Outback Inverters

[bodyguy]

Just curious, I am trying to decide if I should spend the money and buy the  GTFX 3524 Outback inverter. I built a 13 footer(Dan's style)turbine. It is up and running on a 65 foot tower, brought down to a rectifier and into my battery bank with a charge controller. Which components for this inverter are needed to sell back to the utility and charge batterys? Has anyone had a bad experience with outback? Seams like everything I read is good. Or is there another 24 volt inverter out there with the capabilities of this one. I really struggle with the electronics part of this hobbie. Any thoughts, help, advice, would be greatly apreciated. Thanks Craig  

[halfcrazy]

IMHO Outback makes good stuff. I also have an Outback GVFX3524 that is for sale if interested it is less than a month old email me for specifics rstankevitz at hotmail.com

[dnix71]

Outbacks are great. If you want to sell back to the power company, call them first. They have the final say on what they consider acceptable.

[hydrosun]

I use Outback myself and have installed for others. Very reliable. I question if you need battery backup. Our utility requires an extra $500 for meter able to handle battery backed up grid tie inverter systems. The cost and upkeep of batteries. On a grid tie system with infrequent outages I'd make every effort to keep the system battery free. On solar that is easy but the options are less with wind.(windyboy?)

The other option with batteries is a grid backed up system. You store all the power in batteries to run certain loads. Use voltage controlled switches to choose which loads to run from inverter and when to connect to grid. That way you could use a lower cost inverter and avoid the expense of utility requirements.

Chris  

[RandomJoe]

I believe functionally, just the inverter itself is all you need to sell power.  However, the inverter has no provision for making adjustments or local override (beyond an on/off switch input for the inverter).  

If you need to adjust settings, you will need to buy or at least borrow a Mate interface.  The inverter will keep settings once they have been made, so you don't need to always have the Mate, if you can find someone who will let you borrow one.

However, the Mate would also allow you to override control in real time.  Push a button to start selling or stop, switch to battery-power or go back to grid, so forth.  Also lets you see the inverter's voltage/current measurements (although I find the AC measurements on mine to be rather coarse and not particularly accurate).  Besides just being convenient to make tweaks from time to time.

[bodyguy]

Thank you for all your advice. It sounds like everything I have researched about outback is good.

halfcrazy,

I am not quite ready to purchace at this time. But somtime in the near future I will be picking one up. Do you have the mate with your Outback? I will keep your email handy. Hopfully it will still be available when I am  ready to purchase.

Thanks again,

Craig