This lady makes some good points. No matter what your local power company's marketing department says, they are in the business of selling electricity. When solar was a cutsie little minor annoying thing in the 70's they could afford to treat it like playing peek-a-boo with a toddler. In fairness to the power companies though, I must say that grid tied solar has reached a point in some markets like Hawaii where the grid acts like a car with a stuck throttle. At least if the power companies own the solar farm, they can dial it back just like they dial back their other power plants. Grid tied solar just wants to sell all it can and is uncontrolled.

What does this have to do with off grid? Get some batteries and let the power company take their ball and go home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VNYJyXAu_c

This is the stuff killdozers are made of.

Many inverters come with a "dry contact" that you can use for a generator start. This is not exactly true. The problem is that when voltage gets below the start point, the dry contact will close. As soon as the batteries charge a tiny bit, the dry contact will open and shut off the generator.

For a typical inverter "dry contact" to work as a gen start, you need at least an "off delay" relay to ensure that if the generator starts it will run for ~30minutes once triggered to start.

More advanced inverters will have programming that includes warm up and cool down, and min run time.