CHEAP DIY Solar Power Portable Generator

welcome back to Tara Hill Farm today we asked the question can a cheap DIY solar system replace our Honda standby generators that we use when the power goes out let's find out we have unreliable power from our power provider so we installed a transfer switch to make it easy to hook up our Honda generator to power the critical loads in the house whenever the power went out typically the power usually goes out from five minutes to four hours or six hours at most but probably every three weeks we have some type of brown out or short-term power outage so we need to do everything we can to improve our reliability of our power so the question for today is can we build a cheap DIY solar power system with battery backup that can do the same thing for us as our Honda generator does working through the transfer switch and the second question is can we do it cheaper than we would purchasing one of those all-in-one solar generator systems that are so popular on the market today these two Honda generators parallel together put out about 3 200 watts of continuous power so we need to build a solar power generator system that can put out at least 3 000 watts to our transfer switch to power the 10 critical load circuits in our house what we built we got a 3000 watt solar off-grid power inverter charge controller from signature solar it puts out 3000 Watts it'll take 5000 watts of power from solar panels and it will also charge the battery or take AC from the grid to charge the battery whichever one you need we combine this with the eg4 life power 5.1 kilowatt lithium ion battery and this will give us about four kilowatts of usable power on a regular basis to power our house through our transfer switch hello I purchased eight 280 watt LG solar panels I got them off Facebook Marketplace and I paid about 75 dollars a piece for them all eight panels together will put out 2240 watts of solar power so I'll use that to charge my battery and give me up to four thousand watts of usable battery power so this combined with the inverter charger and the battery puts together an off-grid solar powered battery backed up solar system to make it all portable I attached everything to this old hand cart that we had out in the barn you can get one that'll fit perfectly for this system at Harbor Freight for about 65 dollars it's a 700 pound hand cart they sell there but either way it's easy to get all this gear in one spot so you can move it around connecting the components is easy with all the battery cables provided in the inverter controller box it also includes the communication cables you need to provide communication between the controller and the battery for your AC power input to the inverter you need to use a regular 3-pin three prong plug and I would use a thicker core than this I would use probably a 12-2 or even a 10 2 if you can get it extension cord in this is going to transfer up to 1800 watts at 120 volts from the grid into your inverter charge control and that will help charge your battery from the grid when you need to for the AC power out I opted to put in a tt-30 plug which is a typical RV plug because that's how I have my transfer switch set up with my Honda generator now you can use either a power strip like a surge protector or you can do it however you want the way I did it with this is I can plug my generator cord into my transfer switch directly from this or if I need to use just a regular three-prong plug I can just plug this adapter into that and now I've got a regular output for AC personally I'd recommend that if you're using an AC output from the solar inverter charge controller that you use lighted plug-ins that way you can just look down and see if Power is coming out and in both cases here I've got a lighted plug-in so you can get these on an extension cord or you can just buy them and make your own cord up for your AC out power for your solar power input into your inverter I simply just ordered a seven foot mc4 solar cable kit from signature solar when I ordered my inverter and my battery they just threw that in I think it was 18 and I took that seven foot cord and cut it in half which that's what this is right here is the other half and these I just simply connected these to a 50-foot extension cord that has mc4 connectors on both ends to go out to my solar panels panels however you like and if you get into a bigger panel array you may want to put in some some a breaker or a fuse protection and now for the challenge can this system do the same thing as my Honda generators in providing backup power through our transfer switch to our 10 critical load circuits in our house when the power goes out let's find out [Music] now I'm just going to go turn off the main breaker so we can replicate a power outage all right so I'm just going to turn on the battery and I think the battery has about 64 percent right now so we'll just I'm gonna turn on the inverter all the power is off the main breakers off give that a second and up here we can just start bringing these circuits online [Music] six and hear the inverter kicking in it shows about 500 watts on this side so far maybe 300 on this side that just went up to almost a thousand maybe 700 Watts that's 1600 Watts must be the refrigerator Okay so we've run we're powering 10 circuits [Music] with one battery an eg4 3000 watt inverter we can look here and see we have 65 percent on the battery load is at 14 15 percent [Music] looks like we're pulling 300 around 375 watts [Music] 7 amps [Music] 65 battery power okay okay let's go in and check see what the house looks like running off our solar powered battery backup fan Zone [Music] so great we're running off solar power we harvested the solar power from the solar panels put it into the battery and right now it's running strictly off the battery however we can hook up the solar panels to our system while the sun's out and gain more power to power the battery and even do that Wallace power in the house the 10 circuits that we have in our house are our critical load circuits mainly considered of the lights and plugs in each of our bedrooms and rooms it includes on-demand propane hot water heater has a very small amount of electricity needed let's go look at the load on the battery and maybe make an estimate of how long we could power the house off the battery as it stands now so the battery's at 64 percent now so it looks like we're doing 500 to 600 watts so with 4 000 really usable watts in the battery roughly using 600 watts an hour we'd have between six and seven hours of power just from the the solar battery backup system so really it does it's just as good a job for what we need as our Honda generators were doing it's not going to require that we run out to the store to get gasoline if we need to fire it up and we've got solar panels in order to recharge it when we need it it also provides some dual use so we can be charging it while we're using it all right so the Second Challenge was can we build our own DIY solar battery backup generator for Less cost then we can buy one of the all-in-one battery backup solar portable solar generator these all-in-one generators come with the same components as this system but they're all crammed into a smaller box to make it portable that's good and bad it makes it easier to move it around but it's harder to get to parts to replace or work on them if something goes wrong that you don't have a problem like that with this system search it online for the most comparable all-in-one system to ours I found the ecoflow Delta Pro and about thirty six hundred dollars and the blue Eddy EP 500 Pro which is about 5400 the blue Eddie has about the same exact battery storage as ours does while the Eco flow Delta pro has less battery storage as you can see here our DIY system can be built for about twenty four hundred dollars before solar panels so the ecoflow Delta Pro costs about 50 percent more and the blue Eddie costs about 225 percent more while our system gives as good or better performance as all of those I guess that means we can call this system the Cheapo flow 3000 finding new solar panels is pretty easy using Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist but if you're in an area where you can't find anything locally try santandsolar.com you can order online they carry a lot of used solar panels and I'd recommend getting used solar panels in good condition try to get some that don't have any noticeable defects another benefit of this system is it can take twice as much solar power than any of the all-in-ones I mentioned this system can take up to 5 000 watts of solar power or up to 500 volts which means you can run an extremely long string of used solar panels and with the higher voltage you don't have to run a stick of wire which is another benefit building this system is not difficult but you do need a good understanding of electrical wiring if you're not comfortable with that it'd be best to get somebody that who's knowledgeable or maybe even electrician to help you out the voltage this system uses can seriously injure you or even kill you so don't take any chances I hope you found this challenge helpful unreliable grid power can be a serious problem and here at Terra Hill Farm we've experimented with several different ways to get around the problem I'll leave some helpful links in the video description we'd really appreciate your thumbs up and subscribing if you found this video helpful I didn't receive any compensation for any of the items that I put in this video and I've just paid for all of it with my own money because I wanted to give you an unbiased opinion about how it works so from Terra Hill Farm where we truly are two steps from off-grid we appreciate you watching this video check out our other videos thanks a lot thank you

Channel: Two Steps from Off-Grid

Views: 43,981

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Id: 0H7BIy4eLx8

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023