Customer Reviews

Xantrex Technologies XPower Digital 400-Watt Power Inverter 813-0400-01

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The product is capable of 400W output if you were to connect it directly to a car/truck battery. If you connect it to the cigarette outlet the output is only about half. Also the unit that they sent looks less attractive than the one shown on Amazon Website. Also, Amazon claims on it website that the product is warrantied for 1 year. The product documentation says 6 months.

I am very pleased with my xantrex Xpower Digital 400 Watt power Invertrer. I purchased it to use in my motor home for watching TV while dry camping. The Xantrex cooling fan only goes on when the system heats up so using it to watch TV the fan almost never goes on, this is big because most small inverters have very noisy cooing fans. The volt meter also gives me an idea of how much battery life is left in the RV system.

I bought this for the purpose of powering a laptop computer while on the road (which is one of the few things you can power from a small unit like this). For the first year it worked OK with no problems, but then it began go into an overheat alarm after ~1 hour and repeat the alarm every 20 minutes. When the alarm begins I can smell an electric burning oder and the fan would kick on, but the fan doesn't come on until the alarm goes off. I saw in the manual a statement of "The fan comes on only with a 100 watt power draw on it", not by thermal detecting, and I'm pretty sure the computer doesn't draw the 100+ watts. I emailed Xantrex people explaining my conditions who just suggested a replacement. I responded that "I don't want a duplicate unit that will do the same thing" and looked at another of their units, the Xpower 400 plus, but it too had the same statement in it's manual about the fan. I again ask them and got "Only our 1000watt units or bigger come with thermal activated fans". My unit overheating seems to prove that the fan is needed for more than just high power draw conditions, so if that's how they've decided to design a good part of their units and aren't going to change it, who can say but the same thing will happen to you. FYI: I have seen another review here on Amazon of a 800 watt unit that looks like this telling the same story of it overheating while powering a computer, so it is more than a 1 time story from me alone.

I bought this unit for a trip to Alaska in my RV which has deep cycle batteries intended for repeated recharging. . The inverter works fine as long as the engine is running but when parked, the inverter's alarm goes off when the incoming voltage is 11.5 V. That makes it pretty useless for most of my needs.