To be honest, I'm not actually looking for my corvette, I'm looking for a built in setup for my daily driver (I'm a Realtor frequently plugging in chargers, laptops, etc).

The cheapos keep breaking (I've paid up to $50.00 for them) - guess you get what you pay for. I'm looking at these more expensive more permanent solutions that you can hard wire into your battery like a stereo amp. Energizer makes one @ 1100 watt, there's a PowerDrive @ 1000 watt, and whistler pro @ 1600 watt on Amazon I have my eye on. The 1000+ watt is probably overkill but I do want to be able to charge several things at once while running a laptop.

Has anybody else tried one of these? My plan is to hard wire it from my relay box (or somewhere else) with an inline fuse and run a 120 circuit to my ash tray by cigarette lighter, as well as back seat somewhere. Not sure why more manufacturers haven't started doing this from the factory but oh well. The box would be installed in the trunk like a stereo amp would be (my only concern is airflow I'm not sure how much heat these put off).

Any advice / tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

Be very wary of the wattage claims for these things. If you actually pulled 1000 watts, they would draw 83.33 amps from your battery.

A high quality 200 watt inverter would pull a maximum of 16.66 amps and would probably be more than sufficient for the various chargers you intend to use.

That said, direct DC-DC (say 12v - 5V), conversion would be far more efficient. Thats basically what the little cigarette lighter to USB adapters use.

You might consider hardwiring something like into your car. This is what I use in my SUV and it charges all my devices in addition to a 12V laptop adapter.

 

What causes most people to burn them up is voltage drop
I have a peak 800watt continuous (paid 50 bucks) that I have had installed under the sick seat of my Durango for 4 years now. Ran a 6 garage wire to it straight from battery. Will charge laptop, run printer, and charge dewalt batter all at same time. Will also run a small shop vac and has no issue with a large solder iron.

It is used quite frequently as I am in the field 70% of the time for work and work out of the Durango

 

Rule #1 Go with a pure sine wave inverter.

Consider looking for features that prevent dead batteries. Having the inverter turn off automatically or sound an alarm when the 12 V is getting too low is a big deal.

As you may already know, when looking at specs note how much draw the inverter uses doing nothing ( at idle ). If the manufacture lists this number in amps, multiply that by 12 (volts) to get how much watts it is drawing as not all manufactures standardize on the unit measurement for this.

I went with the Tripp-Lite brand and got the 1800 watt modified sine wave inverter. It does the job well and its been in use for about 1 year and just about every day. I run a laptop, a small mini-iTX PC and 7" touch monitor off of it and I enjoy how the inverter manages the cooling fan, its not normally running so its quiet from no fan noise.

I also run a super-duper workstation class computer off of it drawing 5.5 amps which is 660 watts for hours on end. I do need to keep the car on (Chevy Volt) so the 12V gets charged constantly when I run the workstation.

The negative side of the Tripp-Lite 1800 is when connecting computer equipment audio outputs to an amp (car stereo), you'll get dreaded buzz noise in the audio stream. That is a deal breaker and prevents computer to car audio connections from being a pleasure. There isn't anything that fixes this because its from the design of the inverter (modified sine wave is a cheaper way to generate electricity making inverters more affordable).