What Is The Difference Between An Inverter And A Converter?

Today’s question is ,“What is the difference between an inverter and a converter?” Now this can be a little bit confusing, but they’re basically opposite type devices. So an inverter is taking DC power (that’s direct current power): that’s what our solar panels generate, that’s what batteries generate, and it’s inverting that into AC power. That’s a sinusoidal wave going up and down, positive to negative, and that’s what our utility power is. That’s the wall outlet you plug everything into.

So an inverter inverts DC to AC. Now a converter is the opposite. The converter is taking AC power and it’s converting to DC. So take some electronics in there and it takes that AC converts it to rough DC and then uses some other capacitors and inductors to smooth it all out so we get a nice steady DC voltage output.

From there, it can convert the DC to whatever voltage range is needed for the electronics. If that’s one of our solar pumps, we’re using either a 36 or a 72 volt converter to convert 120 volt AC to what our solar pumps can use.