MSN Stephen wrote:
> Myles,
>
> I've got twin EU2000i generators that I've put together to run the air
> conditioner on my sailboat at anchor. Works fine. I will say that I got
> sucked in and bought the parallel kit for like $250. Once I got the
> "parallel kit" and looked at it I discovered that it was a very simple setup
> that can easily manufactured at home for much, much, MUCH less than $250. I
> felt quite taken.
>
In a way what you paid for was an 'activation' of a latent feature of
the gen set, not an actual box of tricks. This sort of thing is common
in the IT sector - try explaining to the accountant that the thing you
just paid $10k for was a 12 digit number the vendor sent by email.
(Typing the 12 digit number into the software activates a feature that
was there all a long, but disabled).
The inverter electronics in the gen-set had to be designed from the
start to allow synchronisation of parallel connected gen-sets to happen.
Doing the synchronisation and load sharing external to the system would
be a larger and more expensive box of tricks.
Sooner or later this style of 'built in feature but disabled unless
you pay more $$$' is going to appear in the motor controllers we use - I
can see some one 'trying on' making regeneration an 'optional feature',
that when you pay the extra $$$ , you get a code to type into the
controler set-up software running on a PC that then instructs the little
computer in the controler to activate the 'optional' feature, that was
in fact embeded in there all a long, but turned off.
Another IT industry trick is to charge you for 'feature enhancements'
that are really fixes for flaws in the original system, but instead of
calling them fixes, they call them enhancements and make you pay.
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