XW 6048 AC2 options

I have a Xantrex 6048 with a 440 A/HR battery bank as my main system (solar panels will be later) that I use primarily as a backup for the house when the power goes south like it did this last weekend here in Northern VA. Everything went really well until the 6048 decided the batteries were exhausted (it was right, BTW). I have an 120 to 240 auto transformer hooked up to the AC2 inputs so I can feed the battery charger from a variety of sources. I have at 1K generator that I can borrow, a Honda i2000EU generator I can borrow, as well as a inverters from 800 to 1400 VA that I have DC sources for (vehicles mostly coupled with my older system's batteries).

The 6048 would not lock onto the 1K generator (it has a cyclical surge at about every five seconds that probably means the output never stabilizes in terms of frequency or voltage). I bought a Black&Decker 800VA inverter at HD when my old Portawattz 1750 unexpectedly died, but the 6048 would not lock onto it either (probably because its a B&D and thus has a very cheap output), that left me with the Honda and the output from a APC Smart-UPS 1400XL pure sign UPS. With both of them, if I turned off the 6048's inverter and allowed either device to feed the AC2 inputs (again, at 240V split phase because of the auto-transformer) it would charge the batteries just fine (at least until the owner of the Honda came and got it back - he was supporting 5 houses with that generator along with the other 1K generator; My hat is off to him). If however, I enabled the inverter on the 6048 so that we could do anything besides battery charging, then when any of the loads clicked on (at one point I was up to 3 refrigerators on the 6048 - at my house and others), the 6048 would disconnect from the AC2 inputs and try to run everything on the subset of the my battery bank that I had partially recharged - that didn't work well for more than an hour.


Configuration - I had the charging percent on the 6048 set to 50%, the AC2 breaker size set to 7 amps, the gen support feature enabled,the gen support amps set to 6 for the Honda (4 for the UPS - it has a 1400VA/1050W continuous rating), and the ECO mode on the Honda disabled. Like I said, with the inverter disabled, these settings worked well for battery charging, but with the 6048 inverter enabled, it'd drop the AC2 input whenever the loads changed. Even with the Honda ECO mode disabled, I'd have to manually start the gen support setting at about 3a and then slowly increase it to 6a in order for the 6048 to be happy with the Honda's power ramp up - I determined this on my own, but have since seen mention of that procedure here on the site; and it does make sense to some degree since the Honda is slower to react to load changes than the 6048 would like. The meters on the 6048 SCP tell me that the power coming off the AC2 was proportional to the Gen support setting - at 6 amps the power reading indicated about 1KW. The i2000 continuous rating is 1600w and 6 amps at 240 is 1440 Watts, so I was within its rating and I figured that the other 440 Watts were lost to charging efficiency and power factor. Since the inverter was already drawing everything it was programmed to be able to draw, load changes should not have been seen at the generator (BTW - this was also true later, after the power came back on and I'd fully charged the entire battery bank).

So, my question really is why does the 6048 keep dropping the AC2 inputs whenever the load increases on the 6048 inverter? and is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks to everyone for being willing to monitor these forums and give such excellent feedback

BH