Beginner And Budget Friendly DIY Solar Power System! Anyone can build this!

today we're going to build a very beginner-friendly and budget-friendly solar power system this is the best bang for your buck and anybody can build it and it barely requires any tools to build it we only have a couple screwdrivers a 10 millimeter socket and to mount this you need a impact gun or a screwdriver and you can build this entire system in less than an hour and it's built with high quality parts with good warranties so i think this is the best combination that you can find if you are a beginner so first off the battery that we're using is a server rack lithium iron phosphate this can last 10 to 20 years it has its own over current protection device and this battery has 5 kilowatt hours of power that means you can run a 1 1000 watt load for 5 hours this battery also has its own shunt so you don't need to buy that either and it has its own state of charge indicator right here this battery is extremely cheap it's almost the same cost as building your own battery and i don't think it gets any easier than this we have two battery cables that are two gauge that you could pick up at any automotive store and you just connect the battery to the all-in-one system positive is red and the negative is black now this is an off-grid version grow watt all-in-one system this has an inverter a solar charge controller an ac charger and all sorts of other features and all you need to do is connect it to this battery with these two terminals inside so just feed the battery cables up to these terminals and then tighten them down with a 10 millimeter wrench now these two wires on the right side are the solar panel wires so we have a positive and a negative now the hardest part of designing the system is ensuring that the solar panel array voltage is not too high as to burn this out so you cannot exceed 145 volts dc so i'm going to have a calculator below on how to calculate it yourself with your own solar panels also keep in mind that this is a single series string that means that all of my solar panels are in series if you have panels in parallel you're going to have to add a combiner box and that will increase the complexity of your system so a combiner box will be over here and each parallel string will have its own circuit breaker or fuse but if you want the most simple system possible have one series string and then you only have two wires coming in and there's less potential for problems in the future and on the roof of this trailer we have 800 watts and it only produces 85 volts so i can safely connect it right here if this was 160 volts i would either have to remove a panel or rewire it so i have a different voltage and all you need is a small screwdriver to connect the positive and the negative solar panel wire when you're building this you want to connect the inverter to the battery first and then connect the solar panel second and then last we're going to attach the loads at the ac output now you have two terminal blocks the one on top is the ac input if you plan to use the ac charger if you want to use solar only you can ignore this then the terminal block on bottom is for the loads or the ac output and this terminal block has three terminals on the far left we have a ground or green conductor in the middle we have the live the line or the hot and that's black and then on the far right we have a neutral or the white conductor this is probably the hardest part of this whole system because you're going to have to strip this extension cord and then use a small screwdriver to connect it to those terminals this is a 12 gauge heavy duty extension cord it runs over here to my air conditioner and it's powering it right now now get this this little all-in-one system look how small this thing is it can output 3000 watts but keep in mind that this extension cord can only handle 2000 watts so if you want to use the entire output capacity of this inverter you're gonna have to either wire up your own outlets on the side or a small sub panel but if you're a beginner and you're not using over 2000 watts just connect an extension cord and you'll be good to go also this system can handle 1900 watts of solar panel power which is pretty good considering its price if you think about the cost of a 3 000 watt inverter in a solar charge controller that can handle that much power you'd be spending a lot more money now let's talk about the total cost of this system up here this all-in-one system costs 770 dollars and the battery is 1 500 and then you need some 20 battery cables that you can pick up at an automotive store these are two gauge cables or you can make your own if you know how to do it then you need to add the cost of the solar panels which can vary depending on the size of your array i know that some people are going to only add 400 watts and some people are going to add 1600 watts so it really depends on your use case but solar panels are cheap so i would add another 500 or so and you would be able to fill this thing up pretty nicely so the total cost is about two thousand eight hundred dollars with everything you see here and you could easily power an air conditioner a refrigerator pretty much any load in a house that you'd have to use for a backup situation you could run it off of this and you can build it in less than an hour previously if you used one battery of any kind you had to add your own circuit breaker but this one comes with it and it's appropriate for this chemistry of battery its internal resistance and its profile and the voltage that's being used next let's talk about compatibility so you can buy these all-in-one systems and batteries in 24 or 48 volts this one is 24 volts because that's what i had laying around but typically i prefer the 48 volt models if you're using this in a van or an rv the 24 volt model is fine especially if you have a step up converter and you're charging it from your alternator but if you're using it as a backup for a home then you should use 48 volts because these two cables will be smaller and the efficiency will be higher but typically these are about 91 to 92 percent efficient but the standby consumption is high so you should ensure that your solar panel array is larger than 600 watts if you plan to run this 24 hours a day also if you want there's a communication board on these grow watts and it can communicate with this battery so you can see the state of charge of your battery on this screen or you can just look down here and these lights will tell you i don't think it's worth it to do the communication and modifying the cycling bandwidth because we're using it for solar on the cycle life count of this battery it should last 10 to 20 years no matter what i'm pretty sure that calendar aging will kill these before we do with cycling with solar now the hardest part of this system is changing these settings so i'm going to have a link to my website where you can see some example settings it's pretty easy though um you can use the default agm settings and it will work fine with this lithium iron phosphate battery if you do want to change the charge profile go under option number five and put it on user then under option number 19 you can set the absorption to whatever you wish and then if you go down you can change the float voltage and then press down again and under option 21 you can do the cutoff voltage and this is the low voltage disconnect voltage so this is when the inverter turns off so that the battery is not put into safety mode and for a 24 volt battery i keep it at 24 volts then for a 48 volt battery i set this to 48 volts because lithium iron phosphate is slightly higher than a lead acid battery for the cutoff voltage and that's pretty much it you can just press escape and it should start charging the moment you connect solar there's nothing else you really need to set up here and that's pretty much it i hope you guys like the video and i don't think it gets easier than this so please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below and check out the forum we have a beginner's corner that can help you anyways i will talk to you soon and thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 1,975,476

Keywords: off grid solar, will prowse, diy solar, rv solar, Cheap solar, solar power for beginners, beginner solar power system, how to build a solar power system, rv solar system diy

Id: adFGmOlDM-Y

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021