Review on 🚗 Efficient 500W Car Power Inverter: 12V to 110V with Dual USB Ports and AC Outlets by Andrew Holman

So I May Have a Bad One? The first thing that strikes me upon unpacking is that this stuff smells awful. Well, some electronics stink, but this one is very sharp. I can live with a smelly inverter as long as it does its job. Second, I noticed that it comes with a DC plug so I can plug it directly into my 12V portable power bank without getting creative. Good! It's time to check it out. I still have an old 3 way bulb in a lamp that I never use for anything other than checking. This seemed like a good starting point. I connected the inverter to my power supply, connected the lamp to the inverter and turned it on. No problems on the lowest settings. This setting should be 50W, but the PSU says it's actually drawing about 60W. There shouldn't be any problems. So far, so good. So I switch the lamp to medium level. 100 W. SOUND. Fail. No light. What? I grab the inverter box and look at the manual. Apparently this is 500 watts peak, 400 watts continuous. That's a far cry from 100 watts. I'm starting to wonder if this is a problem with my PSU. So I put the lamp right inside. The light goes on and off immediately. zero problems. The PSU says it draws about 120 watts. Fine. Maybe it's the DC power supply that's bad? I take my trusty 800w Cobra and wire it up just like this inverter. All three settings, zero problems. At this point I'm wondering if maybe something was installed incorrectly when testing this inverter, so I spent the next 10 minutes plugging and reconnecting the wires. It did absolutely nothing. Still beeps and fails when I try to pass more than 100W through it. Maybe he doesn't like old lightbulbs? I spent the next hour or so testing random things and it beeped and failed every time I tried anything over 100w. Sometimes what I'm testing it starts beeping on after a few seconds only to beep and turn off again. I was even so upset that I tried a fully charged deep cycle battery with exactly the same results. I can only conclude that it can only do 80 watts. It works without problems, but no matter what else I try, it cannot turn it on. It's fairly quiet when powering what it can power. I think it's ok. The fan turned on several times and not very loud. Hooray?