BEGINNER FRIENDLY Step-by-Step: DIY SOLAR GENERATOR for Emergency Power, RV, Shed... Ampere Time

so you're thinking about building a small solar system maybe for a shed or a camper or an rv or maybe just for emergencies what a coincidence so am i let's go figure it out together [Music] all right so let's say that you really don't need the portability of something like one of these power stations here these portable power stations maybe you want something more permanent mounted either in an rv or a van or maybe a shed let's say you want to build your own solar generator system that can grow with you well you're going to need a few basic components to start and that's what we're going to do so first of all you're going to need a way to store your power so you're going to have to start with the battery so the system we're going to build together here is a i would call it a small system that's expandable i'm going to use a 100 amp hour battery and some of these components were given to me like ampere time did provide this battery for me this lithium iron phosphate battery and then boujarvi provided the charge controller because you're going to need a way to get the power from the solar panels into the battery so that's where the charge controller comes into play so we don't just want to store power right we want to be able to use it too so we need an ac inverter so i bought this particular inverter with my own money off amazon because i wanted to do this video and i didn't have all the pieces that i needed so i needed more than just a battery and a charge controller now this is a 2000 watt pure sine wave uh inverter so it handles 2000 watts continuous and up to 4000 watts peak now that's probably overkill for what we're going to be using here it's probably at least double what i really need but again i wanted to build a system that i can easily expand so i'm going to have the components in place that all i need to do if i want to expand this is add another battery and and then add another solar panel or two and then i've instantly got a significantly larger capacity system this is going to be a great sort of entry level size a starter size if you will for a solar generator something that would be appropriate for a little small workshop shed if you want to be able to power lights and fans and that kind of thing this would be absolutely more than adequate for something like this you could actually power some power tools for a reasonable period of time with this psy system as well but so what else do we need now all these other items going to show you these are all things that i bought with my own money so again the only things that i've actually been sponsored with for this video are the charge controller and the battery so uh i did buy some this is a eight gauge battery cable from amazon this will allow me to go from the charge controller uh to the battery i do want to add the capability to use dc power directly instead of not just ac power so i picked this up off of amazon this is kind of cool it's got an on off switch it's got a little volt meter so i can see how much volts this thing is currently drawing and then it's got a couple of uh low power uh type c usb ports and then a 12 volt socket here so that i can power a 12 volt refrigerator off that if i want to so that's going to be cool i've not actually done one of these before but this is going to be fun this is just a box of miscellaneous wire tie downs so once we get this all set up we're going to want to clean up the install so since i'm going to be doing some cutting and crimping of cables i bought myself a decent quality crimper that's obviously optional depending on whether or not you need to crimp your cables i want to keep my cable runs nice and short for maximum efficiency so i figured i might as well go ahead and get a crimper while i'm at it got a wire stripper now this is designed for heavier gauge wire so that'll be handy a wire cutter so this is just some wire snips i always look at these kinds of videos as an opportunity for me to buy new tools so i got miscellaneous copper connectors and uh and shrink tubes so heat shrink too so these are going to be ways when i'm making cable connections that i can terminate properly with a proper sized uh connector terminal connector and then make sure that it's properly covered in and heat-shrinked so it doesn't contact something unnecessarily or unexpectedly now to protect your devices and and reduce the risk of something like fire uh and for unexpected circumstances uh you're gonna want a fuse or circuit breaker now something like this this is a 200 amp fuse and you'd normally position this between the positive terminal on the battery and the positive terminal on the inverter now another way to do to go about that and so i'm probably not actually going to use that fuse instead i've got a 200 amp uh waterproof uh breaker so this is going to enable me to basically very easily disable power to the battery from the inverter and vice versa if i want to do some work so i don't have to disconnect cables i can just simply trip the breaker and disconnect power and then between the battery and the charge controller i've got a 50 amp breaker so other than some miscellaneous wires and connectors that's about it and obviously a little piece of plywood that i can mount all this on so now that i've got all this laid out you kind of got an idea of what the various pieces and parts are and by the way i'll put links to these pieces in the in the description of the video if you're interested in seeing what they are and how much they cost but let's go to a workspace where i can spread out and actually start laying out the parts on the board and figure out where i'm going to put everything so let's go do that and we'll just kind of figure out how all this works together all right i've got my 2 by 2 plywood laid out here this is just a basically half inch thick plywood and i need to figure out how i want to arrange my inverter and my charge controller i've got a couple of these breakers here this breaker obviously is going to sit between the charge controller and the inverter and then this breaker down here is going to sit between the inverter and the battery and then i also need to figure out where i'm going to put my 12 volt accessory ports here so i think i'm going to just put those right down here and i'm going to just basically take these things out and then use this little face plate as a guide to draw the holes where i can drill right into the plywood now it looks like i've got a lot of extra space here on the left so i think i'm just going to draw a quick line here and then i'm going to uh rip down this board so that i don't have all this extra space on the side that i don't really need two hours later all right so i've got my uh my mounting plywood here ripped down the side to remove the excess surface area and i've got my main modules here my solar charge controller mounted and my inverter mounted and then i've got my 50 amp fuse mounted here my 200 amp fuse mounted here by the way i didn't mention this uh in the other earlier part of the video but i highly recommend getting a decent multimeter and being able to use that to test your connections test the output from your solar panels you can test the current voltage on your batteries just really great for troubleshooting and great for knowing exactly what's going on and also making sure that the data you're getting here matches the data that you're getting directly off the battery or from your test leads from your multimeter so how they recommend that now i wanted to point something out with this charge controller here from bourgeois rv this is about 150 and it is an mppt charge controller also known as a let's see this is a maximum powerpoint tracking i think is what mppt stands for this is a very cheap inexpensive alternative and i use the term cheap and inexpensive because it is inexpensive for sure because it only costs about twenty dollars but this is a case of of uh you get what you pay for it is very cheap in addition to being inexpensive so this is a rated at 20 amps whereas this one is rated at 40 amps so obviously there's a big difference there this is also a pwm type charge controller which isn't bad just based on the surface you know just on the fact that it's a pwm that's pulse width modulation but this is not going to be as efficient at drawing power out of your solar panel and and charging your battery as the mpp type charge controllers will be the other thing that really makes me leery about using something like this when you've got a lithium-ion battery in particular something that's fairly expensive i mean these things run several hundred dollars do you really want to take a chance on cooking that battery if something goes wrong with a 15 or 20 dollar charge controller i personally don't think that's a fair trade-off so i would rather not use one of these even though it's a very low price of entry i would much rather use something like this which is in the 150 range but very very well made so that's just my little rant on cheap charge controllers so now that i got everything mounted we need to uh connect the wires that are going to connect to our solar panels as i mentioned this is the system is designed to be expandable this one little pigtail that i've got here to an anderson connector i can plug into the pv side which is going to be these two terminals right here and this i'm just going to kind of tie down here and then this will go to a an adapter with mc4 connectors on it that i can use to connect to my 200 watt boost rv rigid solar panel so that'll be fine for a single solar panel but with the gauge of this wire if i wanted to hook up say two 200 watt solar panels i would want a heavier gauge wire than this rather than because this this wire is only really spec for a maximum of about 10 amps and that should be fine for for most circumstances with a single 200 watt solar panel but you definitely do want to make sure that your wires are properly gauged to the current that they're going to be handling so that said let me put that aside now really i've just got to make my wire termination so this is the fuses are going to be always on the positive or the red wire so i'm going to be taking this is the larger one this is going to go the bottom of this fuse and this is going to go directly to the battery but then i need to also take the positive here to the positive on the inverter then the positive on the inverter to the positive on this 50 amp fuse and then over here the positive up to the charge controller so these will all be red wires and then the black or common wire the smaller one i'm going to need to uh to cut this to fit from here over to the common on the inverter and then i've got the main obviously the main battery cable that'll come down uh from the from the common on the or the negative on the inverter and go straight to the battery so the only other thing uh is these little dc connections so um i did drill the holes as you can see so that actually worked out really really cool um the only thing is is that it didn't occur to me the width of this half inch drywall or a half inch plywood is going to be a problem i'm not going to be able to use the little retaining ring on the bottom side of the drywall to cinch this particular little volt meter down there's not going to be enough thread sticking out to do that so i think the solution there for me instead of just trying to drill a bigger hole which will be a little bit of a challenge without a drill press is i'm just going to actually put some super glue around this little flange and then just super glue this into place uh once i once i get it where i want it i think that's going to be the easiest solution there everything around it's going to be cinched down and then the face plate itself is going to be screwed into the the panel so that's going to look nice when i get it all set up oh before i go ahead and get my cable terminations all set up i wanted to go ahead and directly wire the battery to the inverter without the fuses just so i can test the inverter since i this is a brand new inverter and i've not tested it before go and get this plastic off of there a little shiny and new kind of wanted to see what the display looks like so let's turn this thing on and hopefully we don't see any sparks cool so there's actually a color display we've got 13 volts dc in we're outputting a 111 volts out of this so i can hook appliances up to this right now and actually run them so that's pretty neat all right i got a floor fan here let me just go ahead and plug this in see if it fires up yep assuming you can hear that it's actually right over there all right so we know the inverter works i'm gonna go ahead and take these wires back off and then go ahead and do the wire terminations as i had originally planned [Music] all right so i got all my wire terminations done you can see i've got the uh everything nice and tight down here this is a little pigtail to my anderson connector that goes to my solar panels i've got my breakers currently tripped here so i'm not getting any power i've gone ahead and hooked up my positive negative leads to the battery and i'm just going to test everything you'll notice some discoloration down here on the voltmeter on the little dc panel i i ended up having to to super glue this and so i went and you know and bought some of this loctite super glue gel it's supposed to dry clear but it didn't it it dried kind of white chalky hazy i got some of it off i probably used too much maybe that was my problem taking a quick look at the back of the panel here these are the dc ports that i had mounted and these came as all one block by the way and they're you know attached to one single face plate and each one is is held by these retaining rings and you can see where the the meter this is the little voltmeter module didn't have enough thread sticking through the plywood so that's the one i super glued in uh with maybe less than ideal results but the other three were just fine but as you can see the wiring is very easy so you're just basically taking all of the positive terminals and connecting them in in parallel and then all of the negative terminals and connecting them in parallel so that's how all of that connects it's very straightforward i'm sure you can figure that out just need a decent pair of wire strippers and uh you know an inexpensive crimper terminal crimper to set that up and it all works fine i've got the the positive negative leads coming from the dc module up through this little hole i drilled here and the black common is going to the with the other commons on the inverter and then the red is going to the uh this side of the positive on the 50 amp circuit all i really need to do is to energize this breaker here and let's just see if we get some power okay that's cool we get 13.1 volts let's make sure we've got inverter power okay inverter is showing 13.0 volts so let's go ahead and energize the charge controller and it is coming on that's cool i'm reading 13.2 volts so we got 13.2 13.1 and 13.0 so this is where it's kind of interesting if we were to take our multimeter here just get a reality check on that 13.08 volts so we are just a hair below 13.1 this obviously has a precision of one-tenth so it's just rounding up so this is actually fairly precise this is also one-tenth it happens to be rounding down so if you look at between the inverter and the charge controller 13.2 13.0 i'm actually kind of right in the middle of these two values this is slightly high this is slightly low and this one is actually pretty much right on within two hundredths um right on the money so anyway i think that's all the damage we can do tonight so uh since it's dark out we have to wait till tomorrow and hope we get some decent sun and i can hook up some solar panels and uh get this thing charging all right got some nice morning sun and i am putting power into the solar generator here so i am charging my ampertime 100 amp hour battery so let's launch the charge pro this is charge pro 2.0 this is the app that you can use to bluetooth monitor the boost rv charge controller and i've already got my bluetooth connection established here so we are getting 125 124 watts currently into the um into the battery right now and 9.4 amps and my battery voltage is 13.5 ampere time gives you a really nice little matrix that shows you the state of charge based on the battery voltage and you can see there at the top of the list at 13.5 i am roughly at 100 or approximately 100 so these numbers are all approximations they're not exact numbers let's do some testing here let's actually put an ac load on the inverter and see if we can find out how you know how it reacts when we start actually drawing some significant wattage out of this thing all right so let's go ahead and turn on the hair dryer here i'm gonna put it on warm heat and low so we're drawing nine percent load go ahead and try pulling a high fan with medium heat about 47 hot a little over 50 67 low this should be pulling about 1400 watts right now and this inverter is capable of 2 000 watts continue that's cool all right time to test the thing that i'm not super confident about i have got here my one on my 12 volt refrigerators and uh it's currently off as you can see so i'm not a hundred percent sure that the fuses that are attached on these uh that came with the wiring with these little sensors and this these guys right here i don't know what size fuses those are i couldn't figure that out from the product spec and i didn't take the little assembly apart to look so we're going to find out if i blow a fuse so if suddenly this goes out uh we'll know because there is one main uh positive wire here with the fuse feeding the power connector here so if this fuse blows everything else is dead so what we're going to do is turn that off and plug this in to this socket and we're going to find out if i can power the refrigerator or not so let's turn this on all right and all right actually we're good you can see that's the internal temperature now so the compressor is actually running it's a very quiet unit this is the new air 48 quart so cool that works i am powering the fridge off of this ac or off of this little dc module here i wasn't sure if this fridge was gonna pull too much power so clearly it does not so that's that's excellent really happy with this setup as i mentioned originally i kind of designed this so that i could expand this at some point if i wanted to i already have 2001 continuous 4 000 watt uh inverter and so it'd be very easy for me to add just a second battery so if you're curious what this 100 amp hour equates to in terms of watt hours like a lot of portable power stations are rated at just multiply 12 times 100 amp hours and you get watt hours so 1200 watt hours is the rated capacity for this battery so i could add another 100 amp hour battery and i would get 20 400 watt hours of capacity with the second battery i wouldn't need to change the sign of the the inverter i really wouldn't need to change anything because if i put the batteries in parallel i'm simply going to maintain uh 12 volts and then my charge controller absolutely can handle another 200 watts of input easily since this is a 40 amp charge controller the 40 amp actually refers to the output capacity so it can max out at 40 amps in terms of sending current to the battery but easily you can handle a couple of 200 watt panels with this no problem at all in fact you can handle a fair amount more than that so hopefully you got the sense that this is actually a very doable project and something you can definitely handle if you just take your time and do a little bit of research to make sure that you've got your wires gauged properly so that whatever system you end up setting up is safe to operate i will be going into some more information on another video on the ampere time uh 100 amp hour battery and also another video that will be more specific to the uh charge controller from boost rv that 40 amp charge controller right there i'm going to get into the uh the app and kind of the configuration options and talk a little bit more about what you can do with that charge controller because it's very cool then of course i've got the ac inverter there's really not any configuration options on the ac inverter other than the you know the remote control which i think i showed you when i was doing some of the other little bits and pieces but we didn't really need the remote control in this setup but it's really great if you're actually setting up a shed system or an rv system something like that then this is going to be kind of tucked away out of reach and it'll be nice to have that remote control which it does come with a pretty long cable for that so it's pretty handy and as i mentioned i'll put links to all this stuff in the description below if you want to go check out and see how much this stuff costs and then you know maybe you can tweak the system to better suit whatever needs that you have so anyway thanks for joining me if you found any of this useful i would really appreciate if you give me a thumbs up on the video super does help and consider subscribing if you're not a subscriber that's all i got for you i hope to see you in the next one until then have fun out there

Channel: ReeWray Outdoors

Views: 532,647

Keywords: diy solar, diy, diy solar generator, diy projects, beginner and budget friendly diy solar power system, beginner budget friendly solar off grid tutorial, bougerv solar panel, 40a mppt solar charge controller, 40a solar charge controller, mppt vs pwm solar charge controller, mppt vs pwm difference, mppt vs pwm solar, mppt vs pwm, ampere time 100ah, ampere time lithium battery, ampere time lifepo4 battery, ampere time lifepo4 review, ampere time 12v 100ah lifepo4 battery

Id: 9BgM0PWPjZU

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022