Need Advice (power Inverters for Ice Cream Truck)

garagemaxx

I am converting a Ford E 350 Deisel 15 passenger bus into a mobile Italian Ice Truck. I have three freezers on the truck that I will need to power up each freezer uses 7.5 Amps. My initial thought is to purchase a 3000 watt power inverter and connect it to the vehicles battery.

After some thought, I was thinking of purchase a marine deep cycle battery and hooking it up the inverter to that, so I can stay parked at a beach or ballpark with out running the vehicle. But I would think eventually the battery will die. I am new to the mobile ice cream biz and at this stage I want to do this once and do it right. I was thinking of putting in a second smaller inverter just to be able to install a hot and cold sink system. Any suggestions on the best way to go here?

The bus actually probably has some sort of inverter in it, because it has a pretty busy looking electrical panel. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
John

clasact

I dont know how much help this will be but I am a trucker.I have a 2000 watt power inverter in my truck with 4 batterys and if am park for a long time a day or so the power will still run down.I run tv,dvd,microwave,coffee maker,computer/printer,and 1 or2 other things that escape me at the moment.What you may want to look into is what they call a tri pac or external genorator they let you shut off your motor but will provide all the power you will need for both your freezers and sink also keep batt.charged and will provide heat or air as needed they start around 3000 dollars but if you go on your states gov. web site and follow the guideline the state may pay for it.They also run on deisel but only use about a gal for say 8 hour of run time.Thier are several brands out their like rig master and so forth and if your state wont pay for it well its a deduction and a depreciation at tax time. ope this help a bit

garagemaxx

Thanks for the advice brother, I will certainly look into it.

joed

Your freezers alone are 2700 watts. On a 12 volt battery that would be 225 amps. You need some major size cable for that.
To run them for 8 hours you would need a 1800 amp-hour battery. Look into a small generator set. Some of them very quiet now. You would hardly notice it running.

NateHanson

Actually you'd need a 3600 Ah battery bank, because deep cycle batteries can only be discharged to 1/2 of their rated capacity. 100 Ah costs about $100 at the very cheapest (so you'd pay $4000 for batteries alone), and an inverter to run that load will cost you thousands of dollars. You definitely want to buy a generator instead.