Yesterday, I was over at my friend, Tom's house, and got to use his oscilloscope to test out my 48V UPS.
Here's a bit of video of us playing around with it.
It turns out that the inverter of the UPS IS TRUE SINE WAVE, (which I thought/hoped it would be) but it actually gave better AC power than what came from Tom's wall outlet!
The UPS only converts power from the 48V battery pack to AC when it senses a disconnect from the wall power. We did that by flicking the switch on the power strip. The waveform stayed very nice - no "glitch" or anything - just a seamless transition from wall power to battery power and back.
In my case, I am not really planning on using this device as a stand-alone UPS (although I do have some clever ideas for that as well...) Rather, I just want to use the inverter section of the UPS to convert power from a 48V battery pack to 120V AC.
Charging of that battery pack will be done from the solar panels through a (still undecided upon) solar charge controller.
Using the 48V UPS saves me the cost of a solar true-sinewave inverter, which can be VERY expensive. On the downside, the UPS is only designed to run 2200 VA peak, although it does have several power outlets on the back, including two 20 amp outlets.
I would also like to add an extra output to the solar charge controller, as both my motorcycle and CitiCar use 48V battery packs. Rather than charge a 48V battery pack, invert it to AC, run that to a 48V charger in the vehicle, which converts it back to DC - I could more or less run the PV panels straight to the EVs' main battery pack.
The motorcycle doesn't even have an aux 12v battery, just a DC/DC converter. The Citicar would still need a 12V charger hooked up for it's aux battery, although that could be swapped out for a DC converter as well.
For my electric Geo Metro, it would require use of the UPS/inverter because it runs typically at 96 or 108V. I would simply plug the car (with its built-in charger) straight into the UPS. In case the UPS power pack starts to run low on juice, it SHOULD automatically turn off AC to its outlets. I would want to double-check that with some real world-testing though.
Anyways, I am very excited that it looks like the UPS should work great for what I want it for. I still may add an extra fan or heat sink in it if cooling during longer run times is an issue.