Mastervolt CombiMaster boot issue

[Black Diamond]

I'm more than a little disappointed in this, but maybe someone can give me a rationale explanation for it, or provide a work around that works for them.


I'm in the process of taking my boat apart for the winter and a week ago I took off the canvas, sails, solar panels, etc. I was coming back yesterday to finish the engine, water systems, AC, etc.. When we arrived we noticed that the shore power had gone out and nothing was operating. The batteries had dropped to 4V and everything was dead.



No problem, I thought. Just restore shore power and the COMBIMASTER battery charger will bring things back up. More to the point, it won't need the batteries for inverting AC because there is a shore power bypass.


Not so. In some unbelievable design choice, Mastervolt decided that you need power in the batteries to charge the batteries or even boot the unit! In other words, the COMBIMASTER will not boot unless there is something like 9V in the batteries. Even at 100AMPS, my engine alternator would not raise the voltage in the bank (7 batteries) sufficiently for several hours.



In checking things out, my multimeter tells me that there was 230V coming to the unit. But no - this power source was not acceptable for booting the Combimaster. It wants the batteries it is charging to have enough voltage to boot the Combimaster.



I eventually took a spare battery i had and made a "bank of one" hooked to the combimaster. It booted right up and I proceeded to winterize everything.



Has anyone else had this happen to them? Normally my solar protects me against this happening, but it had been done for 10 days at that point, so....

[smac999]

every inverter / charger needs dc power to start up and pass AC power. Victron, mangasine etc. it's not a mastervolt issue.

[Black Diamond]

There are lots of AC/DC converters in use today for everything from charging laptops to ear buds. Not a great technical challenge, I would think.


I would also think it would differentiate a vendor from other vendors with customers.