Using battery power to go off the City's power grid

sbayne, thanks.

tksteingraber, thanks for sharing your great results with the Powerbright. Which and how much battery storage (amp hr) are you using with your unit?  I looked on their site, clicked on the user manual for their lower quality modified sine wave inverters.  It seems that even lower battery power can still be used with any inverter, although the inverter will not provide as much time of use.  The dimensions and weight of the Powerbright modified sine wave inverters resemble the pure sine wave inverters of Giandel.  Of course, your pure sine wave inverter is stated to produce the purest quality from Powerbright.

Perhaps the most attractive package is from Giandel, with their 5000 watt hr pure sine wave inverter, fed by two Amperetime 200 amp hr batteries, for $2800.  Next attractive is to save $800 and get one Amperetime battery.  See the pictures from ricevs' site, tweakaudio.  The advantage of Powerbright is their east coast location with phone number.

Right now I first have to figure out how to ground the inverter from my 3rd floor apartment.  Giandel says grounding is essential for safety reasons.  

You can ground an inverter to any true ground point......like the third pin in your wall....There are some really old buildings that have no true ground....this is certainly not to code and probably illegal.  I lived in a building like that in Berkeley back in the 80s.....I had to put a clamp on the cold water pipe to ground my system.

Thanks.  So I can take a ground wire and stick it into the 3rd pin in an unused outlet on a power strip?  Are there good ground wire ends with a thick single plug for a secure connection into the 3rd pin?

Yup....just buy a good three prong plug and put a large guage wire (12 gauge is fine) into the third pin only.....plug it into your strip or the wall and.....attach the other end of the wire to the inverter.  Any hardware store will have the plug and sell house wire by the foot....stranded wire is way easier to work with.

@viber6 fyi- i use 2 agm 100wh batteries with my  24v powerbright pure sine wave inverter for a total of 2400wh. I have 2 of these outlet setup’s on both sides of my home.  Each outlet set up cost me less than $500.  Already had solar set up to feed both controllers. (I could easily expand to 4 batteries if more time is needed.)

As for grounding, I buy an inexpensive audio power audio cord on amazon that has plugs that can be removed and take all 3 wires and connect them to the ground only on the male plug.  Then on the female plug I replace it with a spade to use it as a ground only connection.  Works well for my DIY ground boxes as well.