nicobie said:We have 13 solar panels on our roof, but seeing as how they are tied into the grid they won't do us any good with the power off. I'd love to find a way that they could keep the volt's batteries charged when the power goes out. Then I could be totally independent of the grid in outages. I thought of using my bike battery with a small 120V inverter to back feed the panels in order to energize the solar inverter but have been advised that it wouldn't work.
You'd probably need a different inverter. You could possibly do a dc-dc converter to 12v and run your 12v inverter off that. I have a 20A dc-dc that runs from 48v- 96v in and spits out 13v. It was cheap. It should be possible to parallel a bunch of those or find larger ones. Not sure what voltage your panels put out. If they are in the right range you might be able to drive a switching power supply made for 120vac directly. Something like a server power supply.