RV Pro - Xantrex

RV PRO December 2016 Diesel Class C’s Gaining on Gas / A Brand New Dometic / 2017 RV Offerings Please Dealers

A Brand New Dometic

The supplier’s rebranding effort emphasizes products that help RVers take the comforts of home on the road.

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Freedom to Refrigerate

The new Xantrex Freedom X inverter is designed to handle the challenges of using residential appliances in RVs while keeping installation simple for manufacturers. Travis O. Pryor

PHOTOS COURTESY OF XANTREX

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Rob Heckenast, project manager for the Xantrex brand at Schneider Electric, is confident the Freedom X will set a new benchmark for inverters in its class in the RV industry.

Carlson

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h e n e we s t g e n e r a t i o n o f RVs – especially the luxury motorhomes and extendedstay fifth wheels – are putting a premium on offering all the comforts of home. Those comforts include residentialstyle refrigerators that not only create a big draw on power sources, but also rely on AC power. That requires the RV either to be hooked up to shore power all the time or to have an RV that is equipped with an inverter to change battery power over to AC power. Inverters have been around a long time, but most have been designed with an eye toward things that don’t use a whole lot of electricity or don’t cause big surges in electrical usage – think TVs and toasters, etc. So, as residential refrigerators become more popular and increasingly become standard equipment on even smaller travel trailers, OEMs began looking for more efficient ways to power such equipment. British Columbia, Canada-based Xantrex, a business unit of Schneider Electric, has stepped in with its latest solution – the Freedom X inverter, which is designed specifically to handle the loads of a full-size residential refrigerator. “This inverter is a way to make that refrigerator work when you don’t have good grid power,” says Steve Carlson, OEM sales manager for Xantrex brand at rv-pro.com

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Schneider Electric. “We took everything we learned over the past 35 years in the RV industry and optimized a lot of the features improving performance in key areas for the application and brought the cost down.” Technology Meets the Challenge

For the early history of RVs, it was the refrigerator itself that changed to meet the conditions. People wanted to keep their food cool while rolling down the highway to their destinations, but they didn’t want to have to mess with loading a cooler full of ice and food and drinks and then loading everything into the refrigerator when they arrived. This gave birth to the traditional RV refrigerator, which could run off AC power or DC power or even be powered by propane. These refrigerators are still used today in many RVs, but limitations include cost, extra space required for propane tanks and limited designs. Even for these refrigerators, Xantrex has inverter products that can handle the job. “We were the first to have a product that not only was an inverter, but inside had a built-in transfer relay,” Carlson says. “You hard-wire from your rv-pro.com

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The high surge capability of the Freedom X is ideal to operate an appliance with a demanding power load, like a microwave. Plus, the inverter’s quick connect AC in and out terminals make it easy to install on the assembly line. DECEMBER 2016 • RV PRO • 29

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The Freedom X is specifically engineered to operate full-size residential refrigerators. Xantrex put the Freedom X through extensive in-house product testing before recently making it available to RV manufacturers.

The Freedom X joins an extensive group of inverter offerings from Xantrex.


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incoming shore power or from where your generator power is coming into the main panel and then wire that directly into the inverter. Any time power came down that line – whether it was from the generator or from plugging in at the campground – you would just pass right through the inverter, stop drawing power from the batteries, and send it off into the receptacle that was hardwired also into the inverter. The same receptacle could be used whether it was on the grid or if it was on inverter power. … By having the built-in transfer relay, you stop that cycling and wear on the battery by constantly putting power in and taking power out when you’re plugged in. This feature made the Freedom X an ideal product for residential refrigerators.” As battery technology improved and as more powerful lithium-ion batteries became more cost-effective, manufacturers began putting residential refrigerators into luxury motorhomes. That trend has continued and spread into smaller towables as well. rv-pro.com

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But again, obvious limitations call for continued technological innovation. A standard household refrigerator has a compressor that cools the unit. The compressor is run by an electric motor. When the temperature inside the housing rises to a certain level, the compressor kicks on to cool things off. When it reaches the desired temperature, it shuts off. “This compressor is constantly cycling with the motor constantly turning on and turning off,” Carlson says. “That is the traditional way of doing it. A lot of times those motors and the compressors do take a lot of power to start up.” A lot of power means a lot of drain on the batteries – if shore power or generator power isn’t available. An initial surge of power to start the motor means a lot of stress on the inverter to provide that much power long enough to get the electric motor to run. In addition, refrigerator electronics can be sensitive and need to have a pure sine wave form of electricity with a smooth repetitive oscillation that keeps things running smoothly. The Xantrex solution – arrived at through extensive research and development – was the Freedom X. The Freedom X provides 1,200 watts of true sine wave continuous power to handle the regular running of the refrigerator. It also has the capability of handling surges up to 2,400 watts to account for the constant cycling on and off of the refrigerator. “Most ratings are surged to double; that’s kind of common,” Carlson says. “But it’s usually for milliseconds: hardly any time at all. Ours can surge for an extended period of time to start demanding motor loads including residential refrigerators.”

Holding Tanks

Don’t Forget the Manufacturers

Carlson says another important factor in developing the Freedom X was making it as foolproof and easy to install as possible. “We needed something that would be perfect for this application – really easy to install on the production line (you’ve got these trailer builders that are building 70 a day and they need to be able to put them in fast, so we didn’t want the inverter to be a nuisance to the installation.),” he says. “We really focused on that part of it.” Part of that ease comes from the transfer relay. Given that the inverter does the work of knowing whether the RVer is using shore power or battery power, there is no need for multiple wires going to the refrigerator. “It’s so nice for the RV people that they can wire one receptacle and it can either be inverter power or it can be grid power from the same plug-in,” Carlson says. “Many inverters in this power level have a 10- to 15-amp transfer relay. We have a 30-amp transfer relay in the Freedom X. We oversized our transfer relay so that it can handle bad power coming through. That makes it very robust.” Another important factor for speeding up the RV manufacturer’s assembly line is that the Freedom X can remain connected to the electrical circuit throughout the vehicle while the manufacturers conduct standard “hipot” testing. Hipot tests are conducted to find insulation and wires that may rv-pro.com

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A/C Shrouds

Skylights

Available Nationwide www.icondirect.com 1-888-362-4266 DECEMBER 2016 • RV PRO • 31

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At right: The Freedom X is designed for the rigors of the road. It comes equipped in an industrial-grade, heavy-duty metal casing. Top: A Freedom X is mounted inside a travel trailer on the production line. Keystone RV and K-Z RV are using the Freedom X in their products. For now, the Freedom X is exclusively available for OEMs.


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have been damaged by nails or staples used during the building of the vehicle. “They put a really highvoltage DC charge with low amperage through the AC wiring,” Carlson says. “If there’s some resistance at all, they know they have an issue and track it back to find the problem. “The big thing with inverters is: They would never let you hipot through them. You’d have to put quick connects on them to bypass the inverter until you were done hipotting and then reconnect the inverter. We made ours so you can leave the inverter in the circuit; you don’t have to remove it. “What may prove to be the most popular enhancement is the improved robustness against accidental reversed polarity damage. Dealers and manufacturers are thrilled at the resistance to DC positive and negative reversed polarity damage,” Carlson says. “You talk to the warranty rv-pro.com

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