My neighbors called me a couple weeks ago because their power was out. They had an old Trace PS2524 and it was still humming along but no voltage out. They ordered a new Outback and let me fool with their old one. I found a bad solder joint on the AC board where this big toroidal coil was attached. Ten minutes with a soldering iron and I had fixed the thing!
So they let me borrow it. I had this old Honda EM1000 generator laying around that someone gave me, and I wanted to charge batteries with a generator without burning a gallon an hour in my 7500 watt Generac.
This morning, I found a 100A DC breaker laying around and hooked up the Trace to the DC power panel. Then I strung a cut-off extension cord out of the AC side of it. I adjusted the AC amp limit on the inverter/charger to 7A and fired up the generator. It loaded down some and the battery voltage began to rise.. Sweet! I left my clamp meter at work so I cant accurately measure AC or DC amps yet, but I do know it's working. I adjusted the AC amp limit again to 8A and no faults came up. I think that's as high as I'm going to go without measuring.
I'm almost out of room on the power walls! 2 inverters, 4 charge controllers, wind turbine rectifiers, dump load and stop switch. It's starting to look a little crowded in there.
Just checked the thing after 2 hours and it looks like it used 1/4 tank of fuel. I'm pretty sure it only holds 1 gallon so I could run it all day long for $4 in fuel. I estimate I'm getting 15-20 ADC out, which on a day like today, just about offsets the maximum loads, so whenever the refrigerator turns off, I'm actually charging batteries a little. This is a major improvement!
