Can You Power Your Entire House With This Ultra Cheap Solar System??

good morning friends dustin here you're watching the lifeline channel thank you guys so much for tuning in today sorry for the wind noise it's always a little breezy out here because flat you know anyway today we're talking about the solar system that i built for the shop you guys have probably seen a couple episodes on it if you haven't subscribe to the channel go back and check out the older episodes where we built this little guy this is a really small relatively cheap setup and we're going to see if we can power the house today the whole homestead yep all the way over there so what we have here is a bunch of 100 watt for energy panels i purchased 12 of these for about 98 dollars a panel so that's less than a dollar a watt pretty good deal not bad i recommend you guys check them out we're not sponsored by renegy but i've been using their stuff for years and they've been on several episodes been doing 200 300 400 watt setups on rvs and campers and tiny houses and uh recently we did this one here we also have a really really big setup coming soon uh you guys will enjoy that it's um a massive solar system and it's the biggest one i've ever put together myself so look forward to that subscribe like the videos let's get on with it you guys also know from past episodes that we put a wind turbine up yeah that broke immediately and uh had a 60 mile per hour gust come through here and here's the clip from that yeah so the blades survived that but the next day they're doing this and it locked all the loctite nuts right off of it and the blades just came off so we're going to shorten that pole down here and uh that way the guy lines are closer to the weight because it was it was going like that so anyway that's uh kind of on hold for now until i can get up there because that was super sketchy to install that thing so our goal here today is we're going to shut off all the breakers from the mains and then open the breakers from the shop and that'll allow us to back feed from our inverter all the way over to the house we're going to see if it works see if we can power the whole homestead because there's a lot of things to power out here there's some huge considerations this is a small setup and i have some really big loads such as weld pumps yeah that's a major one uh not too worried about an air conditioner an emergency but i think we're gonna see if it'll run it shop i still haven't gotten the uh everything wired in here but lights work let's go check out what i got give you a quick explanation and then we're going to get right on into it [Music] all right ultra cheap battery bank these are 100 amp hour agm batteries i have eight of them they're wired series parallel so technically there's four banks these two 12 volts max 24 these two mix 24 you know so on and so forth so they're all put together excuse the wiring i haven't prettied it up yet this was just a test of function and to make sure that it works so our solar comes in throw a running g charge controller here it's a 60 amp guy plenty good size for this i upgraded from the one i originally put in here just because i was maxing it out right now we don't have direct sunlight so we're only pulling 580 watts or so 560 you know but we do have 21 amps going into our 24 volt system this is not the cheapest part of the setup for sure weighs about 85 pounds this is a very high efficiency pearson wave inverter it's going to take our 24 volts from our battery bank and our solar change that over to this is a split phase guys this is a 240 volt split phase power inverter so this is going to be able to charge both hot lines and keep them in sync so we can power you know 240 volt loads with it pretty excited about this thing um so far testing the shop works pretty good i can fire my air compressor up with you know 900 watts worth of led lights already on in here no issues whatsoever we haven't come close to even maxing it out right now the shop is in off because that's the mains coming from the pole you never want to double up your electricity because fire and explosions happen so this is our 60 amp breaker coming into this panel from our power inverter and it's feeding all the shop circuits um but when you shut off at the pole out there we can click that one on and that's going to backfeed out that way [Music] well there's a lot of loads that i'm just going to leave plugged in um but i'm killing the big ones washer and dryer are now done freezers will remain plugged in same with the fridge upstairs i got you know keep your meat in your house you know that way you got food i recommend it oh it's gonna get real dark in here what do you think bud you think it's gonna work [Music] okay we got approval [Music] so i'm gonna have the camera set up here in the shop that's gonna be watching our load output on this guy you can even see it hopefully okay yeah so we're one percent right now that's just running um the little basic circuits in the shop lights are off out here we're gonna go ahead there should be a little bit of a load jump when we hit the mains because all the stuff in the house is still plugged in let's see what happens three percent four percent it's climbing all right let's we're going to run over to the house check our voltage make sure we're not having a huge line loss this is a long distance for an inverter that size um the voltage just isn't high enough really for running back and forth but this camera camera's going to keep an eye on our load percentage and an eye on things out here let's run to the house turn on some circuits this is an absolute unit by the way [Music] never ride with passengers always wear your helmet [Music] little man's got the most important instrument of the day that's our multimeter well we have voltage here so our magic numbers on one of these phases is going to be 120 volts let's see are these child proof oh they are child move got my multimeter through the child proof outlet finally look at that 121.8 we are officially back feeding the house with our solar beautiful let's uh let's put a couple loads on what do you say you want some lights back on okay all right led halos [Music] iron away good deal okay there's load number one number two looking good bathroom lights roger how about a bedroom fan yup so one of the biggest parts of this test is actually to see if the well pump will work we have a pretty big pressure tank i think it's like a 40 gallon um so we have to run the water a little bit and wait for it to kick on we should see the lights dim a little bit okay it's been nine minutes the weld pump has to have kicked on by now okay well i shut the water back off i think the pumps come on and this thing is compensated flawlessly which is great can we micro nuke let's uh warm up this coffee here let's just do 22 seconds here start look at that that's compensating voltage what wow that is awesome what other loads do we got power is nice and clean these are led lights normally led lights are really sensitive to electrical input so you'll see them like flutter sometimes these ones staying on solid look real nice yep pretty happy so far i think we're gonna go back out to the shop and see where our load rating is with a couple of lights and the appliances operating and um maybe turn on the big well for the garden and see what happens how we doing out here 26.2 dc volts still only at a six percent output load has this thing even been loaded yet battery bank we got 725 watts coming in now because the sun is getting closer to the panels as it rotates across the plane that's a nice 26.4 amps oh 20 yeah 26.4 amps nice cables not hot doesn't seem like it's had much of a load on it inverter humming away doesn't seem hot all right i'm ready to hit the well pump and really test this thing out so i'm gonna go turn on the big water in the garden and see what this thing spikes to all right here goes nothing this is a one-inch water line choke down to two three quarters putting some water on some corn hey guys comment down below is your garden doing awesome this year or horrible mine's pretty bad sweet corn and squash but i had a lot of stuff not come up that's supposed to be in between all this all right we're pumping let's go look at the inverter again oh yeah 46 load we definitely got the well pump on right now power fans kicked on for the first time but we're running it we're running [Music] solar it dumping everything i can into it right now not enough at 730 watts see we're losing battery condition pretty fast i know this battery bank is going to be the main issue these batteries were used but the price was absolutely right yeah i know used batteries aren't going to last very long but these batteries had a pretty nice life they spent pretty much their entire time just sitting there on a solar float charger completely full for the last two years so yep they're two years old um but they're gonna work for now we are pumping more solar into it this thing seems to be pretty stable 24.6 volts coming in 240 volts still going out no alarms nothing's too hot and uh she's cranking away got the fan going now [Music] back in the house still got power in here we lost about one volt well pumps on right now 121.5 still pretty stable well i'm pretty pleased i think we're going to try the air conditioner i have a very inefficient 13 seer 220 volt unit on this house plus our blower for the furnace and everything he's going to draw some amps firing up so that's going to be the next thing while i still got battery and then we'll talk about uh how much the system cost and my future upgrades okay 123 volts plugged in in the bathroom here that way i can see it from this because as soon as i hit the cool button on this that compressor is firing up and the old not so efficient air conditioner ready three two one or not okay three t1 oh light's dimmed out a pretty serious voltage drop it's recovering and ac is on cold air is coming out of the vents uh we'll look at the shop footage and see what kind of load we're drawing right now probably pretty massive but lights and everything are still on probably sucking a lot out of the batteries so in a emergency situation we would not be running the air conditioner sorry it's a little a little humid today so the cameras are fogging up a little bit so guys i'm really impressed because the shop is all hooked up on solar right now you've got the compressor in this fridge here we've got the compressor in the big fridge of the house and i have one two three deep freezers plugged in so with all those refrigeration units that's a lot of compressors you'll see a little bit of an initial spike when they first turn on but they balance out really well really quick and don't draw that much new refrigeration units here where it's at oh and the camera's dead perfect timing good job camera so let's do an overview of this system you guys already know the solar panels outside i've got 12 100 watt units um after the efficiency conversion we're getting about 1100 watts into our battery bank in direct sun at about one o'clock in the afternoon that's when i see the best it obviously tapers off once you start getting later in the day because i do not have panels that shift and move with the sun not really a big deal for me that gap is going to be filled with my solar wind generator that thing will be running all the time because the wind is always blowing while it doesn't produce a lot of amperage it'll do it continuously overnight and even in storms and cloudy days how much does it cost to power my entire house homestead well pumps air conditioner three deep freezers two refrigerators and the lights of my house not that much i'll be honest with you guys solar panels like i said those were less than 100 a piece there's 12 of them 1200 bucks right so 1200 in solar panels wiring wiring was a little bit pricey um some of this stuff down here we're talking about high gauge copper us-made wire um you want the best stuff there because that's where your fires start guys so i do have some nice stuff down here probably have about three hundred dollars in wires here that's not including the three gauge wire that goes from the shop to the power pole i didn't include that in this cost because i already had the shop wired for electricity um but i think that was like a fourteen hundred dollar spool uh to get power out here but not including that in the cost of the solar so about three hundred dollars in wiring let's talk about our solar charge controller here this is a great little unit i paid about 280 280 bucks for that been working flawlessly so far a wind generator was about 400 that included our charge controller for that so we'll add that into the system even though it wasn't working today let's talk about this battery bank guys this battery bank was super cheap i bought them used well let's just say i traded for them i had a friend that had some batteries we did some bartering uh he ended up with some other stuff um so not a lot of money into that batteries is where where you guys are going to spend a lot of money so if you can find a place that's got slightly used batteries like this or some kind of discount it's okay to start there in the future i do plan on upgrading these maybe next year um but it's really it's cost prohibitive to buy what eight eight lithium batteries right now if you're looking at a 200 amp hour lithium iron smart battery right and you could do the same setup as this with eight of them and you double your bank one of those fourteen hundred dollars a piece fourteen hundred times eight um yeah that's a lot of money in batteries so that's why i didn't do that guys i recommend if you're just starting your setup you can always expand your battery bank if you bought the right stuff right so we have really nice charge controller that's going to be able to handle a lot more solar panels and we got kind of a crummy battery bank but it already has good cabling on it so this can be expanded next thing that i spent a lot of money on this guy here this is our power inverter it's a 24 volt model i recommend if you're doing real serious stuff build a 48 volt battery bank and uh go with the 48 volt model this guy here is going to work for our battery back up and run my day-to-day in the shop this is a 6000 watt split phase power inverter that means it's got two legs as you've seen already guys this one is really nice and of course expandable on top of the 6 000 watts continuous this thing is capable of an 18 000 watt pearson wave surge so if you've got a big pump or a big compressor that kicks on this thing will fire it right off no problems so don't plan on upgrading that that seems to power the house just fine we're just a little short in the battery bank right now the power inverter itself paid about 1800 bucks for that so where are we at so far future me editing can you add all that together and put a total yeah so that is our total for our system for a complete power system for battery backup emergency use on your homestead you could run that full-time but man you would have to be really careful with how much power is in your battery banks overnights and stuff for cloudy days you probably ain't going to be watering your garden i do have a solar well pump that i'll be dropping into a second well that is going to pump up into a cistern that we can use a small 12 volt pump to pump out of and uh pretty much eliminate the huge power draw of our current 240 volt well pump that's how much it costs to power your homestead with one of the cheapest solar systems on the market and like i said look for those discount batteries you might be able to find a electric uh electric forklift place that has some batteries they want to get rid of as long as they're still testing good you're not getting up one or two years out of them and if you can get them for 50 bucks a pop as opposed to 1400 it's not a bad choice guys i'm signing off today let me know down in the comments how i did subscribe to the channel if you haven't already hit the like button also we need some help we're trying to finish up some big projects like the wheelie bago but we're waiting on parts uh if you guys want to go help the channel directly you can always go to buy me a coffee forward slash life of lend i'll put a link in the description for that um you know buy me a coffee a beer a quart of oil whatever you want all that goes directly towards projects nowhere else no middleman and thanks again for watching guys really appreciate you i got some cool stuff coming up uh the month of august is going to be full of content it's like a lot i've recently made some purchases and we're doing a lot of stuff here soon so stick with me thanks again for watching god bless you and we'll see you next time [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Life of Lind

Views: 696,148

Keywords: Life of Lind, SOLAR, RENOGY, PANELS, AGM BATTERIES, SIGNEER INVERTER, SOLAR POWERED HOME

Id: gLoW0H1OBO4

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022