100A at 12V is much different than 100A at 120/240V

 

Screw that, I live half the time in Florida, 2 miles from the coast. Even though I was in Ga. at the time, when the '04 hurricane's hit, my parent's house lost power for nine days and some only three blocks away went without for three weeks!
Although my parents came up to stay with me and the former Mrs. Hammer, I had to go down and deal with the mess.
I've got this now and a 500 gal. propane tank buried. Having that tank is handy too, I ran a line to my stainless steel grill so my lazy a$$ ain't gotta go fill tanks all the time.



And back on topic: I've got a 600 watt inverter I keep in my truck toolbox, but have only run it off my jump box. This is gonna change because I am going to install a 2nd battery as soon as I figure out where I want it. The engine bay is a no go because of my CAI so I'm down to either under my toolbox or behind the front bumper in a fab'd battery box welded or bolted to the frame...

 

My dads house was built in 1955 and is still on a 60A service haha. he cant even use the microwave and a celiling fan at the same time.

 

I wont be running anything crazy. Basically, a laptop (charging and playing at the same time) and/or a charger for a hand held dyson hand vac and/or or little portable tire inflator. So, is a 500 watt about what I should use without killing the battery?

 

For the laptop, a 100-200W inverter that plugs into the cigarette lighter would be fine.

For the compressor, I'd use a 12V one rather than 110V. For the same reasons as below; it's got a 12V DC motor and there's no reason to add efficiency losses from 12V -> 120V -> 12V.

Anything with a motor is going to really **** off an inverter, though. You generally need to oversize to be safe. If you get a 500W inverter, a) it'll need to be hard-wired (500W is about 50 amps, and your cigarette lighter plug/wires will melt and b) I wouldn't use it for anything with a motor that draws more than about 2 amps.

There are some inverters that play much nicer with motors, but they tend to be much more expensive. Motors are an inductive load (compared to a resistive load like a lightbulb). Inductors do really interesting things to the waveshape of a signal that gets applied to them. Cheaper inverters are square-wave, which is fine for resistive loads, but the waveshape gets totally screwed by a motor and something WILL smoke.

 

Ive got a 200 watt inverter in mine and hardwired to the battery. I power both my laptop and Xbox 360 at the same time. You need to look at the power supply on the laptop and see how much watts it needs as well as whatever else you are going to use. Add those numbers up and find an inverter thats a bit bigger to be safe.