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Long Beach Marine Electric connects boat owners with licensed, insured marine electricians for marine inverter installation: pure-sine inverters and inverter/chargers that run AC outlets, microwaves and appliances from the battery bank, sized to your loads and wired to ABYC standards. Inverters are also one of the most common causes of shore-power pedestal tripping when they're installed without proper isolation, so the installation matters as much as the box.
What happens on the first visit
- A load list: what you want to run on inverter power, for how long, and at the same time. A 1,200 W microwave and a 1,500 W kettle together need a different inverter than a laptop and a TV.
- Battery bank check. An inverter can only deliver what the bank and cables can supply.
- Survey of the AC panel and shore-power wiring to plan transfer switching and which circuits the inverter will feed.
- Location and ventilation for the unit, plus the length of the DC cable run, which drives cable size.
- A written design with the inverter model, cable and fuse sizes, and a fixed price.
Sizing the inverter and the battery bank
Inverter size is set by the largest combination of loads you'll run at once, plus headroom for motor start-up surges. A 3,000 VA unit covers most cruising boats. But the battery bank is the real limit. Running a 1,000 W load from a 12-volt bank draws roughly 90–100 amps once inverter losses are included. An hour of that uses most of a 200 Ah lead-acid bank's usable capacity. That's why inverter projects often go together with a lithium conversion.
DC cables to an inverter carry very high currents, so they're short, heavy and fused close to the battery. A 3,000 W inverter on 12 volts can pull well over 250 amps at full load.
Why badly installed inverters trip the pedestal
Panbo's reporting on ELCI and GFCI tripping names inverters, along with reverse Y-adapters, as the most frequent cause of nuisance trips. The usual fault: the inverter's AC output is connected straight into the panel bus bars without isolation, or neutral and ground are bonded in the wrong place. On shore power, current then returns by the ground path instead of the neutral, and a 30 mA pedestal opens.
A proper installation uses an inverter/charger with an internal transfer switch, or a separate selector, so the inverter's output and the shore supply can never be paralleled, and neutral-ground bonding switches correctly between modes.
What it costs
Published 2026 retail prices put a Victron MultiPlus 3000 VA 12-volt inverter/charger at about $1,170. Installation adds DC cable and fusing, an AC transfer arrangement, often a battery monitor, and labor. Most inverter/charger installs take one to two days. See the marine inverter installation cost guide for typical totals.
Insurance, warranty and who pays
Inverter installations are owner-paid upgrades. You get a written design and a fixed price before work starts. If the inverter is replacing one that's been tripping the pedestal, the first step is a leakage test, billed hourly at about $140–$200/hr, to confirm the inverter is the cause.
What's included
- Load list and inverter sizing
- Battery capacity check
- Pure-sine inverter or inverter/charger install
- DC cable and fuse sizing
- AC transfer switching
- Neutral-ground bonding set correctly
- Charger profile matched to batteries
- Pedestal re-test for leakage
DIY vs cheap fix vs proper inverter install
| Factor | DIY | Cheap operator | Proper marine work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sizing | Biggest on sale | Matched to a guess | Load list + battery capacity |
| AC wiring | Output into panel bus | Plug-in cord | Transfer switching, never paralleled |
| Neutral-ground | Not considered | Left bonded | Switched correctly per mode |
| DC cable | Undersized | Unfused | Sized and fused at the battery |
| Pedestal | Trips | Trips sometimes | Leakage tested near zero |