High frequency inverters typically are floating neutral and cannot be bonded or bad things will happen. Instead of 120V line-ground you will have 60V line-ground and 60V neutral-ground. My UPS has the neutral bonded in my breaker panel.
Ah well that went right over my head. Just another benchmark of something I need to understand before I proceed too far I guess
I did have a poke around ebay at some Outback and Samlex LF inverters in the 2000W range, and indeed, for equivalent specs on paper, it looks like about a 5x premium over your consumer-grade HF pure sine. They also seem to necessarily include AC charging, which would be redundant in the system I'm imagining, but maybe that's just inherent to their design.
Thanks for pointing out potential scavenging opportunities - it's interesting you pointed to a UPS in particular. I'm still very limited in my knowledge of electrical/electronics, so I'm looking for free junk to tinker with to get a handle on things. I recently pulled a little UPS out of the basement of what was formerly (like 15 or 20 years ago) a small local PC/electronics shop. It looks maybe big enough to keep one or two CPUs running for an hour or so in a blackout. I figured it would give me a chance to play with small versions of the components I would be using for my mobile power application.
Maybe you can answer a question I have about it. When I pulled it open, it was running off of two 6V 12Ah sealed lead-acid batteries in series. They were obviously well past their usable service life, both reading 1.xxV. I was wondering if I could swap in another 12V SLA battery I have out of a jump-starter pack that still has a bit of life left, just to see if I can get it operating normally and experiment with capacity tests and stuff. Like I said, I'm pretty much starting from scratch, no bench-top power supply or anything. I need to hold off at least a couple more months to wrap up other projects before I can make this hobby the money-sink-du-jour.
What's weird about the UPS is that when it's powered, I'm reading the voltage at the battery leads at around 18.5V, which seems way high for charging a 12V lead-acid bank. I can't tell if that's a fault in the UPS, or if there's some good reason for that. I'd rather not have my first experiment vent a bunch of hydrogen into the basement and trash the only 12V battery I have on hand.
