Inverters & UPS

An industrial inverter is a simplified battery energy storage system, for sites that need battery backup but have no DC load to feed. It draws from the grid and supplies the AC load, and when the grid fails it transfers to the battery bank within milliseconds. Because an inverter cannot charge a 110 or 220 VDC bank directly, the system is built as two cabinets — a battery charger sized for the bank, and a separate cabinet housing the inverter.

What separates a good unit from a cheap one is fail-safe behaviour and visibility. A good system logs data and transmits it for remote monitoring, and both the charger and the inverter are Modbus compliant and SCADA compatible. An AC distribution cabinet alongside the charger and inverter is the third element buyers most often leave out and most often need. The output waveform is not a decision: industrial load takes pure sine, and modified sine is never acceptable.

We size the bank, the charger and the inverter together as one design problem rather than three, with a buck converter stepping the bank down to 48 VDC for the inverter input. The finished system goes through adversarial review and test before release. We fit automatic transfer switches where applicable rather than manual bypass.

To quote, we need single or three phase output, the AC load in kVA, the backup time you need, and any telemetry.

The real decision is whether to include the distribution cabinet. The mistake that actually causes trouble is not in design but in installation — on a three-phase inverter, load balancing across the phases is what gets it wrong.