Wondering about pure sine wave?
It’s a question that pops up a lot when you start researching power inverters.
You can easily get lost in all the technical information as you start comparing products.
There’s wattage, pure sine wave, modified sine wave, peak power, voltage, and more…
Once you understand the terminology everything becomes much clearer.
For now, let’s concentrate on what is a pure sine wave inverter as it affects when appliances you will be able to run.
What is Pure Sine Wave?
A pure sine wave is a steady alternation of current that produces a smooth electrical wave with low harmonic distortion. Inverters that deliver this type of output replicate the electricity supplied from the main grid. It means plugging your appliances into a pure sine wave inverter offers the same performance as plugging into the AC wall outlet at home.
Let’s go through it in more detail to help you understand.
Understanding Current
Pure sine wave is the flow of current that your inverter supplies. An inverter is designed to convert Direct Current (DC) into Alternating Current (AC). DC is what is stored in a battery and AC is what most home appliances need to run.
With DC electricity, the current moves directly from point a to point b in a circuit. Think of little electrons flowing around a wire in one direction. With AC electricity the flow of electronics alternate their direction of travel – they switch direction from positive to negative rapidly. In fact, they switch direction 60 times a second!
When you observe the direction of this current on a graph it creates a line or a wave. DC is a straight line and AC is a wave.
Pure Sine Wave Current
The image above shows the two different signals we are talking about. On the right, you see the AC current and the pure sine waveform. You can see it’s a nice smooth wave with the flow changing between positive and negative.
When it comes to power inverters this wave can vary between different types of equipment. Usually, you either get modified sine wave or pure sine wave.
Simply put, pure sine wave is a smooth wave and a modified sine wave is a stepped wave.
As you can see the flow of electrons on modified sine wave is much more sudden compared to the smooth flow of pure sine wave.
More sensitive appliances require this smooth flow of electricity. This is because the modified sine wave is too abrupt and leads to sudden drops or peaks in voltage. Whereas pure sine wave replicates the AC electricity you get from the mains at home.
Benefits of Pure Sine Wave
A pure sine wave inverter is the best you can type you can purchase. The only real disadvantage is that they cost more money. On the plus side, you get a stack of advantages with pure sine wave including:
Run Any Appliance
With a pure sine wave power inverter you can run virtually any electronics and appliance. As long as you have a powerful enough inverter, you shouldn’t have any worries about what you can run.
The smooth flow of current is suitable for sensitive medical devices like oxygen and CPAP machines. Adding to this, you can run AC motors such as power tools and inductive loads like refrigerators. You wouldn’t be able to run any of these things with a modified sine wave inverter.
Quieter
Another thing to love is the quieter performance. The clean electricity output has a lower harmonic distortion. In simple terms, it doesn’t make noise! A modified sine wave inverter hums and buzzes while it’s in operation, plus the sudden voltage changes can interfere with other signals and radio waves.
For example, you would get feedback on speakers and TVs used with modified sine waves. This doesn’t happen with pure sine wave.
Efficient Conversion
You’ll get a more efficient inverter with pure sine wave as less energy is lost during the DC to AC conversion. In fact, pure sine wave can be 95% or more efficient. This is important as you’ll be using your inverter with a battery or solar panels which don’t have an unlimited supply of energy. The more efficient your inverter, the longer your battery energy will last.
What Can You Power With Pure Sine Wave?
I guess the big question for all of this is what can you run with pure sine wave. It’s probably easier to list the things that require pure sine wave to operate correctly.
To quickly identify what appliances need pure sine wave you should ask yourself these questions:
- Does your appliance use a motor or inductive load?
It should be pretty easy to identify motorized devices thinking of things like fans and power tools. These devices are best used with pure sine wave. You can use modified sine wave but it will create excess heat and noise.
You will also need pure sine wave for other inductive loads that might not be so obvious. Quite often this is with coils and compressors in appliances that deal with heat/cooling such as refrigerators, microwaves, and aircon.
- Is it delicate medical equipment?
Sensitive devices cope better with pure sine wave and modified sine wave could actually damage the circuits. This includes things like oxygen concentrators and CPAP machines. You can also include other sensitive electronics here that need a precise clean flow of electricity such as LED TVs or high-end computers.
What is a Pure Sine Wave Inverter Summary
I hope this article answers your question ‘what is a pure sine wave inverter?.’
In simple terms, it is a smoother cleaner output of electricity that replicates your mains power at home.
In my opinion, it’s best to choose a pure sine wave inverter as you will not be restricted in what you can run.
You can just as easily run tools or TVs as you can charge a phone.
Plus everything will be much quieter without the buzz of modified sine wave.
