Can you charge your batteries usinsg a battery charger that is plugged into your inverter?

Does it matter where you get your power from when charging your batteries. This question came up a few days ago and it is actually a very good question. You can plug your battery charger into your inverter and it will appear to work but if you watch the voltage, you will notice the voltage is gradually dropping. That is because you have a closed system and the batteries are supplying elecricity to the inverter and the inverter is supplying electricity to the battery charger, which in turn sends power back to the batteries.

At each stage of this process, heat is generated which uses some of your power. Therefore, the longer you try to charge your batteries, the lower their voltage will go. The remedy is to have an outside source of power such as a generator or solar panels that supply more than the heat loss of the inverter and charger.

A large inverter can consume quite a lot of power. The standby power consumption on my 12 kilowatt inverter is 200 watts. Usually I think bigger is better but in this case, it can work against you. If your inverter is too large and you never use that much power it is constantly consuming at least 200 watts of power. That is 4.8 kilowatts per day, every day.

If you have a generator, plug the battery charger into the generator instead of the inverter. That way the voltage should go up instead of down. I hope this helps answer that question.