Does UPS work on Sundays?

Can an Inverter and a UPS work together?

• I am an over the road truck driver, big rig, 18 wheels, so forth. I have a Rocketfish 600 watt UPS, I have a Powerdrive 1000 watt inverter. I have a very expensive machine that is a pc and is my baby. My goal in this is to protect my baby. My plan was to hook the UPS into the inverter to power the PC safely. The idea is that the UPS will both protect from surges & from the random momentary power loss the inverter receives when turning on the truck. The first time I plugged my UPS into my inverter, the UPS refused to run in 'normal' mode, instead electing to run in battery mode, even though it was being powered by the inverter (both according to the lcd on the inverter, and the incoming v display on the ups.) The UPS said it was getting 135-230 volts from the inverter, which I assumed to mean it was in battery mode to protect from a surge. I assumed the fact my inverter was pushing this much power to mean it was broken, so I bought a new one, of the same brand, and hooked it up. Now the UPS doesn't seem to recongize the existence of the inverter at all. It no longer even wants to go to the incoming volts screen which I assume means its not getting any. The inverter is installed right, I tested it with several other pieces which it did power... Is this just a bad brand of inverter? Bad brand of UPS? Perhaps a broken UPS? (its brand new like 2 days old) Is it not possible to power a UPS from a standard inverter? Or... what?

• Answer:

  The UPS is seeing the modified square wave from the inverter as bad power. The UPS expects to see relatively clean sinusoidal wave. You need either a pure sine-wave inverter, or a second battery for the inverter, which is isolated from your main vehicle battery. Or shut down the computer when you are running the truck.