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Cigarette lighter fuse repeatedly blows when connecting car inverter

Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair Asked by conetfun on December 21, 2020

I was using this car charger to charge my MacBook Pro from past two months without any issue in my Swift Dzire 2012 model. Today, I connected two laptops at the same time using a multi socket extension. It worked fine for 15 minutes and then cigarette lighter fuse blown.

I took car to service centre and they replaced the blown fuse with another one of same capacity (15 AMP). When I again plugged in the charger into cigarette lighter socket then it blown again in few seconds. This happened a couple of times.

Finally, they used another car charger which looked like this and this time fuse was not blown.

Is it possible that the charger that I am using is the culprit and blowing up fuse repetitively? And is there anything that I can do to test and fix it?

Note – I was using this charger from two months without any issue but with a single laptop.

One Answer

So that inverter is a 150W output model. Assuming it's 90% efficient (that's probably a high guess) that means it takes 167W input. At 12V that is 14A.

What's the fuse capacity on your lighter outlet? Most are in the 10-15A range so at 14A you are really close and it makes sense that you will blow the fuse after some time. Fuses are not able to handle their rated capacity for an extended period of time.

You need to either:

  1. Only charge one laptop at a time since the full capacity of the inverter is not needed to charge one of them.
  2. Plug your inverter in somewhere else. That may require installing a second power outlet in your vehicle.

Correct answer by jwh20 on December 21, 2020

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