in my garden I have a wind turbine and some solar panels at the moment they charge some 12v batteries I would like to make a power inverter to tern the 12vdc into 240vac to power my house during power cuts I want it to run on arduino so it can monitor over current, over heating and low battery level that sort of stuff would anyone be able to give me some pointers or circuit diagrams to help me as I am quite new to arduino
I don;t think, that powerful / high voltage inverter is good starting point, as task requires expert level knowledge in electricity/electronics and software.
I'd buy auto/moto and hack into it.
http://www.kerrywong.com/2010/03/12/a-power-inverter-with-arduino-pulse-source/
Connecting an inverter to house mains wiring is called "grid-tie" and is subject to regulation and requires approved equipment and approved installers in most territories. Get it wrong and can cause fire and or death to yourself or others - its not an amateur activity...
Also inverters are tricky to design - coping with varying load, protecting against short circuit and voltage excursions and generally being robust is complex and frankly its much easier to buy an inverter.
A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) contains most of what you want (battery storage, automatic switch-over on mains-failure - they provide a socket output for powered devices that you'd like to keep going in the event of a power outage. A secondhand UPS might be interesting (often they have a serial interface), and if you can provide DC power to the UPS battery pack directly you might be able to do what you want. You would need to know that the DC side of the UPS was main-isolated for this to be safe.
MarkT:
Connecting an inverter to house mains wiring is called "grid-tie"
Not necessarily. It is common to have what is referred to as a "transfer switch" to allow loads to be switched from one source (mains) to another (inverter, generator, etc). It is crucial that your inverter or generator or other non-grid generation not "back-feed" into the grid.
Get it wrong and can cause fire and or death to yourself or others - its not an amateur activity...
Agreed 110% If you're asking on this forum, don't mess with this for a second.
Look up "inverter chargers" and conventional UPS systems for this task.