I drive a 1994 Dodge Caravan, with a more ghetto setup than you could probably imagine, but I put my heart and soul into it... For the most part it's because I'm always broke as hell, but I also love to work on it... and now comes the fun part... I want to install a full size computer tower in the car (hidden away in the trunk), so that I can have access to ALL of my 200+ GB collection of music on the go, for little to no upfront cost (I already have the computer, and a nice portable dvd player to butcher into a flip-screen monitor). The difficult question that I have to ask is:
Is it safe to connect a power conditioner (the kind with a massive toroid) to a power inverter to preemptively clean up the modified sine wave output of the inverter so that the psu on the computer sees a relatively stable input? My thought on this is... no. I read somewhere that the capacitor and inductor used in the conditioning circuit will resonate when there is no load and present the inverter with a dead short circuit. I don't have quite enough know-how to just come up with an answer off the top of my head, and I don't want to test this, as I've already blown several inverters in the past and they get expensive to replace every three months. Other than this, the only other problem I could see is, if it actually does work, the conditioner will cause the 115 volt peak output of the inverter to drop down to somewhere around ~95 volts due to the excessive efficiency loss caused by the gigantic (30 lb) toroid attempting to shape the semi-square sine wave into a more smooth curve. And now that I think about it, possibly excessive heating of the conditioner for the same reason.
I would appreciate some input on this, as an entire night of google searching provided me with only vague hints as to what might actually happen if I decide to go through with it. And, is this really an original idea? Or is it so obviously flawed that nobody would even think to say anything about it, like DO NOT ATTEMPT, or something?
