Air Conditioning On Off Grid Solar... Can It Be Done?

Hey [Music] what [Music] good morning good morning guys topic for today's video can you do air conditioning can you have an air conditioning unit on an off-grid solar setup so a common misconception with off-grid solar is that you can't run very energy needy components for example an air conditioner like this or maybe like an electric water heater electric appliances that use a lot of watts I think the reason for that misconception is that the majority of systems that you see on the internet that you see on YouTube are not designed in order to accommodate components like this it's definitely possible it just requires a larger system so you could run like a 3,000 or 4,000 square-foot house that has a lot of energy needs on a solar system the thing is that solar system is probably going to be costing in the neighborhood of like maybe 50 or 60 thousand dollars so typically the larger that your house is the larger solar system that you're going to need just because there's going to be more components on the inside of the house that are going to that are going to require electricity and there's probably more people in the house that are going to be using those components so we live in a 200 square foot tiny house so it's a small home so to speak specifically about air conditioning this is a mini-split ductless unit so we have our compressor unit on the outside and then we have our evaporator and blower unit that is on the inside of the tiny house and so basically between this unit and the unit on the inside the refrigerant lines are run up this chase up beside the tiny house and also the electoral lines are run through that as well the power that motor on the inside so there's three main things that you want to know about the air conditioner before you purchase it for your application number one thing that you want to know is what is the voltage of the air conditioner this unit here runs on 120 volts most AC units especially the large ones for a larger home that's going to be running on 230 or 240 volts the reason why that is important is because you need to know whether or not the inverter that you have for your solar system only produces 120 volts or it is able to produce 240 volts so for a lot of tiny homes like ours you're going want to go with a unit that's only going to be a hundred and twenty volts and the reason for that is because a lot of tiny homes are just plugged into either a 15 amp receptacle or a 30 amp receptacle and unless they have a special hookup to a panel that supplying that outlet with 240 volts it's almost always going to be a hundred and twenty volts and if you have a unit that requires 240 volts you're not going to be it's not going to work when you only have a hundred and twenty volts available the second thing that you want to know is how many watts is is required so if you look at the specs of an air conditioner like on Home Depot or Lowe's it'll usually list the the amperage and also the voltage that it runs at all you have to do in order to figure out how many watts it is is you multiply them together so typical big household air conditioner unit requires about five thousand watts this unit here since it's so small and it's only providing air conditioning for such a small space it only requires a thousand watts so when we factor that into one of our energy loads on our solar system we factor in the thousand watts as obviously one of our major loads for it the third thing that you want to know whether or not the air conditioner is actually going to be big enough to cool down the area that you have usually typically with a unit like this it'll say about how many square feet that it can handle I think this unit said that it can handle the 400 to 500 square feet so for our purpose living in a small two hundred square foot house it's plenty large enough to provide us with all the air conditioning that we need so it's really cool with this since we live in such a small space is that we can turn our air conditioner on and within about five minutes the house is pretty well cooled down so in order to be able to run an air conditioner comfortably pretty well anytime that you want obviously you need enough panels in order to generate enough electricity and also enough battery storage to get you through the night until you get some again in the morning so to put this into perspective for you when the air conditioner is on with the compressor it requires 1,100 watts of power four of these panels will provide about 1,100 watts when they're getting full Sun so each panel here is about that probably generates around 280 290 watts so you get four of them together and then that will give you a the power that you're going to need in order to run an air conditioner so you can see here we have 16 panels on our array we actually only use 15 we had to change the configuration because our input voltage was a little bit too high doing a 4 by 4 series 4 panels in series so we have to do 3 panels in series to get us at about 9,200 volts for input voltage going into our charge controller so one of the next things that you want to look at with your solar system and whether or not you're going to be able to run some power some power needy equipment like an air conditioner electric water heater up there is how many watts does it produce so I would recommend a minimum of an inverter that's going to be like if you're going to be doing an air conditioner like a small air conditioner like we're doing you're going to need an inverter that's probably going to be at least 4,000 watts because you want to have that extra kind of buffer of the extra 3000 watts for everything else that you're doing if you have any electric cooking appliances you want to make sure that you're going to be able to run those when the air conditioner are going plus a myriad of other things that you could be running in your house so I'd definitely say for a smaller off-grid solar system like ours is that you'd want at least 4,000 watts for your inverter so our battery pack definitely looks a little bit different than most off-grid solar setups these batteries came from a fully electric smart car and battery pack was produced by Tesla and it's a lithium-ion battery setup and one thing that I'd really recommend since lithium-ion batteries are becoming much more common and available is to always if you're doing an off-grid solar setup go with lithium-ion batteries do not go with the AGM lead acid batteries and the reason for that is that lithium-ion batteries like this have a lot of advantages over a lead acid battery setup so there's no maintenance with these batteries at all you don't have to top them up with distilled water or anything like that you can mount them pretty well however you want so you can mount it like this you can mount them like this on the wall it doesn't really matter I can mount them on the ceiling it's not going to make a difference with LED acid batteries you can typically only discharge them to about 50% with a lithium-ion battery set up you can discharge them typically between 20 to 30% of their full capacity so you're going to be getting a lot more discharge out of the batteries for this amount of watt-hours what's also really nice about lithium-ion batteries is that they're rated for many more cycles than lead acid batteries I remember reading on techno Maddie's blog they have a great blog about how they set up their lithium-ion battery set up for their RV let acid batteries typically only get about five hundred cycles so they can cycle up and down between being fully charged and down to about fifty percent about five hundred times a lithium ion battery set up like this should be able to cycle about two thousand times so they have about four times the longevity of lead acid batteries so that's something to definitely take into account when you're looking at different components is that lithium-ion batteries they're going to be more expensive up front but the great thing about them is that there is that they last longer and you're going to get much more use out of them and batteries over time do degrade so this battery setup here is 18 kilowatt hours over time it's going to degrade and we might only be getting 17 or 16 kilowatt hours over time until it gets to a point where you need to replace the batteries so even at LED acid batteries you're going to have to replace them these lithium-ion batteries you're going to have to replace them in the future but we have 18 kilowatt hours worth of storage and four usable capacity we're probably at somewhere between 13 to 14 kilowatt hours and to put this into perspective a tesla powerwall the new tesla powerwall 2 is it has 13 and a half kilowatt hours of capacity so the actual amount of kilowatt hours and the power well too is probably somewhere about the same as this so it's probably 17 or 18 kilowatt hours and what's also nice with the power well too is that it comes with a charge controller already built in and the inverter built-in that can supply 5,000 watts of continuous power so that's kind of give you an idea about how much a solar system like this is going to cost so our system costs about fourteen thousand dollars which included all the materials to do the ground mount for the panel's I guess it would technically only be thirteen thousand that's seven hundred because one of our panels were not going to be using so I'll just use that in a future solar setup so about fifteen and a half thousand dollars for everything I installed everything myself so I'm guessing to get a comparable system if you use many of the same components your battery costs might be a little bit higher because these were used batteries I would say you're going to be spending at least between ten to fifteen thousand dollars if you want a suitable system if you want to be running an air conditioner and say like an electric water heater or electrical cooking appliances if you don't have an air conditioner if you don't have those power needy components then you don't need a system nearly this big what I would recommend though is getting a good charge controller and getting a good inverter because you can always add on more panels in the future if you find that you're not maybe you only have a setup with nine panels or maybe six panels and in the future you can always add on more panels with batteries lithium-ion batteries there it's a little bit easier to add on to them with lead acid batteries typically when you buy it a bank of batteries you just want to use that until they're done and you don't really want to add on anymore while you already have your battery bank so I definitely recommend that you get a decent sized battery bank of you're going to want at least 12 kilowatt hours I'd say the more that you can afford the better so it's just going to give you more peace of mind knowing that you can use a lot more electricity and not have to worry about whether or not you're going to basically drain the batteries all the way down to the bottom so just over the past couple of weeks here in southern Arizona we're getting temperatures like 105 almost 110 and we're just right before a monsoon season so typically right before the monsoon season we get like a big heat wave and my my neighbors send me a message and he's like hey man like how are you doing with this heat I'm like I just cranked up our a/c we run it all throughout the day and then I lowered the the thermostat temperature during the night and he's like really you can run air conditioning on a solar setup I'm like oh yeah man you definitely can and he's like I got to come check out your system so I think a lot of people when they start looking at off-grid solar they just kind of have it in their mind that doing doing an air conditioner maybe an electric water heater I mean we have lots of other electrical cooking up Sciences a rice cooker instant pot electric cooktop we run it all on solar it just comes down to how much money are you willing to invest into a system that's sized properly and designed properly for your needs that's what it really comes down to I remember when I was installing the solar system and I posted I think six or seven videos about the installation so if you want to see how I installed it go check out those videos I'll leave them at the on the end card here the playlist to it someone would even sent me an email and just basically said that we would only be able to run our air conditioner for a couple hours on our solar setup with our battery set up and just like that's not even close to being true some people are just a little bit misinformed about how a solar system can work it just depends how much money you're willing to put into it you can run pretty well anything on an off-grid solar setup and what it really comes down to say you had a hot tub that is like an electric hot tub so the water is heated through electricity and I think those typically take 60 amps at 240 volts so you're looking at something around 15,000 watts or something like that that it's going to require so a lot of power you could certainly design a system that's big enough that systems probably going to cost you 70 or 80 thousand dollars so we just reduce the amount of loads that you have on your solar system you can get away with a smaller system even with our system here and say if you had a small home like this you could probably eliminate two of these battery modules so you have four instead of six and you could probably eliminate six of the panels out there so you can run on nine panels and I would still stick with the same size charge controller and inverter and you could probably save yourself a few thousand dollars just doing that so it doesn't necessarily have to be thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars you could probably get it down to ten or twelve thousand dollars but that's also dependent on where you live and how much Sun that you're going to get we live in sunny Arizona I think we have about 300 sunny days of the year so we have tons of Sun and it's really actually quite easy to do solar ed here because there's just so much Sun if you have any comments or questions leave them down below just understand you can do an air-conditioner on an off-grid solar system it's certainly possible awesome thank so much for watching guys talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Handeeman

Views: 2,027,772

Rating: 4.7518601 out of 5

Keywords: life inside box, derek howlett, off grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off grid homes, off grid living, off grid solar power, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, permaculture, permaculture farm, diy, do it yourself, tiny home, tiny house, tiny house on wheels, tiny houses, tiny homes, air conditioning, ac, a/c

Id: 9fiDig_bhUU

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2017