Using fan on battery power

I just bought a 500w inverter. I don't expect to use often as we don't intend on camping too often without shore power. It's intended purpose is to power coffee bean grinder in the morning, hand blender for drinks and emergency use of the television. As you mentioned, if worse comes to worse it can be clamped on the TV battery with the engine running.

And I concur about the fantastic fan. In a word it's 'fantastic'.

Back to an earlier discussion point... The battery shutoff switch.
Should I be occasionally NOT shutting off the batteries to allow them to drain all the way while the pod is parked?
Or is it fine with deep cycle GC2s to never quite use all the juice?

Originally posted by howmanyds Oh! 😳 I think I got bad advice last summer when I picked this thing up for my van. Ended up not installing it. Clearly, didn't do enough research. What would be an acceptable amount of power in an inverter?

Not necessarily.. if you were planning to use it with the engine running, and the alternator of the van providing the 12v, that's fine up to a point. I have used a 2000watt that way to run a skilsaw etc.

But to draw straight from a battery bank.. not good, not good at all.

A 75watt will run your tv. I personally wouldn't do more than a 250watt. We own a 200 watt Pure Sine. Have used it once or twice. We added 12v outlets long ago, and recently updated them. Happy with that. If it's a/c weather, we camp with hookups. Both our laptops use the same Dell charger, so we bought a 12v dc/dc converter to charge them as needed. But now we both have pretty decent smart phones, and honestly have not taken the laptops with us in the last year..

An inverter needs to be sized according to peak surge power, not just continuous power. I would agree that 1500W is excessive though. I'm installing a 400W inverter, which will have plenty of overhead for anything I'm likely to plug into it. Mostly, it will run the TV when I'm off the grid; the TV is only rated at 17W.

You've got to be kidding! 1500W from a 12V system? I'll take the contract for replacement batteries.