I recently got a call to diagnose and repair a Xantrex Freedom 20 inverter-charger. An inverter-charger is a dual purpose machine that can either charge your batteries using shore power, or create AC power from your batteries while you’re away from shore power. What’s more, it can share your shore power feed between whatever you want to use it for on the boat and the battery charger, giving some power to each. So you can charge your batteries and enjoy using your air conditioner while making margaritas with your blender!
So the customer told me there were sparks, then a burning smell before he got to the unit and shut it down. After that, he was unable to use any shore power. Since this person was living on his boat during the summer in Charleston, SC, this made things quite inconvenient. No air conditioning, no refrigerator, no hot water heater, no blender, NO MARGARITAS! What’s more, he couldn’t charge his batteries, so he wasn’t able to do much with DC power on the boat either because he was worried about flattening his batteries.
The “sparks and a burning smell” was a pretty good clue that I would find some carbon once I got the unit open (no easy task). What I found was that the unit looked pretty intact except for the AC input and output connections. After about 10 years, the clamp-on connections used in the installation failed. I was able to remake the connections with head-shrink butt connectors, which will keep moisture out and solve the corrosion problem.
The unit fired up and ran fine. But all was not well. This installation also had a Xantrex PathMaker battery combiner. This lets the inverter-charger charge both the house bank (much larger with 4 batteries) and the engine start battery (a single battery). It’s necessary to apportion the charging current properly to the two different systems. Well, this combiner needed to be reset because it was only letting one battery get charged. Once we reset it, everything worked great!
Now we can run the refrigerator, air conditioner, and charge our batteries. There’s even some power left over to run a blender. That makes living on a boat here in the summertime tolerable.