5kW inverter

As I read it, it repeatedly says it uses a 48v battery. I did not see any reference to a 150 to 450 volt battery.

It goes out of its way to say it only does 220 v AC. Are you sure all your loads pool are 220 single phase?

 

just give it a shot; no risk, no fun /

 

... from the solar PV input, not from the battery input.

I don't know just what it would do if you put a battery on the solar input, but can think of several ways it might express its displeasure.

 

First it would have to be able to tell it is connected to a battery and not a panel. The volts taste exactly the same, so unless it has some clock built in and wants to know why it's always noon here, it probably won't be displeased.

The main difference between its 48v battery-bank terminals and its solar input terminals is that the battery-bank terminals are bidirectional. It can both charge that bank when there is solar input, and draw from that bank when there isn't.

The solar terminals are just inputs, but that's ok for this purpose. You won't be using this gizmo to charge the traction battery; the car does that.

The traction battery can probably supply a lot more current than the solar panel input might be designed for; a fast-acting fuse sized by what the input expects would be a good idea.

 

That would be goofy. Your traction battery is already the right voltage to connect to the input terminals for the solar panel. In this application, you would not use the terminals intended for the 48 volt battery bank. (We've cycled back to post #5.)

Naturally, one thing to check before purchase would be whether the thing will refuse to start up if it hasn't got something connected at its battery bank terminals.

 

The volts may taste the same, but the current smells very different. PV panels have very different V-I curves than batteries. PV panels are inherently current limited, to an I(sc) not much above the normal operating level.

The device's PV input has a Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT) to hone in on a panel's ideal operating point at any given moment, which varies with lighting conditions. This MPPT will seek the point where increasing I causing decreasing V such that power, the I*V product, is flat at its peak. But on a battery, it won't reach such a point because that peak exceeds the safe power handling capacity of both the battery and the conversion device. The device will need to stop at its top current or power handling capacity. Hopefully, it is programmed to do this correctly without depending on the PV's inherent current limit or very rapidly decreasing voltage output.

 

Well, the MPPT seeker will also need to have some use for the power it finds, which in this case would also greatly exceed the most power a 5 kW inverter could ever want to produce. So if you've got your 1800 watt air fryer plugged in, and there's no battery bank connected at the 48-volt terminals to stash excess power in, then I figure the conversion device is going to end up pulling maybe 2000 watts from the traction battery, MPPT or no MPPT.

 

What's the risk? does this thing ever do a full crowbar on the 'solar panel' input? that's about the only thing I could think of that would be maybe okay for solar and BAD for batteries at the same time.

Worst case you rig up a compact dummy 48v supply to fake out the logic somewhere.

Also, no pain no gain.