1 Hack To Eliminate Your A/C Power Bill This Summer!

it works I can't believe it look at this we've got 1.2 amps power coming in from the solar straight into the air conditioner so I've just turned my old dumb air conditioner into a solar powered air conditioner do I have a video for you it involves my whole home air conditioner and solar the thought that I had is could I somehow offset the amount of electricity this machine uses in the summer with solar even if I didn't have battery backup or net metering agreement or anything could a very simple setup work to pretty much eradicate my air conditioner power bill so here's what we're going to test today I've got 400 WS of solar for testing those come over here and uh I've got this uh excess uh nphase solar inverter this is the nphase iq8 plus microinverter and uh then we've got that uh feeding into the air conditioner here I'll get in close here uh for wiring momentarily but the thought is can I use the contactor on the air conditioner to vary when this inverter sees grid power so that when the air conditioner turns on this in turn sees the grid and starts generating power power from solar offsetting the load of the air conditioner but not running any risk of back feeding to the grid and then obviously once the air conditioner satisfies and turns off then this stops seeing the grid and in turn stops the flow of electricity from the solar and so you don't have to have a net metering agreement you don't have to have any kind of expensive battery backup or anything like that could something just as simple as this work to essentially turn this air conditioner into a solar powerered air conditioner that's the uh the testing we're going to do today before we get into all this testing don't forget to give this video a like and a subscribe this is stuff you don't see anywhere else and it really does help out it costs nothing to you but it really does help out and give me the motivation to keep experimenting and keep recording my experiments uh for you guys so don't forget to do that for me you only need a few parts now if you're going to do this permanently you're probably going to need a few extra bits and pieces but uh the bulk of what you need is your shown right here some kind of solar panels that are within operating spec of your micro inverters some cable I'm using the uh nphase iq8 plus micro inverter and then you need obviously at least one of their connecting cables got the nase cable going to just some roax here for testing and uh and then I've just got some connectors here that will go on the contactor of the air conditioner now what you're about to see me do is just an experiment it's something that I've been curious about I'm in no way shape or form recommending you do this uh or repeat this uh there's going to be all kinds of loose wires and things just kind of dang in in this scenario anyway do not attempt this on your own okay Safety First we've pulled the disconnect and then we're going to take a multimeter here and uh we're just going to check I've got that one the other lead on ground so we're just going to go from each of these and make sure we have zero volts and no power I'm going to use my little lead here uh to point uh but uh what we've done is just hooked up one leg to one side of there's a lot of wires here but the contactor is right here and we've hooked one leg to one side hooked the other leg to the other side of the contactor and this is the side the power is coming out of and that way you'll see but uh the contactor controls when the solar provides power and when it doesn't shout out to micro easy start I bought this my own money and everything but this saved me thousands of dollars in a backup power generator and I'm able to run uh my air conditioner without any problem so I made a video about this uh you'll want to check that out it makes a huge difference in the startup inrush the DC voltage range I don't know if you can see this it's pretty small 16 volt to 58 volts we've got two 200 W rigid solar panels here I've connected them in series and then we're going to get these probes stick one in this connector right here stick the other one in this connector there we go we've got 43 volts open circuit voltage so that's within spec 400 WS worth of solar connected you can see it's flashing red that means it's looking for the grid let's turn on the uh AC unit here and uh see what happens I don't know if you could hear but that was the nice soft start that the microware easy start gives so that fired up let's see what the light is doing over here so now it's flashing orange so as you can see it's seeing the grid now this has a few minute delay before it starts uh exporting so let's let this run for a minute and uh we'll see if uh this starts to export just so we have a reference before it starts exporting at the moment on the black wire here we're pulling 5.2 amps on the red wire we're pulling 5.3 amps so let's see how that changes once this comes online I've got a little pigtail right here some wo connectors and this will allow us to check the amps on this so as you can see uh we don't have anything yet all right guys this is huge check this out so the um light continues to Blink orange I don't know if you can see that there we go uh just because it's not connected to the Gateway however these are designed to still output power even without the Gateway so let's connect our amp clamp here check it out 1.1 amps of power on the white leg push the wrong button and 1.17 amps on the black wire so if we come over here to the air conditioner and clamp the black wire what was over 5 amps is now turn so you can see it 4.2 on that wire and on the red wire 4.2 so yeah we've lowered it by an amp on both legs which obviously maths correctly with what we measured here so let's just do a little bit of math for fun 1.2 times 240 so we're pushing in 288 Watts so you could easily add a few more panels a few more inverters enough that uh you are really close to the amount of amps your AC draws don't want to go over that uh if you don't have any kind of net metering agreement or anything uh cuz then you could actually end up paying for that Excess power you've generated potentially your the other things in your house would use it where the air conditioner contactor is the thing that's controlling this then you've got uh the ability to stack enough panels with enough inverters that you can completely mitigate the AC power draw of your air conditioner and let the sun power it and you don't need to get any different air conditioners or anything like that you just need some solar panels some micro inverters obviously a little different setup than uh just an exposed wire uh running across the ground to take the effort and to hook everything up properly and in a more permanent fashion this is just testing this is so cool so tell me uh your thoughts on uh turning your generic air conditioner into a solar powerered air conditioner with this in my case uh it's very viable because I already had some solar panels that are just kicking around and you can get rigid solar panels especially for so cheap now it's insane so the biggest expense is these microinverters but hey you know get one and get you know couple hundred Watts worth of solar going into your air conditioner and then it add another one the next year and so on and eventually offset it HVAC is like the number one energy consumer of our homes and so if we can just offset that suddenly our homes become much less energy hungry and in turn you save a ton of money just think how awesome it'd be on those bright hot sunny days to feel completely free to knock that thermostat that way down and run your air conditioner to your heart's content because you're completely offsetting your consumption with the sun outside I think this is just really really cool other comments I want to hear what other ways do you think we could utilize a simple setup like this a small inverter with some solar to help offset electricity costs for large appliances one other one that I'm thinking of is like a 240 volt pool pump I don't have a pool but I do have an irrigation pump right over over there so maybe we could try that but that could be another viable thing if you've got a pool pump that's 240 volts uh running a lot you could do a similar thing and to just connect this uh behind the timer or the contactor or whatever system you have to uh run it I think that would be very viable I want to hear your other ideas though so leave them down below please don't forget to give us the like And subscribe completely free to you really helps out with the uh YouTube algorithm and gives me the added encouragement and incentive to continue making these videos for you on YouTube where it's free you don't have to pay subscriptions or anything to see this kind of stuff it's just free education so help a guy out give us a like subscribe and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: There's A Trick For That

Views: 240,404

Keywords: Solar air conditioner, DIY solar AC, Solar-powered air conditioning, how to make solar powered A/C, Solar panel installation, DIY solar projects, Solar power for home, Home energy savings, DIY solar, Solar AC tutorial, Solar-powered home, Air conditioner solar conversion, Enphase, enphase IQ8+, enphase microinverters, use enphase inverters without gateway, Solar energy DIY, Eco-friendly air conditioning, off grid air conditioning, 200w rigid solar panels, trane, DIY A/C

Id: RQ3IIj8rDNw

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024