Beginners Solar project ( very Simple )

[Music] today we're going over a basic solar system setup for beginners because I'm a beginner this type of setup would be great for a small building or RV or things like that I actually have a storage building where I store my stuff and I'd like to have lights in it but by the time I buy wire to run out there I rent me a Ditch Witch to dig the hole with then I had to buy a panel box to put in the building for my electricity wiring my lights wiring receptacles all that stuff I'm already going to have a chunk of change in it so I thought why don't we set it up Sol that way when we're done we never had to pay the power company again it's like free Power free Power that's awesome you know that's awesome so let's quit wasting time and let's get into this first I guess we need to start with the solar pounds okay I bought three these Renegy Mountain brackets and they're made to hold solar panels this right here is what comes in the Box I think I paid 25 or $26 a piece for these like I said I got three of them because I got three solar panels these are mountain brackets that allow you to change the angle of the solar panel so you can point it towards the sun this right here is what you get in the Box this right here is what it looks like after you're ready to Mount Your solar panel on it they also come with four bolts for bolting on your solar panel panels and they come with these little bolts with these uh rubber washers for bolting it to your roof if that's how you're going to mount it and we are mounting it to a roof but not a house roof you can take this bolt loose and this bolt loose you basically can make this thing lay down or stand up more this is the solar panel that we're mounting on those mounts I got the rich solar solar panels reason I picked them there's a lot of YouTube reviews on these solar pounds and they seem like they do really good Plus they're cheap just saying I think these are like $79 a piece that's actually cheaper than Harbor Freight solar panels I got three of these this is a single solar panel we got us a two pack right here which is the same exact thing but it's got two solar panels in this pack that's the only difference these come package actually really nice they got cardboard they got foam all the way around because these things do have glass in them pretty sure anyway looks good let's get her installed as you can see the sun's right over there and the sun kind of comes right over this way so it's off to the side a little bit well this is my chicken coop and behind the chicken coop I've got a storage building I just got it built right onto the back of the storage building I'm going to mount my SAR pounds on the roof of the chicken coop and we're going to kind of make them lean a little bit pointing towards the Sun that comes right over this way that's rooster she's a hen when she was little we thought she was a rooster she turned out to be the best chicken I got this is where they L their eggs at sorry about that drone stick oops as you can see the chicken Cooks right on the back of the storage building plus I just had a new roof put on my little building up there and the chicken's roof is a galvanized metal roof and if I screw this roof up it'll be a lot easier to fix so basically on the back of the solar panel I want to mount it right here and right here and from this hole to that hole is 19 in well it's pretty much 19 in so from the outside we're going to install a new board in here and make it to where it's like here and here well wherever 19 in is we're going to install a new board so I think I'm going to take my solar panels and I'm going to Bol them to the brackets first get them good and secure and I can lift them up onto the roof and Bol them down and I think doing it this way will keep everything nice and straight because I'm doing by myself and that ain't easy so I had my brackets installed I had them installed this way though and they need to be installed that way because of the way I'm mounting them on my building you know what I'm saying this is my finished product as you can see right here I cut these off with a little saw all I have because I really didn't need that part hanging over see when I flip this thing over this part's going to be up in the air and I wanted it to look cleaner now the bottom piece I went ahead and left it long cuz this this piece is going to be boled to the roof and they're not going to be up against each other because if I put these things too close what's going to happen is if they're Lean Like This the front one's going to shade the back one because the sun's over there all I'm saying is I don't think this is going to matter also when I put them on the roof I can put either side up and either side down I've been thinking about it and I think I'm going to put my wires to the bottom side of the roof CU that way it'll be easier to hook these things up speaking of hooking these things up I'm going to be running my solar panels in series see you got a positive and a negative so I take my positive wire and I run it over to the negative on the next solar panel then I take that positive wire off that solar panel and run it to the negative of the next panel it's kind of like hooking batteries up in series but anyway when you're done you'll have a positive on one end and you'll have a negative left over on the other end and you run that positive and negative to your charge controller which will be talking about in a little bit right now I got to finish getting these solar panels ready so we can put them on the roof I tell you what if you mount these on the roof that you can get on top of it would be a lot simpler having to stretch way over there and work it ain't easy that's all I'm saying so next I got to put two more of these on these things turned out Rock Solid I really do like them so the next thing we're going to do is like I said we're going to hook these up in series see how we got a negative and a positive positive is a male connector the negative is a female connector after you get your solar panels running series these are the wires I'll hook to the ends and run inside my building to my charge controller see this says 100% copper that's what you want now I just got to hook these up to my solar panels and run them inside the building okay so I went to Lowe's Lowe's Home Improvement that is and I grab some white pine actually already had this board but I grabbed me another one because I need to make a box this is just 1X 10 I'm going to build all my solar unit in it but I also need it deep enough to set my battery in and I had a scrap piece of plywood that I've had for a while so I'm going to use it for the back so I got to get these cut up and put together we're on the mission people we are on a [Applause] mission [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so we got our box made it's actually pretty dang big it's a little bigger and what I actually need but today I'm only using one battery and I may add some more batteries later so I just made it big enough to where if I wanted to add a couple more batteries I'd have the room in here and speaking of batteries I'm using a 12.8 Vol 100 amp 1280 wat lithium iron phosphate battery yes it's lithium that means it don't weigh nothing it's a cheap battery and it gets really good reviews now something that I really like about this battery is this screen right here you turn this screen on and it actually tells you how much battery life you have left and it'll tell you the current but I don't have it hooked to anything right now so it says says zero that is pretty cool plus this thing's Bluetooth capable which means you can hook it to your phone but I really don't care about that and I'm going to be transparent somebody sent me this battery but I was going to do this video anyway so they offered to send me a battery and I was like okay send me a battery but the good thing about them sending me this battery is if you want to do a project anything like this and you want a battery they have this battery marked down right now to 300 $129 I think and if you use my code this right here is my code but you take that code and you put it in the little coupon box at check out and you'll save 20 more bucks making this battery $39 that's uh really not bad actually plus they have a battery just like the one I'm using it's the same exact size except for it's not Bluetooth capable which I really don't need and that battery is only $249 if you use my discount code you get that battery for like $229 $229 for a lithium battery that's crazy anyway according to Google 100 aamp battery should take about 4 hours for our three solar panels to charge in optimal conditions of course but this battery is 12280 wat IRS now what that means now I'm mainly doing this solar to put lights in my storage building and I'm putting these 4T honey well lights that I got from Sam's Club yes Sam's Club but these are LED lights and they're really bright and I'm going to put three of these lights in the building actually the shop I'm standing in right now has the exact same lights in it so you know that they're pretty bright I mean you don't have no problem seeing in here do you next thing we need to do is build our solar system not that kind of solar system we need to build our solar system you know what I'm saying you know what I'm saying okay so these lights we have three of them right they use 50 wats a piece times three is 150 watts now if we divide 150 wat into 280 W hours so 1280 divided by 150 basically means that this battery should be able to run those three 3 wats for about 8 and 1/2 hours not including the power that the inverter uses but the inverter that I'm using is 92% efficient so you're only losing like 8% so we should get at least 8 hours of run time off of this battery for those lights and if it only takes 4 hours to charge it back up that's plenty because I don't really go in my storage building all that much I'm just saying this is our charge controller for our solar system it's a victron energy which is actually one of the better charge controllers on the market and you can tell when you pick this thing up because it feels like it weighs about 7 lb it's a mppp which is very good because we're talking in simple terms remember I'm not an expert I just been learning about solar for the last year because it's very interesting to me you see this first number 150 that means this thing can take a maximum of1 15 volts there's a sticker on the back of every solar panel that tells you everything about it on the back of our solar panel it says that they put out 18.6 volts 18.6 volts is not a lot we can take 150 volts but remember when I said that I was wearing the solar panels in series when you wear solar panels in series the voltage Stacks if you wear solar panels in parallel the amperage Stacks so I'd rather the voltage stack than the amperage because amperage is what makes wires hot and makes things dangerous that's a redneck definition of electricity well since our solar panels have 18.6 volts we can round that number up to 20 because on very cold days your solar panels can put out more voltage and more amps than even the max says on the back so we're going to round it up to 20 and with three solar panels wired in series that's 60 and we're nowhere near 150 so so we're safe there also on the back of our solar panels it says that they put out 5.38 amps that's each solar panel but since we wired them in series it's going to stay 5.38 amps even if we wired them in parallel we still wouldn't get nowhere near this number and you probably just asked yourself why do you buy such a big charge controller well the thing is like I said earlier I may add more batteries later if I add more batteries later I might want to add a couple more solar panels and getting a bigger charge controller just makes it to where I don't have to replace this thing later you know what I'm saying and remember the wire that I ran from the solar panels into the storage building well this wire is 10 gauge if I wired my panels in parallel I'd probably need a heavier gauge wire than this but wiring them in series I don't need a fuse so wiring them in series seems like the way to go to me okay so we got our battery for our solar system and it's actually a really pretty battery battery I don't know if that matters though and we got our solar charge controller which takes the power of the sun through our solar panels and it actually turns it into what it needs to turn it into now the Su is hot and the voltage is on the and it charges our battery with it now we need something to take the electricity out of this battery and turn it into 110 volts so that we can run our lights and our storage building this is the inverter it's its job to do that it takes 12 volts and turns it into 11 volts so we can run our lights this inverter here I don't know if you watched my last solar video it was actually really cool it was where I made a portable power station kind of the same way I'm doing this and it's sitting right over here I made it to where you could use a portable solar panel like this one that way when you're out fishing or if you power goes off or something you got yourself a backup system but this inverter is a 2000 watt pure swave inverter and yes I know that you pronounce that sign but I like saying sin people about died in the comment section of the last video C I got that sin but for the purpose of this video this is a pure sin converter which basically means it has a smooth Pure Line and it won't harm any of your delicate Electronics like your laptop video games you know what I'm saying but the old modified converters their wave ain't quite that pure if you know what I'm saying I actually got this inverter from Harbor Freight they have a new Jupiter line out and I thought well if this thing breaks at least I can take it back so get the extended warranty but we're going to try this thing out anyway right here on the back it says connect input polarity properly using a two gauge cable up to 6t or voids warranty so basically what I saying we can go up to 6t two gauge and we can use it with a 2,000 W inverter ain't no wires on this thing going to be anywhere near 6t so we should be fine now the reason you can't go over 6ot after 6t you have to go up to a bigger wire because the length of a wire actually creates resistance so your wires are going to be getting too hot after you go over 6ot but I kind of tend to like the overkill stuff what would your mama say go big go go home I don't want my wires getting hot I don't want my building burning down I'm ducking and everything D in the house I'm I got scared I dropped my hot pocket you know what I'm saying okay so I went ahead and hooked this battery up to my inverter so I can show you something I mean it's just a simple hookup I ain't got my wires trimmed down to sides yet or nothing so it's just a battery hooked to an inverter this right here is one of my 5,000 Lumen lights and like I said I got these at Sam's Club for like 20 bucks a piece but the reason I hook the battery to the inverter then plug my light into my inverter is because I wanted to show you this right here this is one of the reasons I went with the Harbor Freight inverter because this is actually cool it's got a cable looks kind of like an ethernet cable but it's really more like a phone cable now you can hook this up in your car and you hook that red wire up if you use it in a vehicle but if you're using this in your house you disable the ignition lock out which already done you hook the other side into the inverter and they give you plenty of this wire so you can run this thing anywhere you want and what this switch does is it cuts the inverter on and off so basically my battery ain't going to be part of the equation my battery is going to be hooked to my charge controller and the solar panels are going to be charging it I'm going to have this mounted over near the door and all I got to do is hit this button and it cuts the inverter on which in turn cuts my lights on I'll give you an example you see what I mean when I hit this switch right here it just Powers up the inverter that's pretty dang cool right there when you get ready to leave the building you just hit the button again and lights go out that right there is freaking awesome so now I just got to unhook all this crap and put it in the building this is the box that it's all going into so I need to drill a hole over here at the top of the box for my cable to run through for my solar panel and I'm going to drw a hole on this side of the box so I can run a drop cord through it and run the drop cord to my [Applause] [Music] lights this is going to be a simple setup and I just wanted it big enough to where I could run a drop cord cable and that seems to be just about perfect next we're going to take this and mount it in the building so this is my storage building I got crap everywhere look at this mess I can't even get in here to straighten it out because it's dark I put this old fluorescent light up here then I plugged it in and run it to a drop cord so I'd have a little lighting here but we really want to get this straightened out we need some lights this here is all of my wife's Christmas decorations and Halloween and other stuff anyway right here on this wall I think this is where I'm going to mount my box Iz right right up here it's where the cables are coming in from the solar panels we can just run them over and into our box first I got to move all this crap out of my way dang that's a big box but like I said I might want span on this project later now we just got to start putting our components in here I think I'm going to put mine like this that way the terminals will be close to my power inverter because I'm Moun in inverter right up here something else that's cool about this battery is you can pull this strap and you basically can just take this thing off if you're doing a mount like this you really don't need that strap so we're going to lose the strap that looks better already now we just need to wire this battery to our inverter all right so now we got all our components in and yes it's really this simple all you need is a charge controller for your solar panels you need a battery to charge up just saying then you need your inverter to turn that 12vt into 110 volts and it's just that simple now I done pulled my wires through from my solar panel this side right here says positive and negative battery your positive and your negative battery cable will come out of here it will run down to the battery then this side right here says PV and it means photo something I'm sure somebody in the comments are going to tell me what it means but this is where you plug up your solar panels so the next thing we need to do is make our cables that goes from this positive down to this positive and from this negative up to this negative do not hook up this PV side until the battery side is already hooked up you can hook up one wire if you want but do not hook up both of those wires because you'll burn up your charge controller if it's not going to the battery if it's not going to the battery it don't have nowhere to go so it'll burn up your control controller next thing we're going to do is run our wires from the positive and negative battery and we're going to make our wires that run from the battery to our inverter now after I cut my wire the size that I needed to fit you going to have to crimp it on there in the last video I took it and got somebody to do it how much owe you about three $3 300 two two for this video I bought my own power crimpers look at that this right here is also a crimp ER and this is like the cheapest one that you can buy put your battery cable in it and you hit it with a hammer you hit the top with a hammer and it locks it in there this one was done with this Hammer crimper and I got to be honest I kind of like this one better CU they both got a good hold to them this is actually kind of cool but no matter which one you use just make sure that you use a good heat shrink tube it's got the glue on the inside it'll seal everything off for you kind of like this right here you know what I'm saying so I finished up the wiring on this thing you just run your positive battery cable this one right here over to your positive terminal on this cable I used a six gauge wire if you're setting it up like I am you run a two gauge wire off of that terminal up to your inverter run your other cable from your negative battery terminal down to your negative terminal it's also a six gauge cable and of course I got a two gauge negative coming off of it going up into the inverter on the inverter I just got a drop cool cord that's a splitter plugged in so basically all I use for the lights I got two 10t drop cords two of them and I run one from the far slide then I ran it into this Junction right here and hooked my second light to it after I ran over to the box I had a splitter like this where I hooked the two farest lights and the closest SL into it then I just hook that wire into my inverter I also used these big tie straps I mean they're big tie straps and I use them on some of the 2x4 also use these little clamps to hold things up where it needed to be held up I got to say this thing turned out pretty dang nice and it wasn't even hard and I ain't never got to pay the power company again that right there is pretty dang cool there's one thing left to do and that's to install our switch to make it all [Music] run okay so we got our switch mounted ain't nothing fancy I just cut me a board now there's 2x4s in there so I'm going to screw it on that I'm going to take my cable plug it into my inverter and we should be able to cut our lights on with the switch and now when you hit the switch lights go off hit the switch again lights come back on that right there is pretty dang cool I really like how simple this build was and I really like the way it turned out and I really like that it come with the switch which that's pretty dang cool the coolest thing about this system if I want to make it much much bigger I can add batteries for $229 think about that lithium batteries have gotten a lot cheaper if you guys that's still intimidated on my last solar video about the solar power station people put in the comments just buy a jackary just buy a [Music] Yeti you know stuff like that well I'm sure they're fine and I can't really speak to those two but I can tell you about EC flow Eco flow because this little generator here is almost as big as the one I built on that video cut it on so you can see it as you can see it's at 100% And it's been sitting in my closet for at least 8 months so these things sitting around they do not lose their charge actually have my roof redone like 8 months ago well we had a power line drop this little generator that I've had for five years ran my refrigerator from that morning to that evening and at the end of the day it was still at 80% power that is pretty impressive well I was so impressed with this ecof flow recently I got this ecof flow which makes this little generator look tiny I mean look at that it is kind of tiny now this Eco flow right here is pretty dang awesome it's got way more battery capacity and it can handle way More Voltage plus check that out it'll actually do 220 220 volts that's pretty cool and we took this thing to catcon last month we run the sign in our booth and charged our phones and did whatever else we need to do with it and after 3 days of use well I'll show you what happened after 3 days of use cuz I hadn't charged it up yet so after 3 days of use it still got 66% power that right there is pretty awesome okay here's my idea if after watching this video you're still intimidated about making a system like I just made which turned out freaking awesome by the way you could buy a pre-built generator like this this small one that I bought 5 years ago would be fine for my building but you take one of these generators set it inside your building then just hook up the solar panels like I did run the wire inside your building and plug it into your generator and then run your lights off of this generator and that would be a whole lot simpler if this build intimidates you that's actually a really good idea but if you do build a system like I built let's just say a hurricane or something comes by and knocks your power off if you got your building set up like I got my building setup now I can use this in my house and when it goes dead I can take it out to my building and charge this thing up again that is freaking cool just to let you know by the way you can hook solar panels directly into these generators I really like that storage head since I got some free electricity in it you know what I'm saying anyway if you like this video then you're probably going to like this video so you should go over there and check it out because I'm pretty sure you're going to like it especially if you like this video I'm I'm just saying I'm serious go over there and check it out because this video is [Music] over

Channel: Fishin N Stuff

Views: 820,982

Keywords: HARBOR FREIGHT SOLAR GENERATOR, SOLAR PANELS FOR BEGINNERS, HARBOR INVERTER, HARBOR FREIGHT DIY, Harbor Freight DIY Solar Generator, FISHIN N STUFF

Id: w1b8DAO5dTQ

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024