BESTEK 300Watt Pure Sine Wave Power Inverter - DC 12V to AC 110V Car Plug Inverter Adapter, Power Converter with 4.8A Dual USB Charging Ports and 2 AC Outlets Car Charger

This is the second one I have owned. As long as you remember that it is a high frequency inverter, it will last u many years. Very low idle power consumption when on.

I’m quite impressed with this inverter and the design of it. Here are some of my observations from it:The fuse holder and 5-15R receptacles have PCBs on the back of the terminations to connect to wire instead of soldering the wires directly to the connectors, a very nice touch! The ground is bonded to battery negative and the chassis, but the neutral isn’t bonded to ground (more on this later). On the PCB they use silastic to secure the LC filter to the PCB so it’s not rattling around. The FETs and diodes in the inverter use actual heat sinks instead of being thermally bonded to the chassis, which is very good, this keeps the chassis cool while still cooling the components. Verified the output waveform on a oscilloscope and its a 60 hertz sine wave with minimal voltage ripple on the output so the low pass filter is designed well. The input and output capacitors are 105C rated, and the high and low voltage circuits on the PCB are isolated with isolation slots cut on the PCB, all in all a very well designed inverter and decent quality. I did find a few improvements they could’ve done as well, one thing is they could make the fan thermally controlled so it only turns on when the inverter heats up, as is it runs constantly and never turns off. Another suggestion is to make the inverter 120V single phase instead of 120V split phase (for the uninitiated this means use 1 120V rail instead of 2 60V rails that are 180 degrees out of phase). Also I would like to see higher voltage rated input capacitors, the ones on the input DC bus are only 16V rated, which a car alternator can easily exceed in low temperatures, I would like to see 25V rated capacitors used instead. I’m quite happy with this product and wish more of the affordable inverters on the market would design their products to these standards. Great job Bestek!

I can't speak for it's longevity, but my initial impression is that it seems very well made

When it comes to 12VDC to 110VAC converters, Bestek pure sine wave models (be careful what you purchase as many of their models look similar on the outside chassis or frames but are NOT pure Sinewave) are a very good value and work as advertised. You may wonder why so specific on Pure Sine Wave model only? Well, when you use an inverter to AC power ANY sensitive electronics such as computers, tablets, personal medical equipment, communications equipment, etc... you should provide clean pure sine wave power source. If you do NOT, you run the risk of (a) the devices not working at all, (b) destroying the sensitive electronic product by way of feeding it dirty, spiky AC power (even if it does power the device up) at any point in time that a voltage surge or spike occurs as it is unregulated if not providing pure sine wave alternating current (AC), (c) you may be able to power things like air pumps, fans, (electric motors) whereas most NOT puresinewave inverters cannot or do so with that weird, annoying and ineffective ramping and falling syndrome - they also MAY permanately damage and/or ruin your electric motor(s) if NOT puresinewave. The Bestek pure sine wave inverters work as advertised, and this particular model is a solid build with aluminum casing to dissapate heat more effectively than plastics. Make a note that the unit will get very warm when powering AC devices that are more than >75 watts so you want to make sure you do NOT place the unit for operations on or near any surface that may not tolerater heat very well. We place the unit on the floorboard carpet rather than on the center console armrests to be safe from any cosmetic damage to the armrest soft materials. Also, bump up to the 500 watt pre sine wave inverter if you have a plan to power anything AC that consumes anything >100watts from cig plug. Cig plugs are most often fused in your car with a 10AMP max fuse. That said, if you pull above 100watts continiously for any length of time beyond 5 minutes a couple things are at risk (a) you may trip the fuse in your car and will have to replace (which can be a big hassle for some people) and (b) will create HEAT at the plug in, power cabling and unit itself as it converts DC12-13V into AC 110 V in higher wattages. The 300watt is designed itself to handle the output, the cig sockets, plug and cabling to/from most factory cig outlets are suspect. Lastly, if you are going to pull more than about 100watts from the invertor you really should use the INCLUDED battery clamps instead of the cig socket adapator. My recommendations come from experience, and are not all-inclusive or absolute -they are our recommendations/suggestions that ALWAYS work for us with no hassles and no complications. We find this inverter very convenient when we camp, and use it in all kinds of different configurations to mainly power AC devices (for us under 150Watt max requirement) that have no direct DC (or external battery) inputs.

This is not a review.This is to give numbers so if a musician (or anyone with a sound system) decides to use their amp with an inverter, one will know approximate numbers.Amp used - Boss Acoustic Singer Pro 100W - Power Requirements 110VAC 50WBestek 300W Pure Sine Wave InverterBattery - Raion RG12220FP - 12VDC 22AH (20Ah 10.5V SLA-AGM)Current tester - Extech 380947 clamp on current meterBattery connected to Inverter, Invert ON - .7A idle (Fan is running and USB power ports active)Side note - With Invert off but connected to battery and cell phone connected, .4A drawAmp Connected and turned on - 2.7A draw (2.8A with cell phone connected)Playing @50% vol, 2.7A constant - 3.0A on hard sturmmingBased on this formula: 1A @12VDC will equal to 10W of AC power. In this case, the amp draws 50W which will require 5A from the battery. So based on those figures, I should get about 2~3 hours (don't forget efficiency calculations) of usefulness.However, based on the numbers above, it look like maybe 4~5 hours if no one else is plugged in. I did not test with a microphone but I suspect the draw will not be much more than 3A with a possible max peak of 4 amps.Added - CAUTION - the inverter is storing energy. Once turned off and disconnected from the battery, there is still the potential hazard of sparks flying if the (+) and (-) leads from the inverter touch. I did not test to see how long the energy is stored or if there is a bleeding resistor installed.So if you are a musician or an entertainer who uses a sound system, this inverter will power a 100W amplifier for several hours (based on the AH of the batter used).