Best Value Inverter, All-in-one MPPT Solar Charger, Growatt SPF5000ES, Part 1

this is a new model inverter that's all in one it has the solar charge controller the ac charger and the inverter all built into one package to make this really easy to go off grid but the most amazing part of this package is the price point at 900 dollars i don't see anything else on the market that can beat it now i don't know if it's any good or not so we're going to test it in this video but i can't believe they got this much stuff into a package for 900 bucks here we go [Music] hi i'm david welcome to my channel where i like to diy renewable energy and energy efficiency projects this video we're going to be looking at the growth spf 5000 es model i bought this from signature solar out of texas it sells for nine hundred dollars and if you decide to buy one you can get five percent off using coupon code davidpaws and that is also an affiliate link which will help out this channel if you choose to use it and thank you if you do there are a ton of features in this inverter so we might not be able to get to everything in this one video we're gonna run through the specifications then we're gonna open up the cover avoid my warranty in doing so but we'll look inside then we'll connect it up to a battery and we'll see what we can power with it this is a five thousand watt inverter for nine hundred dollars now that alone is a great price for a 5 000 watt inverter but it is a high frequency inverter so it's kind of on the light side it's not as light as other 5000 watt inverters but it's certainly not as heavy as some of the big transformer based inverters that i've worked with now this is an international model which means you should be able to set the hertz and the exact voltage somewhere between 220 and 240 volts so if that's the case i'll be setting this to 240 volts this is not a split phase inverter it's single phase meaning it's only putting out 240 volts now that will work fine for certain loads such as if you're just powering something like an electric water heater at 240 volts that's cool but if you want split phase you're going to need to add a transformer to it now i'm going to be showing that later in the video now the second big feature of this is that it is a solar mppt charge controller nppt stands for maximum power point tracking that means that you'll get more efficiency out of this and you can use a high voltage array in this case up to 450 volts which means that you decrease on your wiring size and combiner box and things like that but this is a charge controller that can charge a battery up to 100 amps meaning from here into the battery it can put out up to 100 amps i paid 900 dollars for my victron charge controller a few years ago and that is only a charge controller this is also a ac charger meaning you can supply this with 240 volts alternating current from something like the grid or a generator and charge your battery and it can do that at 80 amps now again that's actually a really good price let me show you a comparison last year i bought this ac charger off of amazon for 130 dollars it is a 10 amp charger that means that i paid 13 dollars per amp of charging i bought signature solar's charger this is a 25 amp charger and i paid 300 which is 12 per amp of charging so a little bit cheaper than the one from amazon this inverter charger can charge at 80 amps and cost 900 which means it's 11.25 per amp of charging so this is actually cheaper than the charger from amazon or the charger from signature solar where they're just chargers this is a charger and an inverter and a solar charge controller so again any one of these features would be worth the nine hundred dollars but you're getting three things that are all each individually worth nine hundred dollars packed into one unit so again i don't know how they did this and i'm really hoping that it doesn't just blow up on me but you know we're gonna find out kind of skeptical when things like this have such a low price point but gosh if they're not exciting to try because you know the whole market every year that i keep doing these videos the market just keeps getting better and better the industry is making equipment that just is getting more and more bang for the buck every year and i can't believe just in the few years that i've been making videos just how inexpensive products have become now when you buy this inverter from signature solar you get a couple of things with it you're going to get a little pack here with a cd now i think this little cd is going to be the software for the computer you're also going to get a few cables that will allow you to connect us to the computer as well as parallel it to multiple units because you can parallel up multiples of these together so if you ran two three six of these whatever together you're just increasing your total output now not every inverter will allow you the opportunity to parallel them up together because the sine wave needs to be in sync between this inverter and the next one that it's parallel to and the next one this has that ability to do so and it doesn't cost anymore you don't have to buy an additional feature there are other brand inverters on the market that require you to purchase additional devices which will cost maybe five or six hundred dollars just to be able to sync up two or three or whatever of these together this one it comes built in so again that's an additional thing built in for the package for the money more value more bang for the buck the bottom of this inverter is where all the connections are made so we're going to unscrew this cover plate and that will expose where we make our connections [Applause] underneath we have a pair of fans we have our main positive and negative post these are where you're going to connect up the battery right here is your pv positive and negative this is where we're going to screw in the solar array and then over here we're going to have your ac input and your ac output line and neutral so that needs 240 volts on a single line down here on the bottom we have an input breaker and that looks like a 40 amp ac breaker these ports are going to be plastic bushings so if you run your wire straight through here it won't chafe on the sheet metal then we have a bunch of different communications here for your computer stuff which i'm not good with and then we have some parallel connection that's if you're going to run multiple of these inverters together let's take a look at our wire input this is a four ought can the four rot fit through there no so four rock cannot fit through those holes not that you would need a four up let's go ahead and take off the cover void the warranty which is right here they have a warranty sticker on the top but that's alright we'll pop that off and take a look at the inside inverter so let's be careful of this display when we pull it up so there's some kind of ribbon cable attaching the display to the front it looks like the fans are going to be directing the airflow inside this plastic shroud and that is probably for these aluminum heat sinks these are called mosfets and they're going to be switching on and off very quickly now in one of my previous videos i made a joke and i called these donuts because i don't know if they're specifically a a toyorotal transformer or an inductor or something like that because i take the cover off for you guys i'm not an electronics engineer i don't know exactly what i'm looking at here but i do know that it looks pretty cool now over here we can see capacitors now those capacitors look like a dead short when they're empty and that's why when you first put a battery connection to this you have to be careful that you don't send too much inrush current to charge those capacitors otherwise sometimes you can blow the capacitors or you can blow out the solder to them the solder traces these are going to be some relays and those are switching relays for when you're running on the ac input versus running in inverter mode these bottom connections are where the wires are coming out to the loads so we have the ground but then we have a blue and brown wire down there let's see if we can find a gauge on them so it says 10 gauge so they're using 10 gauge wire to run to the output 10 gauge wire is good for 30 amps according to the nec and this is at 240 volts and 5 000 watts so that is plenty so that's good well i hope that flyover is fun like i said before i don't know exactly what i'm looking at but i like to look inside for your benefit the next step is to actually fire it up and power on a load this water heating element is rated for 240 volts 4500 watts i can't screw this water heater in because it's longer than the bucket so i'll just drop it in like that and it's sitting mostly submerged in the water i want to make sure that it's touching that a little piece of angled steel that i put down there in the bottom so it doesn't melt through the plastic now here's my positive wire from the battery and right here we can put it on that stud there we go sorry about my hand in the way to start that nut on there now we can do the other one so this will be the negative side and we'll take that off run the negative wire in now remember when i set things up on the bench they're just for testing purposes i'm using some things that i have on hand so i just grab some wire now this is under size on page five of the manual it says to use two gauge wire now that's the minimum you can go more than that so long as you can make it fit and to torque it to two to three newton meters but when you go and hook yours up you'll want to use at least a two gauge wire which i will be doing when i hook this up in its permanent location you guys might notice that i'm connecting these terminals up before i turn on the battery that's a little bit different usually i grab a little resistor like this and pre-charge the capacitors which we saw inside but in this case i'm using uh this gill brand battery bank it turns out that inside each one of these batteries is a pre-charged resistor well signature solar reached out to me and told me that this is a giant resistor built in here to do that exact thing so it turns out that there's an additional feature here that i was not aware of so when i turn this on it will automatically do that limiting of the inrush and now the inverter is turned on without blowing the capacitors some of you are curious how i attached that that's big copper strap there goes up to the bus bar there and onto the bus bar over on this side so we have our positive and negative bus bars looks like the inverter turned on without anything blowing up that's always a good sign now let's go through the menu and see if we can set this up i have not worked with this menu before so it might take me a little bit but i'll edit it down so that it's quicker for you guys to see this will be the battery so 52.4 volts dc and this is probably the output of 230 volts alternating current ac going to the house and we're currently using zero percent of the 5000 watts that this inverter can output up here it says we need to press and hold for three seconds the enter button let's do that and setting number one output source priority solar awesome okay so now we'll go to looks like we're going to scroll down so now we're on option number two so we're in the manual on page 16. now we went to option number two well the options in this menu get pretty long and boring so i'm just going to skip ahead to some of the good ones and you can go through individually if you are programming your own inverter the manual is pretty straightforward on what you need to do battery type now in this case it says here lithium but only when you have communication with the bms i might have a communication ability with this bms but i haven't looked into that yet so at this point i'm just going to define this as user define 2 which is when lithium battery without bms there we go okay so now that i switch this toggle switch to off so we're in standby mode i can now adjust this setting wow it looks like you can go pretty high 240 volts is what i want and output frequency it looks like it's set to 50 hertz so we're going to want to change that to 60 hertz so it is outputting 240 volts at this point so that's accurate and i'm just doing that on the side of that circuit breaker that i have coming out of the inverter so that display is accurate oh and i just heard the fans kick on and it says we're using 82 percent of the load and it says we're at 17.1 amps on the output let's take a look at the water heater you can see all the bubbles starting to so it's outputting 4.1 kilowatts out of the 5 kilowatts this is able to output blowing out the top so that's good it's sucking in air at the bottom blowing it past those heat exchangers and blowing it out the top i can feel it there's no vents up here so it's only blowing out this side and this side over here the fans are still running the fans are quite a bit louder than say my sma inverters well the inverter worked well with the one water heater we put on a 4500 watt water heater it actually was drawing more like 4.1 kilowatts instead of 4.5 kilowatts the menu has 50 different options in there and it was easy enough to get through and i'm glad that i didn't have to hook up a computer just to be able to program this you can do it all on the display and that's good this video was just part one where we got to look inside we played with the menu and we did put a 240 volt load on this and all of that worked fine in the upcoming videos on this inverter there are more things to test i have to hook this up to my solar array which is outside and we're going to see how well it can charge the batteries off the solar array and i'm really excited for that because i have a 5.1 kilowatt solar array that we're going to hook up to this it should take up to 6000 watts so i want to make sure it doesn't blow up at 5.1 kilowatts now in addition to that we need to test this for 120 volt loads now that is going to require something a little bit different now from signature solar i also bought this this is a solar edge brand auto transformer this auto transformer will allow us to take the 240 volts and get a neutral so we have 120 volts split phase for the north american market now i'm excited to test that in an upcoming video but you'll have to stay tuned for those now if you want to pick up the inverter or the solar edge inverter or the gill bat now if you want to pick up anything that you've seen in this video from signature solar use the discount code david paws that will get you five percent off and it also tracks the affiliate program which helps this channel out i've already laid out what i'm going to be testing in some upcoming videos but if there's any other questions that you have that you'd also like to see in some of the upcoming videos where i review this inverter please leave them in the comments below please like subscribe comment and share gonna start boiling our water here in a moment

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 439,414

Keywords: growatt, inverter/charger, inverter, charger, charge controller, controller, solar, off grid, off-grid, mppt, spf5000es, 230v, 240v, 120/240v, split phase, 5000, 5kw, watt, lifepo4, signature solar, gyll, gyll battery, battery bank, lithium, best, cheap

Id: 2eF7zxmKBAg

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021