Quattro buzzing

Q&A and troubleshooting
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1

I know that the question of a Quattro inverter/charger has been addressed a few times in various places, but I am still not clear if it is something I should be worried about.

We have a quattro on our boat. When we are on the dock (like now through a Canadian winter) it mostly runs on 30 amp shorepower. We have noticed a fairly loud buzzing noise like a transformer sound, especially when it is cold. We seem to have traced it to when we are running an infrared dish heater on the low (400w) setting. It stops as soon as we either turn it off or turn it to the high setting. I suspect this has something to do with the sine wave getting chipped up on the low setting, but am not sure if this is a problem.

We have updated all of the software and there are no warning lights or messages, but it is annoying and worrying. The heater is very good and consumes very little power. We could switch it to our “winter line” that does not run through the quattro, but would rather keep i t on the quattro to spread out our heaters over two ac lines in case one trips or goes down. If the heater itself is a problem I would also be worried about running it straight off the shore power line.

Am I right to be worried about this? Or is it just an annoyance?

2

That is exactly the issue. It isn’t fatal but ideally it is better to try find an alternative that does not manage power that way.
Any prolonged vibration, over time, can affect a product’s lifespan vs one that does not experience the behaviour.

3

Thanks Nick. Should I assume that this would be a problem if I ran it on the other AC line straight from the shorepower post (through an ELCI and breaker panel, of course)? Or is it an issue with the way the quattro functions?

4

If you don’t supply the load from the quattro then you should have no issue.
You could try switch the system into “charger only” that may also help but then no load is supplied from battery.
These inverters just don’t tolerate the clipped wave that these types of power supplies use when on a reduced setting.

5

Curious if the HF Victron inverters do better with such loads?

6

Aiui, yes.

1 Like
7

Thanks Nick. That is very helpful it still buzzes on “charge”, but I have reconfigured my heaters so that this one does not run through the quattro.