fan, square waves can damage the coil windings over a period of time. It is not uncommon to find cases where fan coil re-winding had to be done to repair such damages. Similarly, sensitive equipment like TV, laptops, washing machines with more sophisticated components can get affected. So next time you put your mobile or laptop on charging with a home inverter that's not sine wave, think twice!

Sq wave also causes overheating, which also causes damage to components internally.

Reduced Efficiency:

For example, attach a washing machine to sq wave or modified sine wave inverter, you might see a reduction in force and spin speed.

What you read so far were the disadvantages of square wave inverter. Following are some features of sine wave inverters that you can keep in mind while purchasing or replacing the home inverter next time:

• Pure sine wave inverters give clear and clean output voltage, without any disturbances and interference. So no wavy TV screens or noisy ceiling fans.

• Output voltage is more stable. What that means is that you’ll not see flickering tube lights.

• Optimal heat generation, which means the attached appliances and their components won’t get damaged due to overheating.

• Sine wave inverters are costlier than square wave inverters.

Note:

• 1 KVA inverters and those of higher capacity are mainly pure sine wave inverters in India at the time of writing this blog.

• Another thing that holds true at the time of writing this article is that the so- called “pure” since wave inverters do not technically generate pure sine wave output waveforms. But, we will only get better with time ;)

 Also  Read: How to calculate the power requirement or capacity of inverter and battery

Electromatic Sales is a dealer of Luminous, Su-Kam and Microtek Sine Wave Inverters for home and office use.