Kenric wrote:I bought a 750W inverter, which should have been big enough to power my 5.1A fridge, but it wasn't able to power it. It did come on, the lights worked, the temperature readings worked, and if i turned off the cooling the fans would run. But not the compressor. I returned the 750W and bought the largest they had which was 1000W (2000W for 0.1 seconds) and it still wasn't able to run the refrigerator.
Here are a few questions:
Q1) Was the LEAF in "READY" mode? This is the mode that you use for driving with the green car and bidirectional arrow showing on the dash. You need to use that mode to get the 12V battery to charge.
Q2) What is a "5.1A fridge"? My fridge consumes about 100W when running and draws about 1000W to start the compressor.
Q3) How old is your fridge?
And here are a couple of comments:
C1) I find that I need to use a 1000-W inverter to start my large side-by-side fridge. Smaller sizes do not work.
C2) I used the same modified sine wave 1000-W inverter to start my neighbors fridge and it had a lot of trouble getting it going. That refrigerator was old and drew quite a bit more current to start. I *did* eventually get it to work, but I don't recall what the trick was.
C3) If I need to run multiple refrigerators during an outage, I typically connect multiple inverters to the battery.
C4) Note that a normal 15A plug is limited to about 1800 W, but the circuit breaker will allow a starting current much higher than that for a few seconds.