Hi Pete, and welcome to the board... fellow Tasmanian.
Firstly, the 8010 is actually referring to an eg8010 chip which is the heart of a high power pure sine wave inverter control card we have developed recently, so is very likely familiar to Solarnewbee.
So if your gonna use a tranny to make a pure sine wave unit, this is a very useful option... see here:
http://www.anotherpower.com/board/index.php/topic,1116.0.htmlThis is for the first testing of the egs002,which later we made the 8010 directly..... here it is (002 variety, no pics of the 8010 doing this) at 4000w using a torroid transformer with under sized primary ... 16mmsq wire
The transformer we are talking about here has very poor use of the winding window, which is crucial for good duty cycle operation, at higher powers.... It was designed for low duty cycles, so it did not fry.
For a 1kw - 2kw pure sine we would need to take that core apart, as we need to get 12-16mmsq of copper in there, as a minimum... this will entail winding thick wires three in hand or more....and.. this requires a clear winding environment....
If you tried to do this as it is, you would have both a total mess, and more importantly, the enamel would have scraped on the sides of the core, and damage would occur... thick wire is not easy to handle ( 1.8mm and over )
Secondly the length of pull through would make this very unlikely even for single smaller wire....... the primary would probably need the same treatment.
The real problem is that I see no bolts holding the plates together.... pulling apart and redoing the plates is easy in most cases, bigger is even easier, but...
They may have welded the plates together like in microwave ones.... and this presents problems with eddy currents, which would kill this off for inverter purposes... yes I have rewound many and bigger and smaller... but large eddy currents will use too much power on idle, which will be twice the torroids before we use poor steel or have plates uninsulated .
Worse, they may have punched them together, and thats a real problem with reassembly... I suspect this is the case here.
So if he is to use this transformer as a useful inverter unit, we need full winding windows to keep the power handling up and the magnetising currents down.
Or the idle currents will make the inverter very hungry for power. The original PJ units consumed over 5kwh/day just to run no loads.... this is a problem we don't have anymore.
This article here
http://www.anotherpower.com/board/index.php/topic,1044.0.html will give him enough information on how to size the windings as well as other tips so measuring the turns/volt will tell the story of turns, and current will go up or down according to voltage.... wire size..
The 8010 board takes any voltage, so does not matter, as does the 002.
.................oztules