Why does mine shut off all of the time? I'm only running a laptop?

I have no idea what the ratings for it are (volts, amps, watts, ohms....)

I had two until today; I just bought another one that is 75 watts. Previously, I tried to buy higher wattage but today I got the bright idea that maybe my lighter wasn't sending enough power. On the back of some of the packages I was reading today said that they had a 'shut-off' built in if power got below 11.5 watts, so I looked for one with the lowest shut-off. This one is 10 watts.

I am clueless when it comes to electricity.

 

Doesn't it say on the packaging what kind of things each inverter can power?

I swear the ones I saw at Sears did.

Get an Optima Yellow Top to go along with your inverter.

 

Inverter $12, yellow $109. No thanks.

Well, I used the low wattage one tonight. No issues. However, I think that the laptop battery was pretty well charged up, so that more than likely had something to do with it.

 

so it still shuts off with the one with the 10 watt rating??

 

No, tonight I used it for about 15min and it was gtg, however my laptop battery was fully charged. I'm thinking that maybe when I've had the problem before, a low laptop battery may have been the issue.

 

had any issues with mine, but I don't use it a lot. I've never adjusted my map and use the laptop for monitoring. Despite what the UTEC manual says, the front O2 sensor reads fairly accurate (compared to my wideband O2). I have a Belkin with 140 watts constant output, 250 watts peak. You can equate watts to hp, a unit to measure work.

San

 

when i had one in my car for my PS2, i had to use a 300 watt one from k-mart because the smaller ones werent putting out enough power, but that was my incident.

 

Guys,
try running it staight to the batt. make the wire as short as possible and use a bigger gage wires, and never share it with anything else. running a hi-power drawing components on your car's wiring may cause probs- it may even deprive other components in the system of critical power that they need.

later gang!
ED

 

Thanks ED! I'm going to cut off the lighter plug and rewire it. Should I put a fuse along the wire or change out anything inside of the inverter?

 

yes sir! fuse is a good investment here is the formula Pw/Vcc= I t(i.e. -250/12.5 =20A. install a 20A fuse thats if the inverter has no external user fuse). You can even plug in a small UPS in beetwen the laptop and the inverter just
in case- but then thats too much--

ok Pat good luck