48v Solar Power System for Beginners: Lower Cost and More Power!

so in a previous video we talked about the pros and cons of a 12-volt versus a 24 volt versus a 48 volt system and a lot of beginners are still scared of using a higher voltage battery for their solar power system if they're using it for a van or an RV they usually want to stick to 12 volts so that you can use 12 volt components that are easy to source online or even at a local store but today we're gonna build a 48 volt system that is beginner-friendly and there are lots of benefits of running a higher voltage battery for your solar power system but the biggest downside is just sourcing the components it is so hard to find 48 volt stuff but now that we have these all-in-one systems that are rated for 48 volts all you have to do is buy this box add a 48 volt battery or you can take 6 12 or 24 volt batteries and build a 48 volt battery and that's what we're gonna do in this video and then add some solar panels and you're done it is a higher voltage and anything over 30 volts can technically shock you but I must stress that a 24 volt system cannot shock you it is under 30 volts so it's a very very safe you can touch everything with bare dry hands and you will not get shocked but with a 48 volt system if you have wet hands and you do something wrong you technically can get shocked but it's not that dangerous because we have an all-in-one system if we were building our own do-it-yourself modular system with our own circuit breakers and fuses and we had to calculate all the wire sizes for putting the components together on a board you need to be very careful and make sure that you don't get shocked and everything's covered but because we have this only one system all you have to do is connect two power wires right here and then connect those bare wires out to your 48 volt battery so the chances of getting shocked with something like this is very very low it's practically impossible it's almost as easy to build as a 12 volt solar power system I mean you're not doing a whole lot different all you have to do is make sure that your battery voltage is 48 volts and you erase your batteries properly and then connect it the same way that you would for a 12 volt system the next thing that we need to talk about is that when you build a 48 volt system the solar panel array should be cranking out like 60 volts for this one I'm going to make an 80 volt open circuit array so that means I'm gonna take for 12 volt solar panels and put them in series I actually have 800 watts on the roof of this RV and we have in series in parallel 480 volts at 800 watts so we're gonna connect that to this system after I connect some batteries but if you were to connect 12 volt panels to a 48 volt battery system solar power charge controller it will not charge you need that voltage much higher than the battery voltage so if you have a really small array it will not work with 48 volts unless you have higher voltage panels and more cells are in series so if you are building a 48 volt system with 12 volt panels you need at least 4 solar panels in series but it's very easy to do a lot of people already have at least 400 watts in their array but there is another problem is that when you want to add to this array if it's a 12 volt system you just add whatever 12 volt panels in parallel or series or you group them however you want in this instance I need to use 400 or 800 or 1200 watts of solar I can't use anything in between because I need to keep that voltage high but yeah it's so simple and I think if you guys see it in action in me installing it you will want to build one as well and also you will save a lot of money if you do a 48 volt system a lot of people think that you need a bunch of 6 or 12 volt batteries but you can buy 24 volt a GM's or lithium iron phosphate batteries and then you just put two of them in series so you could spend a lot less money also the wire savings is huge running at this high of a voltage compared to 12 volts will mean that you will save like a hundred dollars in wiring costs the biggest downside I would see people complaining about is if you need to run 12 volt appliances and you can buy a DC to DC converter online that takes the 48 volts and steps it down to 12 volts we use those for golf carts a lot for running 12 volt appliances of a 48 volt battery so yeah very cheap it only cost like thirty dollars to add one of those and you can run any 12-volt appliance that you wish and I mean look at how small this is so this is a 1800 watt inverter and they can also input two thousand six hundred and forty watts so let's say that this inverter cannot power your load and you're connected to grid it will have an override mode and it will switch all the power over to grid power so that's very useful to have and it also has a battery charger with continuous 1600 watt output so if you don't even want to use solar and you want a battery backup you can use this all by itself and it also has a 45 amp MPPT so you can push a lot of current I mean 48 volt that array is awesome size so this little thing is like a complete super-sized system if you were to build this as a 12-volt it would be big it would be really expensive but because we're only using 48 volts and using 110 for our output it's very easy to work with and it doesn't need to be as big but man this thing has a huge heatsink on the top I like this this is probably my most favorite design system that they make because 48 volts is awesome it's easy to build for beginners and for what you give for the price is out of this world and no matter how many benefits there are of a 48 and 24 volt system I still understand why people use 12 volt systems if you have a very small system there's practically no point if you have like a small 500 watt 12 volt inverter and you just want to power it off of one 100 watt solar panel you're probably better off sticking with 12 volt forever and if your system is really small you are totally fine using 12 volt that's totally fine if you're trying to build a bigger system you should always step up the voltage 24 volt system works great too and it's super safe you can touch all the wires and nothing will happen but 48 volt system if you want to save a lot of money and get the most bang for your buck and have more efficiency you should absolutely stick with the all-in-one 48 volt system so yeah check out my other video where I talk about the pros and cons but this kind of system especially the larger 48 volt system can power a house a cabin or a village some of them have parallel connection and you can have multiple units connected to each other and you can power whatever you want really so yeah let's get started and actually build this thing so the first step is adding some battery cables we have a red for positive and a black for negative and after the wires installed just slip this over and screw it down the right way to do this is just to slip it over the first thing and then push it in there be sure not to over torque these just tighten them down enough now that we have the battery cables we can put the AC input and output cables if you look inside the case you will see AC input on top and an AC output on bottom this is where your appliance is connected at the output and then if you want grid power you connect it to the input and you can use a normal extension cable for these AC input and output the input will be this type or the male adapter and then the female will be for the AC output for these unscrew these little covers and slip it over the wire like that next you want to unscrew all of these terminals and if you look at the case it will say ground live neutral or ground L in so the green is the ground the black is the live and the white is the neutral and after you install them make sure that they are nice and tight once it's secure you can screw this back on and just so you know this is the AC output you cannot screw this up if you switch these you can shock yourself so the AC output is this one and it connects on bottom where it says AC output now we're going to attach the AC input to the top terminals so first slip this over it so first the ground wire then the live wire and then the white neutral wire and after that's done just slip this back on and screw it down and now the wiring is almost complete but we need to add the solar panel wires it's best to connect the battery first and in the solar panels second so let's do that and this is how I'm gonna build a 48 volt battery bank but I need you guys to understand that you do not want to mix and match batteries I have to because I don't have any other 12-volt batteries around I have two of these and two of these so I can technically put them in series for a 48 volt battery bank but these are 90 amp hours and these are 100 amp hours so when these battery cells are in series I will only have and powers available from each one even though this has 100 amp hours and you can see that we have some wires on these batteries because right now we are equalizing them because if you connect these all in series they need to be the same voltage and so at home what you need to do is connect the negative to the negative to the negative to the negative and then connect the positive to the positive and the positive to the positive and you should leave your batteries connected in parallel for around a day so they are the same exact voltage now these batteries are equalized so we're going to connect them in series and what that means is the negative of one battery will connect to the positive of the one next to it the negative of this battery will connect to the positive over here the negative to the positive and then it these terminals we will have 48 volts and this will be our main positive and our main negative and this is what it should look like we have 1 2 3 & 4 batteries in series so this is the main negative and the main positive and it's always a good idea to test the voltage of your new battery and this battery is at 52 volts so that's perfect now we need to connect this battery to our solar power system so first we're gonna do the positive and if these were lead acid batteries I would add a fuse but because this has a BMS with over current protection and all of them I can put the bare wire on the terminal and it will be fine now that the positive is connected you can connect the negative but there will be a spark and it's also a good idea to use insulated tools like some of my wrenches have insulation on them or you can just be careful and use standard wrenches it's really not that hard now that the battery is connected if you go up to our solar power system it is on and this is the main interface if you hold down enter and then you can change the settings and you want to disable this horrible beeping noise also check out my website I tell you guys what settings are ideal for most solar power systems I could talk for a whole hour about every setting in here so please check out my website to learn more about changing these settings and under 18 you can turn the beeping off so check this out and now it's silent isn't that nice that's like the first setting I change on these and right now it's programmed to AGM so we can hook up some solar panels and start charging these batteries no problem and right now it shows output and input for AC if the output say 119 volts so that means that the output cable that we connected earlier can actually power an appliance if you plug it in and if you want to turn the inverter off there's an on and off button and use turn it off because when the inverter is on it uses power there is a standby consumption now we're gonna learn how to connect some solar panels to this system and these two terminals are where you connect the solar panels but you'll notice that these are live wires and we do not want to get shocked so what we're gonna do is disconnect one of the battery terminal leaves so these do not have any power so down here I'm gonna unscrew it and then remove it while I work on the system now that there is no power from the batteries and the AC input is not connected to grid I can safely attach these wires and for me I'm going to add this 10 gauge wire and this will be the solar input and with the xt60 connector I can connect it to any of my solar panels on the property so first add this plastic piece and then put the wires through the hole and then put the negative on the right it will say PV minus and screw it down nice and tight and then the positive wire and now everything is connected so we can actually add the cover plate and you should always add this just for safety because this is high-voltage stuff in here now that everything safely wired we can reconnect the battery now we have power again so now I need to add four twelve volt solar panels in series to this negative and positive connection and luckily I have a whole array to connect to it now it's the moment of truth I connected my solar panel array and it's at 77 volts so let's see if it starts charging I love this no way look at that you guys it's charging oh that's so cool okay so we have the solar panel it's charging the battery and it's powering our AC loads I mean how easy is that this is a complete system we've got 551 watts going into these batteries right now with solar now let's test out the inverter I think the fans are quieter on this one compared to the 24 volt model those are way quieter that's really good okay now we have the fans going when you put a really big load on it now I have another extension cord and we're gonna connect this system to grid and so now I can charge the batteries with grid power and solar power and if the inverter cannot handle a load it will switch it over to grid as well and look at the amount of wires for this type of system if we were building a modular one we'd have wires everywhere but we just have two for the battery two for the solar panels input and output and that's it but now let's talk about the different models because this is the smallest 48 volt model out there but they also have larger models and that's for like houses or big cabins or if you want to power something really big get a 5 kilowatt models and those are a lot bigger and a lot more powerful but we're gonna talk about that and build them in another video but it's the same concept whether it's a 12-volt small system or if you're using a 5 kilowatt 48 volt one it's just 2 wires going to the battery and then 2 wires for the input and output and that's it and what's interesting to think about is that when you buy one of these units you can use whatever batteries you want you can use cheap Walmart LED assets and I highly recommend not doing that but you can and these are very very cheap compared to buying like an inverter MPPT and programming them all so they work together with a cut-off voltage with like automatic transfers which it is so difficult like I have so many other videos teaching people how to do that and you could just buy one of these and slap it on the wall and then add whatever battery you want god I sound like a Salesman right now I really don't try to it stuff with solar though because it's so product centric and I am so dependent on these things working and showing you guys how to do it that I do sound like a Salesman because I'm talking about the price and all the features all the time and I was actually researching last night how to build your own MPPT charge controller but like there's no point to building it yourself anymore the price for just the components and getting everything shipped to you from different distributors there is no point like just buying one of these in getting batteries with a warranty you'll be set for like 10 or 20 years or more and what's crazy to think about is that this channel has been dedicated to like small off-grid systems with lithium ion batteries but now that we're building 48 volt systems in like under an hour and you can use a five kilo watt inverter model you can power a house and if you put a couple in parallel you could power a village so we're talking some serious power here another thing I want to mention is do not check my youtube description for product links because they can change over time there's new models sometimes a warehouse is completely out of stock for three months and so my website is updated every single day like the only one Power Systems I check the inventory every day and change links out when necessary before I even make these videos I update the website first so if you're looking to buy something specific do not use these YouTube videos as a pure reference check out my website because it takes me seconds to update it and thank you so much for watching I hope you guys found this very simple and easy to understand but if you didn't please let me know in the comment section below this is like the first 48 volt beginner system I've seen online so yeah I hope this helps you guys I'll talk to you later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 870,338

Keywords: will prowse, diy solar, rv solar, 48v solar power

Id: ikDLxnf1ePQ

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019