Wagan EL2600 Elite Pro 200W Pure Sine Inverter

I bought this unit to replace another that had a noisy fan and was not pure sine wave. I use it to power my CPAP when primitive camping. It consumes about 105W with the humidifier on. While running my CPAP overnight for about 8 hours, the unit never felt warm. I was able to use a watt hour meter to determine load which would not have functioned without a pure sine wave output. This is a great little inverter that appears to be very efficient. My deep cycle battery dropped from 13.4V to 11.9V after three nights of use.

I initially bought this to run my guitar amp on battery power so I could busk. It worked very well for this and provided nice, clean power without any noise, important for music applications. I later installed it in a van with power and it failed within a month of near-constant use. I speculate that perhaps the 14.4v that was being pushed into it while the batteries charged may have been the cause, or maybe it just wasn't intended for 24/7 use. In any case, it still functions, but with some terrible buzzing noise, and it can no longer handle anywhere near 200 watts.

Product is junk. Do not buy. I plugged a 75 watt bulb into it and it worked fine. When I plugged a 100 watt bulb into it the unit emitted a high pitched whistle. When I plugged a 150 watt bulb into it shut itself down.

Performs well on typical battery voltage (12 Volts +/- 1 Volt). The reason for 4 starts is that when the battery bank is charging (voltages up to 14.4 Volts in BULK charge mode), the inverter heats up dramatically (fan noise and ultimately heat alarm even with a load as little as 80 Watts). At normal battery (discharge) voltage, the unit works as advertised.

Tested Wagan EL2600 with load of 90W incandescent bulb and 60W to switching power supply. It worked fine with either load alone, but emitted a high screeching sound with both loads that measured 82dBA at 3 feet. Inverter was connected directly to a 55AH storage battery. At full load measured parameters were:DC input 11.7V @ 16.2A (189 watts)AC output 108V @ 1.7A, 150 watts, 180 VA, 59.9HzThe screeching sound stopped immediately when either load was turned off and the voltage returned to 120V. The fan running full speed had a noise level <60dBA.While the Wagan looks good at lower power, it doesn't meet its 200 watt continuous power specification. I am returning to Amazon.

I have been running this unit solid non-stop 8 to 10 hours a day 6 days a week in a work vehicle, it is powering a 90/120 watt HP laptop in high performance power plan mode with a discrete Nvidia graphics card onboard. On the second outlet there is a 35 watt continuous UtiliQuest GPS site survey location device running fulltime also. This 200 watt inverter has not skipped a beat over the past 4 months of continuous field/work use. I have heard the fan ever so slightly only a couple of times, the unit doesn't overheat at all and it is the smallest pure sine wave inverter I could find for my power consumption needs. I know the unit is running at peak efficiency because efficiency increases when an inverter is running at or as close to its rated capacity. I wouldn't hesitate to buy another and this is my first experience with a Wagan product.

Update: works great and very quite.A little to noisy while on standby. I would assume that the fan wouldn't run at all ifthere were no load at all😕

Seems to work, but when it senses low voltage it emits a terrible beeping alarm. As most common 12 volt systems will have high amperage components (macerator, engine starter, water pump, bilge pump) the idea that you need to be notified when the voltage drops is kind of dumb. The USB plug was installed a little wonky too so it seems to be a challenge to plug something in. It does work an inverter and I use it mainly to keep my laptop charged because my DC charger failed and I needed a backup. I also don't think it works with 200 watts. I've had the annoying alarm turn on when I tried using an 85 watt laptop charger. It can handle 45 though and I happened to have one that works. Not amazed with this thing but I also have not returned it.