Dear Dennis... analogZONE's Dennis Feucht answers your design queries in his new Circuit Design Clinic! April 2007

analogZONE presents an interactive analog design service to readers! Send us your design questions (with relevant data; schematics in JPEG or GIF, please) for some free engineering advice from analogZONE's circuit consultant, Dennis Feucht, on how you might solve a design problem or improve circuit performance. Submissions may be edited for clarity or brevity, and submitters and their email addresses will remain anonymous (unless otherwise indicated). Please send your questions to Dennis here.

Low-Cost Commercial Power-Source Inverters

Q: I bought a low-cost 300 W inverter and it has failed. Are they hard to repair? What can I do to improve its reliability?

A: The market is flooded with low-cost commercial inverters, such as those sold by Vector Mfg Co, Koss, or those from undisclosed Asian sources. Many of these inverters have one characteristic in common: to be price competitive, they have cut corners in the design, resulting in unreliable products. Neither the repair nor the design of power-source inverters can be adequately covered in this article, or its sequels. In the style of the Circuit Design Clinic, some more practical design aspects will be considered, leaving the more involved theoretical aspects for TechNotes.

Read Dennis' entire response here (330 kb Adobe Acrobat PDF file)