COST Of Our 100% DIY Off Grid SOLAR SYSTEM | Powering an Electric Range, Dryer, and Water Heater

oh it's totally worth it you forgot how much it cost I know a sticker shock all over here maybe a little too big let's talk money [Music] good morning everyone welcome back to a bolder life off grid today we're going to talk about and break down the complete cost of our large 100 percent DIY solar system we're going to start here at our solar stand the first thing that we purchased was this galvanized angle iron this came from the scrap yard we picked it up at 25 cents a pound and we took it and as you can see some of these are square tubing we weld all this angle iron into squares to make the post this total came out to 285 dollars from the scrap yard so that was a good deal for us that was a good start to building this whole stand we were able to get some of the unistrep from the scrap yard but not very many pieces so most of it we had to purchase brand new brand new door that was a lot more than we paid for at the scrap yard the total for the unistrat brand new was six hundred and forty dollars for all the other pieces of the stand including concrete nuts and washers we had to buy a galvanized paint for all the welds that was a total of 475 dollars for all those little miscellaneous items so for to build this solar sand we ended up spending 1400.99 now let's talk about the solar panels these solar panels are from solar World they are grade A and they are 300 watts at 40 volts now we have 30 solar panels and we have them in the shape of a v as you can see here we have half of them 15 facing Southeast and then we have the other half facing Southwest so that we can catch the sun earlier in the morning and catch it later in the evening with 30 panels at 300 watts a piece that comes out to 9000 Watts worth of solar panels and the total cost of those panels was 6570 dollars and now coming in at 265 dollars the combiner ball ladies and gentlemen we have here the midnight solar combiner box let's open it up see what's inside [Music] and inside our combiner box we have three 300 volt 15 amp dc Breakers here and then we have another three over here each one of these three Breakers controls a row of the panels here so three rows here and we got three rows over there so these Breakers were about 32 bucks a piece and the total cost of these plus we're including some of the we got two fuses and two main fuses in the PowerHouse there the total cost of all of that was 381 dollars and now let's head over to the shed where we house all of our solar equipment [Music] [Music] Welcome to our shed which is actually really becoming our Powerhouse look at our power yeah we got the light on we got light now we wanted to go through and show you all of our equipment here and kind of do a quick breakdown of how all the wires ran and what goes to what and kind of what order everything is wired together in and as well while we're doing that go over the cost of all this stuff all right [Music] we need a bigger shed [Music] this is actually a big shed it is this is 200 square feet plus it has a little Loft up here that we got tons of stuff up there maybe we just have too much stuff [Music] here's the conduit that runs out to our solar array and we have two strings that come into here and make up on a terminal strip and connect to our EMP Shields which is our surge protection slash lightning protection and they all tie into here right then it comes out here's the two strings coming out this is eight gauge welding wire we needed welding wire so that we could surface mount it without having to put it in a conduit because you you can't just run THHN across here that's a code violation so this goes comes this way and I kind of had to run it this way because all this other stuff was already here this was the last wire I ran and then it comes up and splits off hitting this charge controller and then our other Target controller the charge controller does half of the array as we showed you out there it's split in half now from here where are we you got these one gauge cables coming out they come out the positives hit these two Breakers and then they go down to the positive bus bar the negatives come over to the negative bus bar and that's where it goes from the bus bars through these four Rock cables to another set of bus bars look at that now the reason we did that is because if anything ever had to be serviced here we didn't just want our batteries to be in the way sitting on the ground and these things weigh a ton by the way if they ever had to get replaced which I imagine these will last years and years these are victron and so we're able to just disconnect the batteries here and then this is on Wheels and can be rolled out of the way now let's talk about the cost the number we're going to give you includes all this welding wire you got four out wire one gauge wire eight gauge wire um six gauge wire for the ground there this this price also includes the wire which is eight gigs by the way that runs out to the array and we had to do eight gigs because it was 130 foot run it includes all the lugs that we had to crimp onto the wires it includes this price also includes the conduit that we ran out to our solar panels and there's two conduits one of them is a spare for the future what else does this include it includes the wire in these conduits which was two gauge that goes to our main breaker in here at 100 amps and also just the heat shrink oh and it includes the sheet rink okay see rink what did I say did I say sheep shriek dream sometimes my apologies and so all of this together and I'm probably missing a couple things but we got most of it all of that together was 3097 dollars wire wire wire wire also in that price we just shared that also includes the lay-in lugs out on the solar panels the ground that grounded and bonded all those solar panels and as well the PV wire that is out there which was 300 feet of PV wire to wire all those up and mc4 connectors am I right is that in that yes it is in the mc4 characters okay moving on so power comes in goes over to the charge controllers comes out of the bus bars and it kind of splits up from here you got going from the bus bars to the batteries and from the bus bars right here here's our positives uh going through these fuses one positive to each inverter and your negatives right to the inverters these inverters are the Quattro 48 volt 10K inverters they're both 10K which means we have 20 000 Watts worth of inverter sitting here and the reason for that is we like power right well we want to run big things we do we need a 240 volts so that's why we have two inverters you need to to get 240 volts at least of victron I know there's the all-in-one inverters that create 240 but we need a 240 because we want to use clothes dryer we have a range an electric range an electric range those are going to pull a lot and we've used the closer out a few times and it's awesome working great yeah and uh at its peak it pulls like 6 000 watts and in the when the sun is shining the system doesn't even fling [Music] so price price of these inverters eighty three hundred dollars eight thousand three hundred dollars together both of them total that's the inverters charge controllers these charge controllers are the mppt250 100 which means you can Max them out at 250 volts or 100 amps or I believe the Watts were 4 800. a piece and the cost of those were 1847 dollars now moving to the serbo GX and uh I believe it's called the gx50 touch screen it's the touch screen you can get this size or you can get one that's a little bit bigger the bigger one I think was a seven inch this is a four or five but the cost of this stuff and this stuff wasn't necessary but we we added it to our system because we wanted to monitor it and see what's going on like that these were 627 dollars foreign [Music] okay bus bars we didn't yep we have two kinds we do we have two different types of bus bars okay they're both the same brand which is Blue Sea Systems these two are rated at a thousand amps and the two on the battery box are rated at 600 amps we wanted a thousand amps but couldn't find him at least fast enough you can get them online so 1000 amp bus bars and then two 600 amp bus bars over here we just have to be careful not to hook up too many batteries to them right now they're they're totally fine they could actually take about two more batteries and these these things are just pieces of metal like they these are an arm and a leg what tell what's the Thousand amp the Thousand amp is 438 dollars for those two for a piece of metal it does nothing just connects I don't know okay and then the 600 amps down here I'll show him down here there they are two of them positive negative okay cost of these were 280 280 dollars so that's what like 718 bucks in bus bars right here we got this inch and a quarter carflex conduit and one here they come into our main panel this is a Siemens 200 amp panel however we only have a 100 amp main breaker because that is what all of this is rated for is 100 amps if we ever wanted to do 200 amps we'd actually have to get two more these bad boys so Siemens panel got all our Breakers total cost of that was a hundred and seventy dollars now that the AC side we got the price on that I need to backtrack a little bit and talk about the EMP Shield devices we have we've got four of them okay this one protects line one and line two of the AC sides the AC phases whatever you want to call it in here and then we've got this one here which is for the 48 volt system this one here is connected to our two strings that go out to the arrays and this one here where the light's not on is actually we'll do the same thing does the same thing as this one it's just made for one string though we'll use that later on in future we uh we actually I think accidentally ended up buying that one thinking we needed it but right now we don't but we're going to keep it because we do plan on using it like I said now these things EMP Shield is supposed to is supposed to be really good at surge protection lightning protection there's videos out there that talk about the EMP Shields and how much they can handle and they're not really made to take a direct lightning strike I don't think anything is but there are stories where they have taken direct lightning strikes and they protected all the equipment on the other side of it so I'm excited to have these but I'm not excited about how much they cost us it made our price go up a little bit they were what were they 1506 1506 dollars [Music] anyway we're protected [Music] moving on to the batteries and this giant battery box that we built to house our batteries it is made out of plywood two by fours it's got tongue and groove on the sides and it is insulated to keep our batteries warm through the winter as you can see it doesn't have doors yet but we'll be building those real quick we had a couple projects that require some more immediate attention and then we'll put the doors on we have two shelves in here so we can expand our batteries in the future what we can hold five on the bottom and we can put five more depending on how our needs as we run this system as we learn what what our needs really are our battery boxes on Wheels there's eight of them just because it's so heavy um that way as you saw we can roll it in and out out of the way as we need to get back into there the total cost for just this battery box was way more than I thought it should be [Music] 578 dollars why'd you spend that much money why did you spend that one we should have built this out of cardboard but we want our batteries the batteries were the biggest price tags they are expensive we better take care of them we have five sacred Sun 48 volt 100 amp hour batteries and these are the big sticker shot because these cut do not come cheap One battery cost 2250 so for all five we spent 11 250 bucks on these five batteries with that being said about the batteries these batteries are 4 800 watts a piece so we have a battery bank with the total capacity of 24 000 Watts if you want a system that's just like ours that has 9000 Watts worth of solar panels 20 000 Watts worth of inverter power and 24 000 Watts of batteries then it will cost you it will cost you and this is the DIY 100 DIY cost of our system thirty seven thousand forty three dollars and fifteen cents [Music] about thirty seven dollars is that what you said thousand thousand okay now you can't see me hat on backwards time there we go now my eyes are shaded [Music] it was worth it oh it's totally worth it I we love every minute of this uh the whole design and everything was fun and awesome and if you're new here go back and watch the whole build man you're going to want to see it the the racking was probably my favorite part building the racked racking system for these panels was fun it was a lot of welding my favorite part was putting up the solar panels that was fun that that's it changed it quick yes that was the thing it went fast so it was like nothing to Something in like two days and so that was exciting right it's before we even moved out here I was looking into the cost of solar equipment and I I got up one price from another company down in Phoenix here down in the valley and they actually didn't sell equipment to anyone they weren't into the DIY market right they were just installers and so they were telling me yeah well we could we could put one in for you uh and they were saying it was a 10K system and they could put it in for maybe he was giving a ballpark number maybe as low as 60 000 but as upwards as like 80 000 or more and I was just like wow uh thank you but no thank you uh so we saved how much money on labor right we're the laborers yeah Free Labor yeah the other thing I wanted to say is you maybe you are wondering is there anything that we would have done differently oh yeah one thing I would change though is maybe try to make the battery box smaller it's kind of huge uh yeah when I walked in on you building that I was like uh what's up what is that giant thing another thing I would have done differently we have good batteries they're they're good but you're a little disappointed we are they they actually don't communicate to our victron monitoring system so that's kind of annoying I mean the victron display can show us the voltage of the battery which kind of gives us an idea of the state of charge of the battery and the battery does have the four LED lights to indicate how much power is in the battery but I really wanted them to talk talk to the the monitoring system but apparently sacred sun is one of those brands that haven't gotten with the what am I looking for Times Gone with the times you know victron is a big name you know anybody watching this that makes and sells batteries make sure they can talk to the victron stuff will ya come on yeah we did go victron because we wanted good quality right um we were looking at cheaper inverters and equipment and stuff but we were looking far ahead we don't want to have problems with our system we were going for as low maintenance as we could so victron was the way to go right I mean you have all these all-in-one systems and they work and of course this is just me talking my opinion I just don't think that uh that's the way to go because what if your charging controller inside of that unit goes out well then what do you do do you replace the the entire uh apparatus of that you know because they're you got your inverters in there charge controller monitoring system in there in those all-in-one deals so victron just has a good track record they have yes that's why we win very good went with the higher they're very expensive it is but hopefully that pulls out in the long run it'll work good so yeah the batteries we have they're good batteries we just uh you know I wish they could talk to the the victron equipment but all in all we are super happy about everything one last thing I remembered I wanted to talk about was the size like why our system is Big we've talked to people around like where we live and stuff and they're like whoa you're building a huge system and the thing that we want is to be completely self-reliant I guess on our power a lot of people do solar for some and then they need propane to support all their other systems so we went big because we have an electric range I don't want to have to pay for propane over and over and over and have to have someone come out here you want someone to deliver it yeah so one of our big things why we went big with our system was because we want to be able to produce all the power we need and not have to rely on someone else to provide it for us yeah that's a pretty good explanation right there go big or go home so what I always say yep even on battery boxes maybe a little too big all right guys we are checking out thank you for watching this video we hope that you enjoyed it and we hope you enjoyed our transparency of all this stuff because we know a lot of you are interested in it we know a lot of people want to have solar for themselves and so I hope this gives you a good idea and we have a whole playlist full of like the different components going up for different videos so check those out if you're interested in any of those different sections or all of them yep thank you for watching subscribe hit the like button tell your friends you don't want your friends to miss out do you do you I don't think so we'll see you guys next time bye [Music] 925 thank you what at 40 volts awesome one half is facing Southwest and we have another half facing Southeast and actually that's Southwest this is Southwest should we start over yes and so with each panel at third three got three uh 300 volt I don't know because Natalie hasn't told me that no I don't know either [Music] pull it out a little more the heat shrink oh and it includes the sheet ring okay see drink what did I say they say Street it includes the heat to shrink how do I get out here so down here is it's gonna be is this ended up being a spare I got a cat problem ended up being a spare it says we plan on [Music]

Channel: A Boulder Life Off Grid

Views: 194,384

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Id: -FXKvKHEoso

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022