# Grid-tied inverter when grid is down



## Gray Wolf (Jan 25, 2013)

Hi gang. I have none of this brand in our off-grid system, so it's not a reccomendation, but I came across it and thought it may be worth looking into for some of you.

The catch in a normal grid-tied system is that it goes down when the grid goes down. The solution used to be a hybrid/expensive system with charge controller and a battery bank to power your stuff.

Here is a product that claims to provide limited power with no batteries. Killer if the sun is shining. No good if dark. The solution may be to have a large UPS for limited night time use and run bigger stuff when the sun shines? (Personally, if I had something like this, I would just have a couple of batteries on a float charger and a small sine-wave inverter for nightime and cloudy days.)

Totally off-grid works for us but something like this may make sense if you are already on the grid and are looking to reduce your power bills while still having a bit of power when the grid goes down.

Here it is. Good luck and let us know what you think of it.

SMA Americaâs Sunny Boy TL-US inverter. During a grid outage during the day, this inverter can supply up to 1,500 watts (at 120 VAC) from the PV array to a dedicated wall-mounted, switched outletâwithout batteries.


----------



## K.B. (Sep 7, 2012)

Couple of other options in addition to the SMA:
http://www.homepower.com/available-battery-based-grid-tied-inverters


----------



## spacecase0 (Jul 12, 2012)

I have been looking into this as well, and a new inverter seems to be the answer


----------



## SolarGary (Sep 8, 2005)

Hi,
Here is a Homepower article on the inverter: http://www.homepower.com/articles/s...oducts/backup-power-without-batteries?v=print

Looks pretty promising.

Gary


----------

