Space heater trips inverter breaker (R-Pod 195)

We have a Renogy 1000watt inverter hooked to our twin 12volt LA batteries. It will handle a small 4 cup coffee maker and a couple of pieces of toast. I wired seperate outlets for the inverter (to keep things simple) and it all works fine. 

Originally posted by Talking_Cow Thanks offgrid, I'm totally with you now.  If the grid power goes low, the EMS will kill the power to the pod, but life in the pod goes on (other than AC & Microwave) thanks to the Inverter's ATS. And I've got all winter to look for an EMS   ... dang, winters coming...

There are hybrid (grid tie/stand alone combo) inverters you can buy which will either work in parallel with the grid or off grid. Those are nice because they are bidirectional and will either charge the battery or provide additional current if your day in a 15A circuit trying to run the a/c and micro. But theyre expensive and FR doesn't offer them.

The additional specs you provided are mostly for the inverter function and are pretty typical. None of that tells us what the voltage or frequency limits are that trigger the ATS to operate. That might be covered in the UL standard that the ats was presumably listed under. I'd guess the limits would be pretty loose if they existed, UL standards are safety not performance standards.

Of course, a total power failure would trigger it. My feeling is that if you feel you need brownout protection, hanging an EMS in front of the inverter/ATS would do it, because the EMS setpoints would determine when the ATS sees an outage. Short of that if you have a visibly low grid voltage situation you can just disconnect and manually trigger the transfer.

With the inverter/battery available, you only need an autotransformer if you don't have a generator and want to run the a/c or expect the low voltage condition to last a long time, the inverter/battery will take care of your low power appliances and short duration voltage drops.

I don't believe the inverter itself would take care of brownouts. It's not going to be a hybrid type inverter which parallels with and provides grid support. It will be either on or off, depending on whether the grid connection is down or up, and there will be an automatic transfer switch which will determines that.

So, if the grid voltage is low but not low enough to trigger the ATS to activate the inverter, then you could still see a low voltage condition on the trailer circuits.

Is there a min voltage spec for the ATS transfer listed? If so and it is acceptable then as you say you wouldn't necessarily need an ems, just a surge supressor. If it's not then you might still want an EMS so you could depend on it to disconnect the grid and allow the inverter to take over when you wanted it to.

As for an autotransformer, that would maintain the voltage so the ATS wouldn't trip and the inverter would stay on under low grid voltage conditions. If you expect to encounter low grid voltage conditions a lot you might want that to avoid running on your battery, but it seems a bit like overkill to me.