Reverse polarity on inverter

[capn chuck]

This one has me puzzled. I am installing a Go Power 1750 watt inverter to run some outlets on the boat. The inverter is connected to a Blue Seas transfer switch to go from the inverter to the AC panel or the incoming shore power. When I switch over to the inverter on the transfer switch the reverse polarity light is on albeit faintly. The polarity is indeed correctly wired from the inverter to the transfer switch and to the panel, I have triple checked it. The inverter is connected to the boats green ground wires at the chassis of the inverter and is internally connected at the inverter outlets to this lug. The DC side is fine. I have talked with the techs at Go Power and they pretty much said ignore it. They specifically said not to bond the neutral and chassis ground and it is specific in the manual. The transfer switch is connected to the incoming shore power, no reverse polarity there, and to the inverter and then to the 110 panel. The unit seems to run fine and test items plugged into the outlets seem to work fine. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Chuck

[elnav]

Chuck I have seen this a few times; once even with a Prosine marine grade inverter. The fixed type inverters seem worse for doing this. I assume you are using a double pole selector switch that breaks the nbeutral as well as the hot wire. What size chassis ground wire are you using? It could be the smaller size is too high an impedance is allowing a voltage rise on the neutral versus ground wire. Remember ABYC requires the chassis ground wier to be of equal size to the supply wires. We once fixed the situation by increasing the wire gauge. On the Prosine installation which was a split bus where some branch circuits were inverter powered but the rest were not; the indicator lights turned out to be the problem. You have to use a split neutral bus as well as a split power bus. The indicator lights being wired all to the same neutral bus provided a feed back loop the wrong way. Splitting the neutral bus and making sure the indicator lights were wired correctly to the associated branch circuits eliminated the erroneous test light signal.

[capn chuck]

Thanks Arild. I took some voltage readings and found there is 13.5 AC volts from the neutral to the ground on the AC outlets on the inverter. I connected it to an outlet on the boat and also got 13.5 volts from the neutral on the outlet on the boat to the ground on the same outlet. Chuck