My nephew owens a small cabin in the woods w. no electrical service. He is using a generater in the daytime and a battery/ inverter set up at night. I have installed of course a dpdt transfer switch to switch between the two sources. Im going to put one small branch circuit in the cabin which will be switchable between the two sources by the transfer switch. This branch circuit will run to a small sub panel with a breaker.
The sub panel ( in this case, the only panel ) I will ground to a grounding rod buried to earth. My question is, do I leave the netural buss bar in the panel " floating' above the grounded panel box. If there should be an accidental short circuit in the branch circuit
Will the breaker trip if the netural buss bar is not grounded to the panel earth ground?
Also will there be any effect to the generater and/or inverter if the netural is left floating or grounded to earth? Which way should I go?. to ground or not to ground? Henry

What you should do is keep the neutral/ground bond in the panel and disconnect the neutral/ground bond in the generator. What's commonly done is to create a twist-lock with ground/neutral jumper to be used when the generator is used stand-alone. Usually 240 isn't required in this case.

Ground and neutral from the generator should come back to the panel.

In fact, in hindsight, if you didn't use an explicit transfer switch where both contacts of both cannot occur simultaneously, you could have backfed the panel through an breaker and used an interlock kit from Generator InterLock Kit (http://www.interlockkit.com).

Just curious, any thought of solar or wind in the future?

Just curious, any thought of solar or wind in the future?

Yes, possible solar panels to charge the batterys. For now, we intend to use a battery charger fed from the generator to charge the batterys in the daytime.

Best of luck to you, sounds like an interesting project.