wooferhound,
At the moment I use Yuasa 100AH lead acid battery. Actually I have not done battery sizing yet. I think I will use 600w solar panel with 400AH battery. And try to tune number of panel and battery base on usage later.
Just so happen I was thinking about battery too. In the morning, surprisingly the inverter arrived (was in heated discussion with the seller because he give me wrong tracking number). It caught me off guard because basically I have nothing in hand. Not even a battery. So it is just luck when I went out, stumbled into mom & pop battery shop and they sell N100 battery for abour US$100.
So with the inverter and the battery, with no solar panel and charge controller yet. I just do short simple tests.
1. Connect inverter to battery and an AVR to inverter. The AVR have volt meter and the volt is arround 220v and stable. [PASS]
2. Main concern is that it is not pure sine wave. Heard that power tools will not function if not pure sine wave. So I connect Black & Decker 500w drill and play with it. Volt meter indicator move a little bit. But it function as connected to the main, [PASS]
3. Connect only 36" TV (around 200w) to the AVR. Just in case there is noise in sound and visual. It works fine. [PASS]
4. Connect only fridge (between 200w - 300w) to the AVR. I think it start since I can hear normal in operation sound. And the freezer does felt cold after some time. [PASS]
5. By this time I wonder how to check the 1500w continuous power rating. So I test the fridge + black & decker drill plus a 350w blender connected to the AVR, Estimated that should be around 1kw. (Unfortunately TV is no where nearby the fridge). All three work fine. [PASS]
6. I have a microwave with rating 900w at the back plate. Connect only the microwave to AVR. Set power to high and try to microwave some nut for 1 minutes. I think it does it for about 5 second before I heard warning buzzer from the inverter. It cut off the microwave and then turn it back on. Puzzling, I don't know much about microwave but since it is rated 900w it shouldn't do that right? [FAIL]
7. I have a 1500w vacuum cleaner. But since the microwave fail, I stop testing [TBA]
Here is link to picture of the inverter.
http://picasaweb.google.com/harishashim/InverterPictures with inverter on top green table is from the seller. The other two is from me. You can see that the seller give me 2 white socket but the picture he show has 2 black socket that looks nicer. I'm going to complain about this.
My method might not be correct. So really appreciate suggestion. Unfortunately I don't have scope to really see whether it is pure sine wave or some kind of very good modified wave.