DIY Solar Setup: Easy to Follow Step-by-Step Instructions

in this video i'll do an introduction guide to building your own diy solar setup if you're trying to understand and learn this for the very first time this video is for you i'm not going to overburden you with technical terms but rather provide a high level overview while still showing the step-by-step process of assembling everything that i believe anyone can perform the advantage of learning how to build one of these is that you easily can customize your setup modify in the future as your needs change and most importantly develop an important skill set so let me start off by giving you a quick overview to explain how the system works there are four primary components solar panels collect energy from the sun and then pass the energy via cables to what's called a charge controller a charge controller regulates the energy from the solar panels that it then passes to the batteries where the energy is stored in order to get the energy out of the battery we need to convert it to usable electricity through a device called an inverter this is the device that we plug in the items that we want to power such as your phones laptops or refrigerator as far as connecting all of these components there are three primary sets of cables that you can purchase that already have the proper connectors on the ends and are set up to be used in this system cables to connect the charge controller to the battery cables to connect the battery to the inverter cables that connect the solar panel to the charge controller we will cover a few other miscellaneous items throughout this video but at the core that's it as far as tools go here's what you'll need phillips screwdriver large and small crescent wrench or socket wrenches needle nose pliers will also come in handy step 1 connecting the charge controller to the battery let's grab our battery charge controller cables to connect our battery and our small phillips screwdriver please do this step before connecting the solar panels to the charge controller as it will damage the charge controller without first connecting to the battery if you look at this charge controller and this is common amongst most of these devices you'll have six places to plug in cables on this one you'll see two holes with pv plus and pv minus pv simply means photovoltaic this is where we'll connect solar later the next two holes are what we're interested in at this step bat plus and bat minus this is where we'll connect the cables from the charge controller to you guessed it the battery the last two holes are load which we don't cover in this video let's grab our cables to connect the charge controller to the battery these particular cables have lugs on one end that will connect to the battery and the other ends are stripped which will connect to the charge controller you will notice that these cables are both black so you need to pay special attention to these when connecting them to the battery in order to keep the positive and negative connections correct okay let's connect our two cables to the charge controller by inserting the stripped ends of the cables into the charge controller use your phillips screwdriver and turn counterclockwise on both the bat plus and bat minus terminals which opens a connector then we'll take our two cable ends which are stripped and slide them in one at a time to the terminal as we slide each in we'll tighten the screw down turning clockwise you want to tighten these firmly to avoid the cables coming out be sure to test by giving a light pull on the cables to ensure that they do not slip out next we'll connect the cables to the battery to do this first we'll unscrew the bolts and our batteries next we'll take the negative cable and connect it to the first battery now before you do this double and triple check that your negative cable is connected to the bat minus connector on your charge controller i then place a negative cable lug to the negative battery post and insert the bolt tightening it down i won't tighten it overly tight at this point as we're going to add the inverter cable later finger tight at this point is fine now i'll connect the positive cable to the battery using the same approach as with the negative cable again let's just finger tighten down the nut now that we have the charge controller connected you'll notice the charge controller screen is turned on you can go through it at this time and configure settings based on your model i found this particular model as easier to configure with their app than using the interface options on the charge controller itself but do whatever is easiest for you there are two primary settings that you're going to want to configure you'll want to define the battery type that you're connected to in this case we're connected to a lithium battery next we want to define whether we're connected to a 12 or 24 volt battery in this case we're connected to a 12 volt battery this charge controller comes with a temperature sensor which can easily be plugged in if you buy a charge controller without one it is highly recommended that you purchase this to monitor the temperature of where you store your batteries additionally this charge controller has an optional bluetooth module that you can connect that allows you to observe the information for the charge controller through your app this completes step one step two connecting the charge controller to a solar panel for this step we're going to grab our 100 watt solar panel you can add more panels but for simplicity's sake we're going to stick with one panel in this video and extension cables with mc4 connectors on one end that are stripped on the other end for this step you'll need just a small phillips screwdriver during the process of connecting the cables it is important to observe the plus and minus signs on these cables that come off the solar panels when connecting to the charge controller in order to go from the cables on the solar panels to your charge controller you'll need the extension cables with mc4 connectors on one end and are stripped on the other end okay i'll keep the solar panel out of the sun for now connect our extension cables to the cables coming off the solar panels that will run to the charge controller i have two black cables and that's fine but just be careful to keep track of which is positive and which is negative even adding a small piece of tape on one end or writing a plus or minus sign might help a bit to keep things straight now with the stripped end of the cables i'll start with the negative in and insert it into my charge controller give it a slight tug to ensure it does not come out next insert the positive cable into the pv plus connection and tighten it down remember we have two holes in our charge controller marked pv minus and pv plus again pv is short for photovoltaic power which is the power is coming in from our solar panel now let's put our solar panel into the sun and see what happens so now our solar panel is in the sun and we're connected as you can see on the front of the charge controller we're showing a charge coming in and now we're officially charging our battery with this setup i can view this information on my app as well along with information on how charged the battery is so now we're harvesting power from the sun and storing it in a battery to be used later to power appliances and devices that's pretty cool right so up to this point the video we have confirmed our solar panel our charge controller and battery setup work now we're going to move forward in our final step to pulling power from the battery this completes step two step three connecting the battery to an inverter before we proceed to this step we need to bring in the solar panel disconnected when working with this system we don't want to interact with our setup when actively pulling power from the solar panels to do this we'll simply disconnect the cables from the solar panels connected to the pv plus and pv minus connections on the charge controller we're also going to disconnect our charge controller from the battery to do this unscrew the positive bolt first on the battery and remove the positive charge controller cable next unscrew the negative bolt on the battery and also remove the negative charge controller cable now that we've disconnected our solar panel and charge controller from the battery let's connect our inverter to the battery to do this let's first connect our cable to the inverter first not the battery first to do this connect the positive inverter cable to the positive inverter post and then connect the negative inverter cable to the negative post on the inverter now we're ready to connect the inverter to the battery but before we do this it is recommended that we put a fuse on our positive inverter cable i have a 2000 watt inverter so 175 to a 200 amp fuse works just fine i'll post a link below where i purchase mine when connecting the fuse to the positive inverter cable be sure that the fuse is flush with a lug make sure that there's no washer in between the inverter cable and the fuse now bring the negative cable from the inverter and connect it to the battery then using the bolt on the cable that connects the fuse to the cable place it on the positive battery terminal it's going to spark but this is to be expected now let's finger tighten these bolts down to allow us to test this out we'll tighten it much tighter momentarily when we add the charge controller back on we have completed the connection of the inverter to the battery we can plug in devices and appliances and power them as shown here earlier we disconnected the charge controller but we'll head it back now we're basically just repeating step one at this point i'll begin by removing the inverter from the positive terminal negative terminal the battery bring the negative cable from the charge controller and connect it to the negative post of the battery along with the lug connecting the negative cable to the inverter and tighten down the bolt with a wrench next i'll bring the positive cable from the charge controller and add it to the positive post on the battery along with the lug from the cable connecting to the inverter again i'll tighten this down with a wrench it's important to note that when tightening the lugs on cables to the batteries that there's no washer in between the battery posts and the lugs on the end of the cables you want these lugs flush on the battery post we do want the washers on top of the lugs pushing them down to the battery post so finally we'll connect the solar panel back to the charge controller connect the negative cable first then the positive cable step four testing our setup all right it's a moment of truth we've got solar charging the battery so let's turn on the inverter and power some devices excellent everything is operating as expected i've got a pure sine wave coming off the inverter which means we can safely power our electronics and appliances we can power most devices that you can normally power through a typical wall socket in your home such as a tv or refrigerator one important detail about discharging the battery there's a level of charge that you don't want to exceed when drawing power with the inverter you can safely discharge down to 20 of the battery's capacity under load with the inverter powering devices if you go under 20 of the battery's capacity while you have a load on it you can damage the battery you can add a battery monitor to the battery to keep track of that for this battery does come with a bluetooth and i can monitor that information in the app hopefully this video gave you enough information to get you started on your first diy solar setup it's really not as challenging as you may think if you follow the steps outlined here you'll have everything that you need again i'll post links to everything that we covered in the description and comment section below i'll pin a comment to link all the items if you have any thoughts any feedback any questions again feel free to post those below as always stay safe out there you

Channel: City Prepping

Views: 1,319,621

Keywords: diy, solar, how to, guide, diy solar, solar setup, prepper, emergency preparedness, shtf

Id: M89LDaTzgmo

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022