As you already know, a power inverter has to be connected to a 12V source: either to our car’s own battery or to an auxiliary battery.
Although there are several ways to connect to the battery of our car, the 2 most common are:
- Through the car’s cigarette lighter
- Directly to the battery.
The simplest way to connect an inverter to the car is through the cigarette lighter.It is the one that we have more at hand, and it is unnecessary to leave the vehicle. However, this option has its limitations, as we will see below:
The cigarette lighter socket connects us to the 12V of our battery through a fuse. This means that the said fuse’s current value will condition the maximum current that we can extract from here.
In general, the fuse that connects the cigarette lighter to the battery is usually 20A.This would allow us to extract a maximum theoretical power of 240W from the lighter:
Maximum cigarette lighter power = 12V x 20A = 240W
For more power, we would need to resort to the second option. We need to connect the inverter directly to the terminals of the battery under the hood of the car.
In this case, the power will be limited only by the car battery or the inverter we connect.Also, it will be limited to the cables used for the connection between both as well.