Hi Maine sail,
Still grappling with the inverter charger replacement decision, since I’ve decided to have it shipped to st Thomas we still have a month, since we got 17 years out of the Xantrex and since it appears the magnum will require the extra cost of a new remote and the hassle of fishing a new cable across the boat to the nav station I’m inclined to go with the freedom 458 modified sine. It’s 500 bucks more to get pure sine with either magnum or Xantrex and all our boat stuff has worked fine on modified for 17 years.
The magnum will cost 150 bucks additional due to the need for a new remote. I haven’t yet learned enough to see the value in the different brand or the upgrade to pure sine. But... I don’t want to look back a see I missed something. So maybe to can help me understand the value in the upgrade or the move to magnum from Xantrex. Understand magnum is better on customer service, but honestly after 17 years of never a problem I wonder how important that’s going to be?
You get what you pay for. Old Xantrex is not the current Xantrex. The last Xantrex inverter/charger we installed, at the customers insistance (he bought it), has been nothing but a big nightmare for him. I would post a video but I am pretty angry in it and my frustration & language is not a pretty sight. Xantrex has been promissing a fix for this unit now for three years and failed to deliver on numerous promisses. The unit is still not working correctly because Xantrex has failed to supply the fix. This is one reason why we no longer install them. We sure are glad we had the owner sign an agreement that this product was installed
against our advisement,
supplied by him, and that
any Xantrex warranty issues were to be billed at our normal hourly rate.
"But my boat builder installed it and they know what they are doing, so I need and identical replacement." was his thought process. He now pays a lot closer attention when we recommend for or advise against a product.
As a business we can't stand behind Xantrex, we can't afford to, so we no longer install it. Being in the industry I can reach out to many colleagues who do still install Xantrex and they have continually supported why we don't. The only Xantrex products we will install are the Echo Charger, the LinkLite and LinkPro battery monitors but today those installs are far and few between as there are much better options out there now.
I have given you my professional opinion, and given it as a professional ABYC marine electrician. It is all based on actual experience across many hundreds of boats & a multitude of problems with recent Xantrex products.
Beyond that the 458 is an RV inverter. It is
not a marine product and is
not marine compliant nor is it tested to the Marine UL standards. In order to compete better in the RV market they dropped a lot of important stuff off that unit (cheapened it) such as conformal coating, steel vs. aluminum internal components etc. etc.... The old Xantrex unit you had was a hold over from the high-quality Heart Interface/Trace days and they were solid products. After the Xantrex buyout customer service and reliability went steadily downhill.
All I can say is do an extensive google search on poor Xantrex customer support & quality and decide for yourself. If you came to us with a 458 (ignoring brand here), and asked us to install on a boat, the answer would be sorry we can't do that..