Ron what's the best inverter to charge my precious MacBook?
Good question! Mac (and other laptops) is a global product and its PSU is designed to work from 90 to 250v all over the planet, and that the quality of electricity varies greatly from country to country. So you really have to abuse a PSU to make it fail. They are very forgiving. The circuit inside digitally "chops" bits of AC from the incoming supply, and digitally re-assembles a stable DC voltage for the output. If it's not happy, it is supposed to shut down. So running a Mac off an inverter isn't particularly a difficult task. Modified sine vs pure sine used to be hot topic, but nowadays pure sine are not much more expensive. There is a very interesting read on the Sterling website where Sterling justify their policy of producing robust mod sine inverters. I think that for us MH owners it's more a question of "brand name" vs "Chinese" inverters. In my last van I had to replace my inverter in Morocco and all I could find was a noname unit and I had no choice. It lasted 7 years, powered a Samsung and two Macs and a TV, and only failed, well it didn't fail actually, when the fan bearings gave out and made an annoying sound. I used to regularly run it down until it failed and bleeped with undervoltage, and still it worked. Nowadays I have a more sophisticated system running a Victron inverter charger, which is pure sine, but the inverter is 1400 watts - I don't need that much, but I wanted a unit with a powerful charger that would recharge my battery in the minimum of hookup time. If all you want is a small inverter that will charge your mac and other low power devices, then I tend to recommend Victron because they are a proper well established mainstream company with a full UK dealer network and warranty support - but so are Sterling ... I just happen to be a Victron man! A Victron 300w model should do you fine, but if money is tight almost any inverter will do and won't damage your Mac. I tend to favour the ones that are black aluminium with a big heatsink, rather than those in plastic cases, and never power an inverter from a cigar socket. But if you can afford a Macbook you can afford a Victron!
And about sine waves ....
You can power just about all modern devices, including laptops, from either type of inverter and there are only a couple of exceptions, which are detailed in the article below. Switch mode PSU's are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
This passage from the Sterling website explains it better than I can.
General opinion over the last few years was that the quasi-sine wave inverter was dead and the pure sine-wave inverter would rule the world (an opinion not shared by Sterling). Sales of quasi-sine wave inverters have continued to out-grow sales of pure sine-wave, proving that there is plenty of life left in this technology. The principle reason is that most of the equipment such as mobile phones, TV's, drill chargers and all that type of equipment which used to have a problem working with quasi-sine wave tends to now work fine on quasi-sine as the effected equipment tends to use a switch mode power supply in the design which works fine with quasi sine wave. This meant that rather than the problems getting worse over the years the problems have diminished, however, this is not to say that the odd microwave, drill, vacuum cleaner would not work (if there is a thyristor control circuit employed then this can still be an issue) but there is no question this is becoming more rare as the years go past, plus, it usually is a lot cheaper to replace a £35 microwave to a different model which will work rather than spend £700 on a sine wave model to make it work .
This passage from the Sterling website explains it better than I can.
General opinion over the last few years was that the quasi-sine wave inverter was dead and the pure sine-wave inverter would rule the world (an opinion not shared by Sterling). Sales of quasi-sine wave inverters have continued to out-grow sales of pure sine-wave, proving that there is plenty of life left in this technology. The principle reason is that most of the equipment such as mobile phones, TV's, drill chargers and all that type of equipment which used to have a problem working with quasi-sine wave tends to now work fine on quasi-sine as the effected equipment tends to use a switch mode power supply in the design which works fine with quasi sine wave. This meant that rather than the problems getting worse over the years the problems have diminished, however, this is not to say that the odd microwave, drill, vacuum cleaner would not work (if there is a thyristor control circuit employed then this can still be an issue) but there is no question this is becoming more rare as the years go past, plus, it usually is a lot cheaper to replace a £35 microwave to a different model which will work rather than spend £700 on a sine wave model to make it work .
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