What type of foods do you cook in your air fryer on your semi-truck?

Look Ma!!! I cooked the Ramen!

 

I find they come out dried

 

Seen one here at this store where I live the other day was 1000W.

Had some 900W.
Good thing I bought a microwave for another truck over the past weekend Or Is have not known some of these answers.

 

I think, a lot of people don’t really understand how things work, yet, speak as authoritative figures. I’ve found, many “techs” are guilty of this. There was another recent post where the guy said the tech claimed a big inverter kills the alternator.

As you know, an electrical system is just like a water supply system. The alternator is the river. It feeds the battery bank, which is the reservoir. The inverter is the local water treatment plant. The receptacle is the water tap. Voltage is water pressure. Amperage is water flow.

If we look at the electrical load, at the receptacle, you’re only going to pull what the accessory needs. The amount of pressure is only what the battery voltage is at that time, which is going to be a high of ~13V and typically a low of ~12.2V when voltage protection usually steps in. Inverters are 12V-rated and designed for that voltage range. There’s no “zap” or “excessive electricity” by the batteries, because the voltage (pressure) is within limits. The batteries can only “push” that hard. Now, when we start the truck, we’re looking at, generally, a low 14V range to the inverter. We have a bit more pressure, but, the inverter is designed for that range. And, as you know, we need a bit more pressure to reliably supply the demand.

An inverter only converts the amount of DC power necessary to operate the AC accessory plugged into it. For example, if you have a 3000W inverter with a CPAP (~80W) plugged into it, the inverter is only converting 80W of DC to AC. It’s not continuously drawing 3000W; only 80W in this example. A 3000W inverter makes little heat and is simply loafing, at that level. Likewise, there is plenty of battery to operate it. However, if you’re going to be connecting an air fryer (~1400W) or microwave (whatever watt rating), you’d be best to start the truck, so there are plenty of amps flowing from the alternator to the battery bank/inverter connections to keep everything copacetic. Obviously, the higher the voltage (pressure) and amp availability (flow), the better things function.

An alternator is rated at “X” amps, just like an engine is rated at “X” horsepower. Just like you’re not going to kill an engine pulling a mountain, you’re not going to kill an alternator by connecting an inverter or the accessories hooked to that inverter. Just like an engine, the alternator only makes the power it makes. Generally, alternators are 140A-300A rating, depending on spec. If we look at the 14.2V an alternator, generally, operates at, these are the numbers: 140A X 14.2V = 1988W. 300A X 14.2V = 4260W. We have a bank of batteries as our reservoir/buffer, so we’re not going to be short of power, with the truck running. The reserve/reservoir size is going to be dependent on battery amp hours and that’s highly variable between batteries. If we use 80Ah X 4 batteries = 320Ah. 320Ah X 12V = 3840W, reserve for the hour. This, combined with the 140A alternator, gives us ~5828W of continuous power, over an hour. With the 300A alternator, we’d be looking at ~8100W. Obviously, this is all approximating, because we still have the truck’s power requirements in order for it to run. But, this gives the gist of how to figure power supply versus power needs.

As a disclaimer, I’m not an electrical engineer, so don’t drag me over the coals, if something isn’t exacting to the Nth degree. This is only meant to be a layman’s course, to help others, on an internet forum.