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jeff cote here with boatingtechtalk.com so we have a fellow question from a boater named torsten and torsten uh is asking a question in response to our nespresso video that we posted a few weeks ago so jeff following up on your nespresso uh segment on the 27th of january 2021 what do you stand on the question of combined inverter chargers versus dedicated inverters dedicated chargers pros and cons of each um and what's your thought on redundancy you're right you know um most of us as boaters are most likely going to have a combined unit inverter charger you know the reality is that the cost of buying a high output charger that is 100 amps um is almost the same price as buying an inverter charger with a 2000 watt inverter and 100 amp charger so first off the bat if you're gonna go dedicated inverter dedicated charger you're going to pay twice for it not only you're going to pay for two items literally double the price but the other thing too that you're going to end up doing is you're going to have to install two devices so that's two ac feeds going in one ac feed even leaving you're going to have connections dc connections from the battery bank to the inverter you're also going to have dc connections from the battery bank to the charger so we're talking about a duplication of effort now that being said if money is not a huge object certainly i like it right and i've seen that on some boats where they're going to have standalone inverters stand-alone chargers good for redundancy but another way to achieve redundancy which is our more popular approach is actually installing two inverter chargers the reason we do that is from a capital cost perspective it's almost similar to buying a dedicated standalone inverter and a dedicated standalone charger so from a capital cost perspective it's not the same but it's similar and if you lose one you still have the other right and that's the beauty of an inverter charger especially for the boaters and we've been doing this quite a lot lately installing two of them side by side so you can make use of certain things right you can start stacking inverters so you could have two 2000 watt inverters or two 3000 watt inverters and literally have both of them working together so now you have a 6000 watt inverter and have both chargers working at the same time some boats have huge battery banks as we know i'm a big fan of sizing a battery bank charger to the battery bank size right so having two inverter chargers that are both let's say outputting 150 amps at 12 volts right that's maybe a 6000 watt inverter 300 amp charge rate and those two combined are going to really allow you especially when you're running your generator to recharge the batteries at a really really fast rate which is important to a lot of power boaters that have or sail boaters that have large boats large battery banks and have a generator and they want to recharge as quickly as possible so my take on torsion's question is my pref my preference is to actually install two inverter chargers if an inverter is something you need versus want then i think it's worthwhile considering having a secondary inverter onboard because generally the people that have inverters there's a subset of us that their refrigeration for instance only works on an inverter power like they have no dc connected to that fridge so if they're not connected on short power if they're not running the generator then they need an inverter and if they don't have an inverter then they're stuck to being on shore power 24 7 or generator 24 7. so that's why for those borders that have ac refrigeration on board i'm a big proponent of have actually redundant inverter chargers running in parallel and if one fails you can isolate and you can do that with a source selector switch all of this doesn't happen in the unit you do it around but you'll see the big boats you know around 50 55 60 65 foot they're actually going to start building that in so around the trawlers around 40 45 or people that are really going remote that want a high level redundancy um i'd recommend two inverter chargers over a dedicated inverter dedicated charger and that's a great question thanks for asking thanks for watching this video and we'll see you on the next video