DIY Off Grid (Whole House) Solar System - Victron, Fimer, Pylontech

hello good morning and welcome back to another video it is a really nice sunny day today and so we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to talk about our solar system not the planets and stuff but our solar power system we've had this for a while now I think getting on for two and a half three years and we've still got all the things that we had before but we have made some changes and so we're going to show you some of those in this video and of course most importantly we're going to talk about why we've done it how we've done it of course that there are many other ways to do it but this one works really well for us so just as a quick refresher what we used to have is six panels out here which we still have and then all of the equipment all the batteries all the inverters all the solar charge controllers were in the wooden shed that you can just about see behind me and we still have some stuff in there but most of it has moved has been relocated to the house and we'll give you a quick tour of the system first and then we'll talk about some stuff in a bit more detail so let's go and start over by the panels and then we'll go into the shed okay so these are the panels that we have and have had since the beginning they used to be wired up as three sets of two in parallel and then fed back to a combiner box inside the shed which combined the power from all of the panels into one big feed that then went into a solar charge controller to charge the batteries and power the inverter so we still have the same six panels they're still mounted in exactly the same place although we'll talk about the mounting in a second but they are just wired differently so instead of three sets of two we now have one big string which starts on one side and kind of feeds all the way through to the end and then back to the shed and the reason for that is some of the changes that have happened in the shed we now have a system that needs a big string of panels rather than lots of small ones so something that will change here in future is these panels are going to be moved from being ground mounted to being mounted on a roof but it's on the roof of a structure that we haven't built yet so over here slightly off to the side we're going to be building a carport kind of like a big garage with a small storage shed but with a large covered area where we can park cars or mowers or chippers and wine making equipment and all that kind of stuff but most importantly put all the panels on the roof and so we have these six panels here now we've actually bought another six I just haven't had time to set them up yet and we've got so much sun at the moment that we really don't need them at the moment but there for the winter but in future the carport structure that we're going to put here we've got space for we've got space for 20 panels but I think we're probably going to put 16 up there but we've got a bit of extra space if we need it which is good and these six panels are actually going to be relocated to the roof of another structure and we can talk about that a bit later on so with that set up let's go into the shed and show you what has changed in there [Applause] so welcome to the shed which used to house a lot more of our solar equipment now it's just got these two pieces that you can see on the wall we used to have a whole load of batteries down below as well but everything has been moved to the house and actually we only need one of these things in here but I've left the uh this is the DC combiner box just because most of the panels were already wired into it so in the future we'll just have this femur thing up here not in the shed but in the carport structure so let me explain what this is because this is a very different kind of system than what we used to have and actually this is a system that I didn't know anything about or this type of system was something that I only learned about through working with the guys at soloshop who helped me design the system but we did do all of the install ourselves so this thing is called a string inverter an inverter is basically something that takes in one kind of power and converts it into a different kind of power and the reason you need something like that is the kind of power that solar panels produce is not something that your Kettle or fridge or microwave or dishwasher can use so there needs to be some kind of conversion the old system which we're still using most of is something called a DC coupled system so the solar panels which are DC connect to the batteries via recharge controller and then that feeds an inverter which produces the AC power for all the appliances and we will still have that in future but we have added this and what this string inverter does is it converts the solar panels from DC to AC up here and then sends that AC down to the house and so this is known as an AC coupled system and at the moment we just have this we used to have the DC coupled we now have the AC coupled in the future we are going to be taking advantage of both because they both have their kind of strengths and weaknesses and I don't want to get into all the technical details because it's probably not what you're here for if you want to learn more about the technical side of solar then there's loads and loads of information out there on the internet we're just going to try and give a high level overview of what we have how it works and why we chose it but one of the great things about this is it will produce AC right here in the shed or in the future in the carport which means we can feed a fuse board or a consumer unit right here and power the things in this room or in the future power our carport so we've got lights and sockets and stuff like that and then it sends all that power down to the house which feeds the consumer unit in the house and then connects up to all the other solar stuff and it does all of that with just one cable which which is what convinced me to go for this kind of solution up here in the first place previously we'd looked at running lots of DC cables around the place and we were going to have to run I think five separate cables to get the same result compared to one the other nice thing about this unit is it will generate up to six kilowatts of AC power but you can actually plug in up to seven and a half kilowatts of solar panels so that's what we've got going on in the shed and whilst there are a lot of benefits to the system which we've tried to explain one of the downsides of this system is it's not as good for charging batteries it still works and any Excess power is diverted to do that but because it does quite a lot of conversion from DC to AC and then from AC to DC to charge a battery because batteries are DC powered it's not as efficient for doing that and so there are some losses in the system and also our shed here and the carport is quite a long distance from the house we've got a cable that's about 50 meters long and so there are some losses in that length of cable as well but these are just things that we have to deal with and in the future we will also have the DC coupled system as well which is much more efficient at charging batteries because it goes from solar panels in DC straight into batteries in DC there's no conversion there but a DC coupled system is not as efficient at powering lots of high-powered appliances like heat pumps or breweries or canning stations which we will have all of those things in the future as well and so instead of trying to choose for us which one is best which way to go we're just going for both and having The Best of Both Worlds cool I think that's probably enough up here let's head down to the house and show you where all of this stuff culmates and some of the changes that we've made inside there do you want to stop here for a moment yes I do so guy mentioned a DC coupled system which is what we had before we now have an AC coupled system in the future when this building is redone we will put more panels on the roof here because we'll design the roof to be in the right direction for the Sun and we will install a DC coupled system here which will connect to the batteries that are going to be in the house so we've thought this out for the long term we only have the AC couple but this will come the DC couple system will come when we do this building yes okay moving on yeah probably one of the most complicated things about this whole thing has been trying to work out where we want to go with the whole thing in the end and then trying to work backwards from there and install the things that we need at the time that we have the buildings for all the space for at the time but so far it's been working really well to do it in this kind of staged approach okay here is the new and improved but mostly the same solar equipment we had many discussions about where we were ultimately going to cite all of this equipment we talked about building a shed outside we talked about putting it all up at the carport end and running power down to the house but ultimately we've settled on putting it in the house in the small room the utility room where we've got all the heat pump stuff and the underfloor heating stuff we're also going to have a big networking Hub in here as well and that felt like the best place for it all all of the technical stuff in one small room but all inside in the house so it's safe it's secure within the building so let me talk you through what we've got in here now we used to have one inverter one of these here we now have two of them running in parallel so we used to have up to five kilowatts of power maximum power at any one time we now have double that up to 10. and they can actually deliver up to 20 kilowatts a for a peak of I think up to about a minute or so so if there is something that kind of pushes it over briefly because of startup power then they can actually handle that which is good and then the other major new thing in here is this big gray box over here which is where all of the fuses and all the cables have been nicely kind of hidden away and tied it in there to keep them out of sight because they don't look great when there's a mess of cables but also to keep it safe because we've got a whole bunch of DC stuff going on in this box and they need very big fuses we have 200 amp fuses and 100 amp fuses and so to have those like visible on the wall like we used to have is not great so the guys at soloshop put together this box and they pre-mounted all the fuses in the right locations and they've got some really big chunky bits of copper in there to distribute the power both on the positive side and the negative side really nicely and then the other thing that has changed we used to have one rack mount of batteries we used to have four we've now added a second rack with two batteries in that so we now have six batteries which gives us I think 14 and a half kilowatt hours of battery storage and we've got space to add another four if and when we need them and since we bought the first round of batteries the company that makes them called pylon Tech have actually now added larger batteries to their repertoire so these are all 2.4 kilowatt hours each and they now have a three point something one and a five point something one as well so if we need to put bigger storage into the same kind of the same amount of space then there is an option for that as well but at the moment we don't have a huge amount running we don't have a huge amount turned on because we're not really living here it's still a building site and so whilst we have some data about our power usage and what our kind of General tickover is we don't yet really know how much we're going to use on a daily basis or on a weekly basis or whatever so there's a lot of scope for making adjustments and adding and scaling the system if we need to so that is pretty much the tool there isn't a huge amount to it there's a few components they all talk to each other there's lots of network cables and stuff going on so that all the different devices can communicate and they all know the status of everything the state of charge and how much power is coming in and how much power is going out which is really useful it's also cloud-based so I can monitor it from anywhere in the world if I want to but that does sound a bit weird but it's a great system and we're really happy with it and I really like the way that it looks in here I put quite a lot of effort into making it look neat and tidy and as professional as I could because I always like to think that if something looks good then it is good that's not always true but I like things to look nice as well as be functional so shall we talk a little bit about some of the reasons why we've done this and why we've chosen some of these things and all that stuff so maybe we should start with why have we gone off grid in the first place yeah we get asked this a lot because the house did have power when we bought it it very quickly got disconnected um and there is several reasons and so else as always I'll start with probably the one that is most likely to be different to many other countries so energy in Portugal is tier-based and it's not tier based on usage it's tier based on the amount of energy you can use at any one time or the maximum power that you can be consuming so if you have a kettle on a toaster or an oven on Etc and as those tears get bigger the cost per unit of energy also gets bigger now we know that we are going to be a relatively high energy usage Customer because we have a heat pump system we've got brew kit I'm going to have a workshop we've got canning gear guy likes to cook with multiple ovens so we're going to be in one of those top tiers and I think it goes something like and don't quote me on this there's a three point something a four point something a 6.9 I don't know what there's something else in the middle and I think the top one is about 13. but this is the biggest point is all those top couple of Tears aren't available to every home and because we live out in the middle of the rural area it's very unlikely that the cabling on the street goes anywhere near that so that's one of the reasons is very unlikely that actually we could get the power that we wanted and if you can't get that power then you need to go three-phase which is more very much more complicated you need to go through a whole approval process and actually when we bought this I I'm going to guess that it was on the lowest reach like the three point something or maybe four point something because all they had was a couple of sockets and some lights so for us to even get it turned back on and that uh to move up a grade the whole house would have been rewired first before they would even connect that to the house and anyone who lives in Portugal who is visit Portugal or is in any of the Portugal Facebook groups will know that the paperwork to do any of that kind of stuff is crazy and can take several years and we were not willing to do that and so it made the decision really easy for us we were like well we want to have this staged approach we want to be able to wire our house at a speed that suits us and so we were like well we'll just start with a small off-grid system and then we'll scale it up as we go so this is one of the biggest reasons was just the availability of the power on the street and the the way in which it would have meant we had to do this renovation in terms of the rewiring secondly I'm not a fan of fossil fuels I'm not a fan of any company who uses promotes fossil fuels all of the big energy providers here while they have a lot of Renewables are still supporting and kind of giving a knee up to those fossil fuel companies and from a values perspective that just doesn't sit well with me all the people who invest in those companies get a profit or a share based on fossil fuel usage and I just don't agree with that so I didn't want to go that route and energy companies are just really painful to work with I mean any Telco company any of the big companies are just difficult and I would prefer not to have to deal with them so that was a value-based or ethical based decision that's mostly me not guy um so those two things together were just like yeah it's just easier to go off good another big part of it is the the self-sufficiency aspect and that's a big part of our move here to Portugal we want to grow more of our own food renovate our own house all of that kind of stuff kind of fits with our approach to how we want to do a lot of this stuff and most people will probably be aware of the recent energy crises and the fact that that's just going to continue in obviously we don't know how it's going to continue but when there is so much uncertainty if we can have certainty by being responsible for our own power generation and also know how the whole system works so we're almost self-sufficient in repair work as well because we installed the whole system then that just gives us a lot more confidence or I don't know what the other word would be control is a good word control of the system control of the future from an energy security perspective and we're fortunate that we are in a position that we can invest in this now and because we are planning to be here for some time like 20 years 30 years however long it will pay itself back it has been an upfront investment rather than a few hundred euros here and a few hundred euros there for a monthly electricity bill but because we are high energy users or will be in the future and because there is so much sun here in Portugal even in the winter we think this is a good move for us but really over time the data will either prove or disprove that and we are willing to be wrong but I kind of think that we're right and I guess something else that has driven a lot of this decision-making and investing in this system and we'll talk about the costs in a minute I guess it's my Curious mind we've done a lot of research into solar watched a lot of YouTube videos about various different sizes of systems all the way from like a small cabin in the woods to an RV to massive houses that are powered purely on solar and having seen that I was like I wonder if we can do that and I like the idea that we can I like the idea of being able to show that it is possible to run an entire house with all the modern conveniences because I don't want to compromise on comfort and convenience but I do want to be in control of the situation and of course one of the big things we have to look at is does it make Financial sense but we are willing to be the guinea pigs and to do the experiment and to invest in this having done a lot of research and being fairly confident but to be the ones who install it who gather the data who openly admit how it goes whether it works or not how much we spent and all that kind of stuff because that is the beauty of this wonderful platform that we are all enjoying right now is through watching other people do stuff you can learn things and you can decide whether it works for you or makes sense for you but without people doing it and sharing it it's hard to know what's possible and so that's one of the things that drives us to do this stuff is to not just see if it's possible but to show if it's possible so uh yeah that's kind of what we're doing shall we talk about the cost the initial install that we had was 6250 all in not including any of the electrical wiring of the house component so just the solar equipment 6250 and then we've added to that with more batteries and the second inverter and the femur out there and some cable runs and another six panels yes that all that second phase is then seven to fifty so we're in for 13 and a half we have another couple of phases to go so they include moving all the stuff up onto the cardboard so that might cost us a little bit more cable but nothing we already have the panels we have the gear Etc and then the fourth phase is when we do the outbuildings and we put more panels up on the top there we already have the charge controller for that so this is the DC coupled system so there'll be some more cabling there'll be some more panels um but it shouldn't be anywhere near as much as we've already invested it will be a couple of more thousand but yeah 13 and a half all in which should get us quite some time before we need to do any more work to the solar system okay I think that is pretty much all we have to say and hopefully we've answered most of the frequently asked questions but if you do have more questions whether they are high level or a bit more detailed and Technical do stick them down below and if we get lots of similar ones or if we get lots of questions we'll do a follow-up video of course we will do follow-ups in the future as the system expands and as we get more data and all that kind of stuff but if there is something specific that you want to know about what we've done or how we've done it then do let us know and we will do our best to answer you but I think we'll leave it there for now thank you for watching we will see you in the next video bye for now bye

Channel: MAKE. DO. GROW.

Views: 119,383

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Id: 5sqw7vHwhGU

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023