Building Rock BBQ Outdoor Fire Cooker (Massive Burger!!!) - Installing Solar at the Off Grid Cube

this video is sponsored by ecoflow there'll be more on that later they got both versions of the um grill this is the griddle which gives you a solid surface stainless steel thing is uh built like a tank and uh that's the that's the grilling surface so if you got uh burgers you can either griddle them or you can grill them this is actually good for bacon and pancakes and uh anything that you don't want falling through the cracks and this one is good for anything else steaks or hamburgers or you know pork chops or anything like that sausages and so those are the those are the uh adjustable height stakes so we're gonna have to make some sort of thing that's going to hold these guys in the upright position because there's little grooves on these things that allows you to adjust your cooking height so that's how you adjust your heat on your fire well good morning guys welcome to another fine day at the off grid it's a beautiful day today you know we're into mid summer and we've had a little bit of chance to use our island and now we got uh we got some other issues we gotta contend to this is part of the bigger plan that we've had is the the outdoor kitchen so we got our kitchen sink and now we need to complete our work triangle by work triangle cooking surface so that's my plan today is build a permanent location for my um grill and it's going to be right about here and i'm thinking kind of like a circular gaby and basket sort of thing that's going to bring us up to kind of stove height because if anybody's ever camped knows that cooking on a campfire kind of isn't the best thing because you're crouched down you've got smoke in the face because you're you know you got your fire going so what my plan is to raise it up bring it up to you know comfort height so don you got any idea what the plan is today i have a rough idea rough idea yeah it's always a fun game of trying to get what's in my head and convey it to dawn so we both on the same page to build what we're going to build so what what we're going to build a circle a circle with a rectangle yes a circle with a rectangle made out of rocks that's right like a gaming basket yeah circular with a uh a rectangular insert stove sink fridge stove sink fridge and it goes in triangle fashion because it's the most efficient way to cook that's right so the rectangular insert is designed to hold the coals from blowing away on top of the circle that's right so what's what's the stove what's the height of the stove 30 inches no it's got to be higher than that let's count our top countertop 36 32 we'll have to google that okay so this is our area that i want to be dealing with so this is the size of the um grill uh but i want the base to be larger than this and i wanted it up higher so kind of got a blank slate we can kind of decide what we want to do with the space that we have i'll probably cut in a little bit to the deck maybe as much as over there just to kind of give it a nice kind of nice round shape so you can walk right up to it without being in the mud gets us close enough to our kitchen sink because again the work triangle when you're dealing with kitchens and building kitchens [Music] that's as big as we got [Applause] all right to bring you guys up to speed we've leveled and plumbed our mesh basket now this is the rough footprint of our cooking surface so the idea is to fill this all the way up to the top and then add clay at the end of it and that gives us our our first level and then we build kind of like a box around it so all we gotta do now is place the rocks gently in the basket now we did a different kind of gaping basket where you just kind of throw them in this one's not going to lend itself that well to that so we're going to kind of stack the stones carefully just to make sure it doesn't deform our basket all right we've got to figure out a solution to this problem so the grill that we're using is the grill and it comes with these stainless steel stakes and the idea behind these guys is to stick them in the ground but much like my shop floor it ain't going to stick in the ground so the plan is to make a bracket that is going to hold these uprights and allow me to use the grill to its full potential meaning it'll be able to slide up and down and then this peg will be in the vertical position to hold my grille so i'm thinking something like a steel pin like this that sits inside this guy maybe this way like this so it allows me to i want to get that stuck on there it allows me to keep it upright but then i have a bracket so it'll maintain the weight and then i'm going to embed it in concrete and that's going to hold my grille in place so that's that's my plan i just got to weld up a bracket yeah so some square tubing and some spare parts shouldn't be too hard so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Laughter] [Applause] all right real world test of the bracket system to hold up you guys can see that real closely i'm not a great welder i uh i can't give you any tips other than just keep practicing that's what i did i was like i want a weld thing so i wouldn't bought a welder and i started sticking things together the best describe my welding ability as glue gunning stuff and you know what paint fixes what a welder you ain't anyway this should hold up not to mention it's going to be encased in concrete so uh let's do a real world test on this thing so the idea behind this thing if you guys can see this right there is these pegs are sitting inside there i may cut these off at a later date so the plan if i cut them off make them a little shorter so i don't have to encase these so much concrete so that that's the system there and then you take that grill and you put it on top there just like that and you'll be able to adjust the height of the grill just like that now i don't know if i want to try this so the idea is it won't can't pivot forward at all because it's kind of cantilevered at the bottom and uh let's try this so i don't know what you guys grill at home but you should be able to that's pretty good you should be able to probably grill at least 150 pounds of willed beast or whatever so that's that's all i'm pretty confident that that weld is not going to break when i cook my sausages and hamburgers so there you go and then that's what's cool now it could be on a solid surface that's pretty nifty if you're wondering why i'm wearing an apron is because that unfortunate catching fire incident way back in o6 this i've had this for a while and it's made of canvas and uh my sister-in-law made it for me i'm not sure why maybe she doesn't want me to catch fire i don't know but she makes these things it originally was designed as a kind of dust keeper offer when i was working in the shop to uh to prevent dust from from accumulating on me but it uh it seems to be fireproof too which is cool so that's kind of neat looks like i'm wearing a dress look it's got the it's got i got an a-frame dress on look at that i like this video is sponsored by ecoflow power kits ecoflow power kits are the first compact modular systems for tiny homes and rvs with a plug and play design it's easier than ever to customize the power needs that you require did i mention it's scalable you can go from two kilowatts all the way up to 15 kilowatts so that makes it really easy to size your system according to the power usage that you need for my needs here in the cube i picked a four kilowatt system so i'm going to show you just how easy it is using the eco flows power kits to install power in your off-grid tiny home rv or even a boat okay now that i got this system installed i'll give you guys a little bit of a tour now i am very impressed with this system not every day does a piece of technology wow me this thing is really cool so it's eco-flow power hub this is the box this is the main box that everything connects to so what's really neat about this thing is that you can connect all of your solar off-grid devices so i have in the in the first port it's my uh cells or my solar panels so i've got a 200 watt panels on the vertical surface i don't have them horizontal and i want to catch my morning sun because that's the best sun i get around here i don't get a lot of overhead sun because a lot of the trees in future maybe in the winter time and i want some horizontal panels i can add them because i got three ports for solar panels so one two three and then the next ports that i have are the battery connectors which is battery one battery two battery three you can hook up to 15 kilowatt of power to this thing in many different configuration i currently have two kilowatt batteries so i have two two kilowatt batteries so it gives me a total of four kilowatts on this particular system and then you can hook up if you have a eco-flow smart generator which is a gas power generator to top the system up say uh you know it's cloudy for six weeks and you run out of power you can hook up a the ecoflow smart generator this port also you can if you are installing this in an rv or something that is portable you can have shore power plugged into this port over here which is the ac in port which will charge your system so if you have like a camper van or an rv or something like that you can plug it into shore power and on the pack itself it has an ac out which is a 20 amp port which allows you to plug in uh any devices so this is how i have the cube running is actually the ac out port i have plugged into the actual cube so that's what's powering the cube so there's a couple ways of turning this system on well there's a button here and that turns the whole system on and then up here there is hardwired button so you don't need this control panel but this is where it's really cool this is the control panel so you can actually control the entire system it gives you the statistics on the system it says currently the batteries are charged up to 32 available time and the current running capacity is 99 days 23 hours so that's just kind of an idle mode it's currently overcast it's about ready to rain uh we have a solar input of 12 watts which is decent considering they're mounted vertically and not horizontally and output of zero watts now the touch screen here i can hit the ac button and what it does is actually controls the power hub hello ac power hub ac output oh i have to slide it i only touched it so there you go we've got ac is turned on the cube is powered up it shows output of 59 watts and it shows that it will run it for about 13 hours in this configuration with all the lights on which is kind of cool and then there's all sorts of other things you got the settings you've got uh your screen timeout you can you can turn this thing on and off this way it's really neat what i didn't mention about these lithium iron phosphate batteries is they're good for low temperature they have a heating element inside of them to operate at low temperatures they'll go down to minus two fahrenheit or minus 20 celsius so it's great for off-grid applications eco flow has truly thought of everything with this power hub on the side of it it's got dc out so 13.6 volts to 26.4 volts out that's dc or you also have your ac out which is convenient if you have an rv and you've got the both sets you've got the dc for lighting and you've got your ac for all your appliances this is where the ac dc smart distribution panel comes into play so it's another add-on which i'm not going to be using in the queue because i don't i don't need it but it is really cool option to have so what you do is you plug in this cord here to the power hub and then you connect this essentially distribution hub and it allows you to power all of your ac devices and your dc devices simultaneously and it's got all the quick connections and the fuses and the breakers and everything you need it's plug and play and it's a la carte so you just kind of buy what you need to outfit your your rv or your tiny home and what's really cool about this guy is you can actually recess it in the wall so you don't actually have to have it it fits like seamlessly in any kind of design you can think of it's it's this thing is really slick the other really neat feature with the ecoflow power hub is the app you can download an app to your phone and you can control the power hub from your phone say you leave and you think maybe i left the lights on and it's draining my batteries well you can check it on your phone it gives you all that information and you can remotely turn it off from your phone or for that matter you can turn it on from your phone so if you you know you're coming home late you want the lights turned on you can turn it on from your phone which is really neat ecoflow has been a big supporter of my channel so if you guys are looking for off-grid power or portable power i highly recommend you checking them out at ecoflow.com to check out their power packs or you can click the link down in the description below thanks ecoflow well hello up there my original plan was to take this thing that i made i fabbed it up at the shop and to bury it in concrete it was just these little pegs sticking out so i could have my thing sitting inside and then i thought to myself i don't know if i should do that so i've kind of done a redesign midway such as life just kind of evolving as we're going so the plan now is to make somewhat of a concrete pad here and then have this as a bracket that sits here and then what i'm going to do is actually make a pan that slides in here for my ash tray and then when i can take my ashes out and throw them away i don't have to clean anymore and it's it kind of like it's multi-purpose so if you know you need to move the bracket you can always just take the bracket out and uh and use it somewhere else which is kind of cool multi-purpose so that's that's my that's my thoughts right now so uh what i gotta do is form a box i'm gonna pour a concrete sign with a sidewalk here and it's going to uh sit nice level spot for this bracket i think that'll look good what do you guys think it's daunting you're thinking gotta pour concrete and you never buy enough concrete i bought two bags hopefully it'll do it anyways all right let's get started i'm gonna form this guy up and uh curved front should be easy pour it now trowel it out all afternoon something nice relaxing to do now that i've gotten this far i kind of want to change my mind again i think i'm going to embed the posts into the rock because i think it'll take away from this area here so this will be my concrete flat spot and then i'll have the two pegs just sticking up it'll keep it clean and simple i think it'll look better in the long run so this guy right here i was always told that if you mix concrete really dry it's stronger i don't know if that's true or not or if it's just a cruel way to get a young person to work harder i know it's harder to trowel out dry concrete but if it's soupy maybe there's some maybe there's some truth to that maybe dry dry mixed concrete is stronger makes you stronger anyways because you have to work harder to trial it here's hoping here's hope it is stronger so the plan is to coat this let it set up and then go to the next step i got that concrete pretty smooth considering how dry it was generally speaking when you're ever you're doing concrete and i am by no means an expert at doing concrete you trowel it out the best you can and you let it sit and what happens is the water seems to float up to the surface and then once that water disappears you can trowel it out again and get that kind of glassy finish from my experience anyways i'm sure there's people that are way better at concrete that can explain it way better than i can but this is how i do it this is uh this is going to be the base of the uh the cooktop so the fire is actually going to go right here and then the cooker is going to the the grill is going to go up here and everything's going to be cool but i still got to build the sides on this thing so this is first step and then i build the sides on it and probably an air vent or some sort of fresh air intake on the side so you don't get smoke in the face it's always a little nerve wracking taking the forms off your newly poured concrete but in this case i was careful to tap all the way around the forms so all my concrete worked down to the bottom so i was pretty confident taking the forms off that i would be pretty good it's kind of like baking a cake and then you flip it over and then you see your cake has got no air bubbles or any kind of uh you know imperfections or voids that's the same idea when you're doing anything with concrete is you want to make sure you force all your concrete down the sides in order to get yourself a perfect form and in this case i was really concerned about the front not so much about the sides because the sides were going to be covered in order to get enough material to make our fire pit we first ended up collecting a bunch of stones and then we ended up cleaning them using a what looked like a large toothbrush type device and we scrubbed all the clay that was stuck to it in order to give our mortar something really solid to stick onto so we added the stones to the barbecue kind of equal parts stone equal parts mortar we built it up layer by layer we started with the bottom and then we after the first layer we ended up putting a air charged tube in the base of it to allow our fire to have enough oxygen to kind of burn a little cleaner and have less smoke on our face we loosely placed the mortar knowing that we would come back later and uh tool it out with either a glove or a brush once it's kind of partially dry whenever you're using kind of like a rubble foundation type build it's really difficult to actually lay it like brick so it's kind of a messy process in order to get it right but once the stuff firms up a bit it's a lot easier to tool so like i said once it's dry we'll go back and we will tool it using either like a leather glove or even a uh like a plastic bristle brush to tool of the thing and if there's any spots where we don't have enough more we can always add more mortar later and the same goes for the height of our backstop we can always add more rock if we find once we use the cooktop if we need more focused heat we can always go higher at a later date you see it kind of like sag in there so once that dries up you'll be able to push it in and it'll stay up there same goes for here and then what you'll do is you'll take a brush and kind of brush that out and it'll give you a nice finish it's kind of fiddly but you know so there's our air charge tube allows us oxygen you can see right can you see through it yeah you can see through it i promise you can see through it anyway so that's that'll be allow allow us to have enough air for our fire once we get it down here and then this will be the base for our fire i may make a metal pan to hold all my ash and then i can just take the pan out and then it's just clean and then there's my uh my metal brackets for the uh grill stands well that was pretty cool the uh the elusive blue heron actually made a pit stop on top of that balsam tree and then he just left but uh i'm sure he was trying to look for lunch speaking of lunch so are we i've got my buddy mike here and he self-proclaimed so uh amateur amateur he's a professional cook no he's not a professional amateur that's right well you got an italian background so everybody with an italian background knows how to cook right yes and uh lay bricks in lay bricks so the plan today is to give our our our cooking station a run for its money it's our first initial test we don't exactly know how it's going to work and then whenever it involves food right mike mike's involved because i have to like food right to keep up the physique it is it is lunch time so we're gonna just i gotta do a little couple more dusting off of the surface of the the cooking area and install my uh my mm grill side supports and then mike you're gonna show us how to make the ultimate cheeseburger we're gonna have a little cooking with mike that's right that's gonna be like is it like what's what's the other famous italian cooking lady giardia what's her name giardia oh geez i don't know gia de la renta i don't know her name guy fieri no well guys guy fieri yes but there i'm trying i'm trying to think of the other one the the one the prosciutto what's her name i can't remember her name i can't remember we gotta look her up because she's we'll google it she's something anyways okay so we're gonna cook we're gonna dust this thing off we're gonna give it it's a maiden voyage and uh we're gonna see we're gonna either we're gonna either well cooking and fire i've got a track record so does it work too good or what what's going on here there's a lot of heat poured off of this thing so do you think it maybe uh maybe we put too much wood in there no we got just enough we got a nice cold base and then we can start cooking yeah that's great it's a pretty good full deadline nice fire well she's got a nice she got a nice burn right she's got no smoke very little smoke smokeless smoker smokeless firefit homemade it's pretty good i like it it's nice nice height too it is perfect for cooking give you guys a little bit of a pond update i know you guys were very concerned about the fish the other day when we started doing some uh some remediation it seems like the fish have uh they're still doing excellent we've only ever found i think three dead fish so they've been they've been doing okay ever since we put the aluminum sulfate in the water seems to be cleared up the fish are feeding as normal as you can see there we just fed them and you can see them actually feeding there which is uh which is good so the pond is is is doing okay again we still have to we still have to you know add more rocks around the perimeter just to kind of keep them clear but i believe over time once the vegetation establishes it should it should be working better than that i actually picked up a new little thing here i haven't quite set it up yet but i've got a deer feeder from cabela's bass pro shops and i'm going to rig that thing up at some time in a later date to actually feed my fish because i'm not down here every day and i think i should probably feed them every day although in the summer time they tend to slow down their feeding because it's just it's just warm out so this guy here i should be able to rig it up easy set programmable digital timer so you can you can set a feeding time every day to sprinkle that'll shoot food over the entire pond area so make sure my fish get really nice and big that's probably good what do you think so far looks like it's setting up pretty good right it looks great looks very professional i think it's great so we're doing half a half half and a half half pork half medium ground beef nice and then you got uh a bit of garlic garlic yeah garlic powder we'll do uh salt and pepper actually let's do a little bit more garlic we got the parmesan parmesan there we go salty is salty because it comes out of its face that's disturbing that's why they're at the off grid dude we're cracking at the bottom what a life yeah let's get the bottom open you need some more pepper there you go there we go there we go now at the bottom yeah there we go there we go that's what we're talking about you want to talk about room temperature meat while you're making that yes so one mistake people often make when making burgers is using cold meat when you're using cold meat it's not good for your hands because you're adding all the extra heat from your hands into there and it doesn't cook right i find now i could be wrong i am no expert but in my experience using room temperature meat and a good blend of beef and pork you get a nice juicy burger every single time you want some bacon you're gonna taste it or you're just gonna inhale it take a bite take a bite take a bite bite bite there you go yes you're inhale it's tasty mmm bacon oh that good buddy how does it feel watching somebody else do all the work it's great mike's the star of the show is it great he obviously knows what he's doing that's right we're just perfect keep too many cooks in the kitchen is bathroom right yeah no i'm just here taking it all in maybe i'll learn something what do you think of that is that bush flipper we got there okay it works doesn't that work great look at that perfect size for the burger let's see how this is gonna go oh yeah and then this honking burger massive one look at that perfect fit crazy hamburger mustard burger buddy oh wow what are you guys gonna have we gotta that thing we're gonna check back with you see how you make out on that one okay is there uh some prize at the end if you can finish that burger i will uh i don't know i don't know oh the price of indigestion i think yeah give her a whirl give me all the and acid that i can take there you go eat off the other side bean it's good um i've got the reasonable sized burger look at this look at that burger ah it's got the bacon it's got the cheese i got the mustard which that's what i like is i like only mustard on my burger and i might be odd for that we got some sweet potato fries i've got our soda pringles because i like pringles barbecue pringles what do you got you got everybody in yours sweet potato fries got the burger with some red onion bacon cheese ketchup and mustard nice mmm i haven't i've been frying up let's just go bean wants to try it for me you can you want this doesn't that look good look at that fresh bun the bun to burger ratio is where it's at look at that it is good it's like a good ratio it's good ratio it's go it can't be too big you can't i can't have too much meat i should just take a bite stop talking kevin you eat your burger dude forest burger dude ultimate cheeseburger that is that is good tip of the hat to the cook that was good thank you sir you've lived up to your italian heritage it's in there somewhere so i don't cook a lot as you guys may know as a person that cooks a lot mike what do you think of the height of that grill it's perfect height for cooking because you're not leaning down and you're not going too high and it's enough away from your face it doesn't burn and it's uh the wind guard at the back is perfect for the wind where it's blowing i think you did a fantastic job it turned out really well well not no we're going to finish our burgers has put a chip down because she thinks she can get burger she'll eat the chip later anyways on that note i'm going to continue eating my burger

Channel: Kevin Builds (Modern Self Reliance)

Views: 88,576

Keywords: building, tools, hand tools, power tools, sawmill, cabin construction, how to build a cabin, tiny house, forest house, small house, log cabin, construction, cabin design, sawing, cutting wood, off grid, homestead, tiny cabin, self reliance, solar powered house, small home, axe, saw, BBQ, DIY, building outdoor cooker, firepit construction, off grid life, living offgrid, outdoor bbq, outdoor fire, cooking, cook, solar power, ecoflow

Id: Zqg3DOpzYkg

Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022