DIY Solar Generator - Save Thousands by Building Your Own

I just did a review on this three thousand dollar solar generator how we built this version for about ten percent of the cost and it has about 90 of the functionality hey it's Brock here with Rock Hill Farms and this is a really nice solar generator that I just did a review on and this is an empty box that we're going to try to make a cheap DIY replacement option for a version of this that you can get without spending so much money and you know when I'm looking at what I want to make videos about I really do give a lot of thought to the comments on my previous videos and when I reviewed this solar generator everyone said yeah that's really nice but there's no way I'm spending three thousand dollars you know to have this backup power source and I can really relate to that it's a great unit this is uh rated for 3 000 charge cycles that basically means you could run it down and recharge it every single day for 10 years but three thousand dollars is a lot of money I've got something to add to that at the end of that 10 years the batteries aren't completely gone they still May hold 80 percent of their capacity from what I've from what I've read now I've got my dad here to help me build this DIY option and he's actually been running these forever just on a on a smaller budget and you'll never get 10 years of recharges out of the kind of battery we're going to use but you know it's all about what you want to spend and so you actually have a need for one of these right now yeah and you had no interest in spending that kind of money on oh no uh his brother's wedding is going to have be an outdoor venue and they needed lights and and music and so we needed some way to easily and practically Supply electricity to this outdoor venue and it just so happened that Brock came up with this uh generator at about that same time so everything worked out great so we're going to build what he was gonna do and we're gonna talk about what it's actually cost us because we're going to use a lot of stuff we just already have laying around and we're going to talk about what it would cost to build a really nice version of this with lithium ion batteries and what it would cost if you were buying everything to do it the way we're doing it with you you know just basically car batteries so anyway let's get this thing put together see what we can run on it and do a little comparison like I said earlier my goal is to not spend any more money than I absolutely have to now a lot of my viewers if you've got property and Equipment you've probably got an extra battery or a battery on a piece of equipment that you don't use very often one of these batteries I had mounted on my trailer to run a winch but I hardly ever run that winch maybe two or three times a year same thing with the other battery which was on this 1941 Model A I start that tractor a few times a year so having these batteries here for those pieces of equipment and never using them will ruin the batteries so actually this isn't just free it's going to maintain the batteries and make them last longer now this dad had recently bought this 1500 watt inverter is around 150 dollars right and so the first components of this are you have to have an inverter to turn your 12 volt power into 110 and we looked at those today and you can get really big ones for a few hundred dollars two thousand watts is my generous is 2200 Watts a 2000 watt so getting almost the same power was a hundred and seventy dollars at Harbor Freight and I've got two batteries here and we're going to connect those two positive to positive right here and then the positive on the inverter will go on that and negative to negative on the batteries negative on the inverter and that gives you power right there so while I'm setting that up I was thinking about when I was a kid you used to always when our power went out we just still had lights and TV and it feels like you didn't spend it very much on that setup so how did you do it 20 years ago well it's the same kind of story I always had a battery that wasn't getting used much a boat battery or or one to a antique car and uh it was pretty simple I mean from the time I learned what an inverter did I went out and bought one and we would use them for when the power went out we had a lot of problem with our power going out for just a few hours and uh if you can power a couple lights and a TV and and your Internet modem uh you you'll be a hero to your young kids because you know everybody gets their entertainment then and I also used them uh I'd take a battery with me and an inverter uh when we were tent camping because it was able to have a light and a radio and maybe a fan it was it was luxury for tent camping now at the house you didn't just have the inverter and plug stuff into it you uh seems like you would set up a series of things that were all on a plug-in so you could just swap it over you can if you know how to do it electrically you can wire a setup like this into a breaker box and have it to where everything on that circuit will work but same thing you plug into that room for instance the way I remember you doing it you didn't even go into the box you just had like a plug-in that I did at one point I I had it where I could plug in certain uh lights and into either the house current or plug unplug it plug it into an inverter yeah so if the power went out he would unplug all of the lights in that room from the wall and plug it into this inverter so that was a kind of a unique and simple way to do that that I haven't really seen other people doing I powered a small trailer house when a family member was desperate for a place to live and didn't have the funds to to do much and I run the water off a 12 volt RV pump I had an inverter that I powered directly into the power lines and you could walk into that trailer flip the light switch on the lights that come on go over and pick up the remote turn the TV on watch a movie ceiling fan would run the basic low level you know didn't draw very many amps and you never all worked you never spent three thousand dollars on it all right most of the time like I say it would be a battery I already had and I used the inverter for a number of different things uh just like you would this this mountain when only it wasn't as powerful the newer the newer lithium iron phosphate batteries are amazing because they'll hope they weigh about a third as much and and claim to hold about twice as much energy so that's definitely a lot more portable now than it used to be another thing the inverters years ago just transferred power now they have limits in them to where if the battery doesn't have enough voltage it'll shut itself down if you're drawing too much voltage through the plug-ins it'll shut itself down they have a walk meter in there to tell you how many watts you're drawn but what a lot of people probably don't realize and and this has changed a lot too in recent years uh most things don't draw very many watts uh you could you can have a LED bulb that runs on under 10 watts pretty easily and uh and so you run a couple LED lamps I looked it up in a 55 inch flat screen TV draws about 57 Watts uh modem Internet modem is about is under 10. uh you could you could pretty much light and have your entertainment for under 100 Watts yeah and a battery a good battery will run that for several hours where there's any and by that time you had time to go get some fresh gas fire up the generator make other plans if if the power doesn't come back on so we've got this wired up now we should be able to plug something in if we want right and um and these are used batteries and they're probably they're probably nowhere near fully charged so we may we may see a failure here but uh this is the basic setup I put each of these batteries on the battery charger for a little while but like he said they're each a couple years old and don't get used much so they might be weak and putting it putting a solar charger on will help to maintain the life because when a lead acid battery gets low on charge it uh it will corrode the the lead plates and then they short out and so keeping it charged up is is uh the life of the battery when you're talking about acid basically just before we set this up in a box and get it finished the way we want you want to make sure it's going to work at all so we're going to start with the really low power draw we'll turn this on it's showing it was drawn let's see how many watts it's drawn oh the light's already on sure it's weird this light's not showing that it's drawing any power off that inverter this is a cheap inverter so that's that's a that's a LED light it probably is drawing like one watt it's not enough to register on the machine so let's go up a step to something but I'm I would bet that it'll run this drill I don't know you know how much power this uses see if it says right on it nine amp drill 849 Watts then it dropped back to 425. yeah I actually already knew that because I measured it on the the universe and was getting about that same number about 800 it started up and 400 continuous so the two most important parts of this setup and where you spend your money is your inverter and the type of batteries you have the better the batteries and inverter the more power you're going to get yeah but that's where your cost is at too and when it comes to like the batteries or the solar you can just continue to add more to it you want to start out I think you want to start off out with the inverter that you're going to end up with because you don't want to keep buying inverters but when you're adding another battery you're not buying a whole new set of batteries each time yeah and so now the only thing that we've shown that we just bought was these battery cables that link these two together now you recently bought the inverter around 150 dollars now I already had this tote actually boxes like this are fairly cheap and it's got a long handle and wheels I think it's going to be convenient now we should probably actually just set this on the ground to do it so this setup with the two batteries is heavier than the geneverse but it's got wheels on it so if I had to take one of these 100 yards from here I'd rather take this one so at this point we've demonstrated that this is going to work it should put out 1500 watts to the 2000 that we get here I drilled a couple of holes in this put zip ties on it now the inverter is locked in place it can't short out on the batteries you can plug in over here you can read the display if we wanted to we could run little cords from here into here and not have to open and close this it's got wheels I've already rolled it it rolls pretty easy now the the next thing is how do you charge this and basically you're going to have the same options you have with this they're just not built into it so I've got a battery charger and I can charge this up in the shop then if you wanted to charge it off your vehicle jumper cables and if you want to charge it solar solar panels are not that expensive nowadays especially if you want a trickle charge so we actually went and bought one to charge this with this is from Harbor Freight it's a 25 watt solar charger and for a trickle charge that's actually a lot I have a 7 watt version of this that's been maintaining the battery on my two fuel pumps for the last couple years and I've never had to charge that battery just out because you don't use it that much yeah now if you're going to use this heavily like you are this one this one came with two 200 watt charging solar panels so 100 watt version of this at Harbor Freight was about 120 dollars so you'd be spending five hundred dollars on 400 watts of charging but that's a lot of charging capacity that's like for heavy use the other thing you need with it is some kind of a charge regulator to keep your your uh solar from over charging the battery and this one was twenty dollars it it regulates it to a constant voltage your solar panel might put out anywhere from 14 to 18 volts and you don't want to try to get put that into a battery so my system is just to clip these on to the battery and these clips come with with the solar panel so pretty simple setup now let's talk about cost for building up a unit like this so first option is you say I don't have anything and I want to build my own setup you're going to spend a minimum of a hundred dollars on a battery yep for this size of inverter you're going to spend at least 150 dollars so there's 250 dollars you don't have to put it in a box but you can get a plastic toolbox like this and a dolly or whatever you want to do you're probably probably looking at three hundred dollars to have an inverter and a battery in a box and then this solar panel was seventy dollars plus 20 for the Pro so you're at 90. so say 350 to build a basic and if you want a second battery then it goes up about a hundred dollars more yeah so the most basic version of this you can do is going to be about 350 dollars as opposed to three thousand three hundred dollars so you can save three thousand dollars now this is not as nice as this but it's also not bad for that price now let's say you really want to try to match this you're going to spend a lot more because these are the lithium phosphate batteries and you've looked at pricing those yeah uh about the cheapest you can get a hundred amp uh lithium iron phosphate battery is around 400 and most run into five and six hundred dollar range so if you sit five hundred dollars and anticipate you needed two of them that's a thousand dollars right there you could get the the 2000 watt inverter for under 200 and I'm rounding up there's tax in all this so at that point you're at twelve hundred dollars Harbor Freight sells uh uh solar panel 100 watt solar panel for 125 I believe and and if we're really trying to go Apples to Apples this came with 400 watts of charging capability so if you're buying it at Harbor Freight you're gonna spend another 500 yeah so 1700 yeah you're still at about half the cost and you would need to get a better um what is this thing charge controller you would need to get a better charge controller their good charge controller was like seventy dollars it would handle up to 500 watts so to build the best version of this that you could now we're at 1800 and let's say you get a nice box that everything fits in well and has wheels and a handle maybe another hundred dollars so you could probably build this yourself for eighteen hundred dollars and have it be portable we only spent ninety dollars today that was our entire cost to build this was ninety dollars because we already had some stuff all right hopefully this was helpful to you guys I appreciate you taking time to watch the video I'll put links on the screen to a couple more of our videos and I'll see you next time

Channel: Rockhill farm

Views: 184,455

Keywords: solar generator, diy solar generator, running an inverter on a car battery

Id: upLh5uzpPkc

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023