EcoFlow Delta 2 Max Solar Generator Power Station Review

so I think ecoflow has knocked it out of the park again if you're looking for a kind of mid-weight or kind of lightweight Power Station solar generator whatever you want to call it not necessarily need something to run the whole house maybe you're running tools remotely or if you just have like a van life setup or a small cabin a tiny home this might work if you're only requiring 120 volt power this is the all-new Delta II Max now I think it should have been called the Delta Max II because they already have the Delta II it just gets confusing they have their whole Delta series which is the Delta Delta Max and Delta Pro and this is the mid-range for that Delta series from ecoflow I really like it so this is the Delta II Max this is the Delta 2 max expansion battery and I've been doing tests on this for a number of weeks I have also the Delta 1 Max as well as two expansion batteries for that and I've done a review on that in the past the Delta 1 Max had lithium ion batteries and this has lithium iron phosphate also known as lfp life po4 now there are some things that I do just like about this unit so you do want to make sure you stay to the end of this but I'm going to go through the whole testing of this I'm going to show you charging on a clear sunny day how well it performs in real life can we really get the thousand watt solar input on this this has two mppts in it we're going to test it out and see how well it actually performs to see if this would be a good unit for you only you can decide that but then I'll give you my report on if I think it's worth buying so stay tuned for this let's go ahead and get into the ecoflow Delta 2 max review as far as what comes out of the box obviously the expansion battery is separate so in the box with just the Delta 2 max you're going to have the unit you're going to have a bunch of pieces of paper here you've got a quick start guide you've got your user manual which it's confusing to me because the first page is nothing this page is all your disclaimers and then this page is your specs and then we already get into German I mean this is like the shortest user manual I've ever seen so they must be more reliant on the quick start guide and honestly that's perfectly fine because no one ever reads these anyway I mean except for the quick start guide but if you want to know all the specs they are listed on the second page here in the user manual I guess it's the third page but either way this has a lithium iron phosphate battery it is a 2048 watt hour capacity and up to 3 000 Cycles now people focus on the Cycles way way too much for me Cycles aren't nearly as important as how much can I discharge from it how fast can I recharge it from solar because I'm thinking off-grid or grid down situations because this is about preparedness and then as well how expandable is the system the thing that comes in the box is the AC cable it is able to charge up to 1800 watts from a wall charger or gas down generator this is the car charger which is rated to 8 amps so it's a hundred Watts input and then it's got this dc5521 is DC 5521 is this cable here comment down below seriously if you use this cable comment down below what you use it for the only thing I've heard these things used for is cpaps and or converting it to a cigarette lighter Port but it already has a cigarette lighter Port I want to get over everything that's in the box there are no solar panel adapters you've got your warranty card DIY instructions double Your Capacity all these little leaflets in here it really is frustrating to me that they don't include an xt60i to mc4 adapter now xt60i is the orange cable and then the yellow is the xt60 notice that the xt60i has this extra pin whereas the normal xt60 does not have this extra pin and that just allows for more current so current is amps or also represented by an i in some charts anyway it frustrates me that ecoflow doesn't include solar chargers because literally to have these made in China it's like two bucks if that right I think you could flow is themselves in the foot by not including those they cost them next to nothing to include them and it increases the betterment of the user experience rant over now all the specs are listed here on top of the Delta II Max on the front here we've got our screen and yes I do have this icon that shows me that there is an error or something it's a tool showing that it needs repair or something like that but I've got four USB a two USBC and 100 Watts I can turn on the USB ports right here I've got my fans along the side for cooling and on the backside we've got our charging inputs we have two xt60i connectors each one of these is to an mppt charge controller it's a maximum PowerPoint tracking it's just the best solar input computer that can go in here and you've got two of them each rated to 11 to 60 volts and 15 amps which makes it pretty easy to Max these out by putting up to 500 watts of solar it's the easiest way to get 500 watts input is by connecting three 200 watt panels I like to use the Ridgid 200 panels from powered portablesolar.com that's my website I put on there the exact kits and systems that I personally use and recommend so if you want to know what those are go visit over there but we're going to test to see if we can get 500 watts input on each of these got a perfectly clear sunny day and I've got the panels out ready for that then we have our c14 plug right here the c14 is the receptacle of the C13 plug right here you guys didn't know you'd be learning all sorts of plug types in this video but this will do up to 1800 watts input which is very impressive which means you can charge this whole thing in just over an hour about an hour and 15 to 20 minutes or so once it reaches 80 percent the input rate slows down because simply if you have a battery that's a hundred percent or is that zero percent and it's rated to two thousand watt hours basically you can easily fit 1800 watts worth of energy going into that because the capacity is more than 1800 Watt hours but once you get to that last little bit it's hard to fit a larger volume of energy into a smaller space kind of simplifying things here and so because of that it slows down the energy going in because there's not as much space left in the battery now the expansion battery I love that it has the storage space right up on top here and it uses a simple xt-150 cable you can buy longer ones these xt-150 plugs are really really Hefty and this is the same one that you use with the smart dual fuel generator which I've got as well I've got a video coming out about that and you can connect the smart fuel generator to these different systems whether it's the Delta Pro or the Delta Max and then of course we don't want to forget we've got our regulated cigarette lighter Port here and then our dc5521s here and I was actually using this earlier to run my Glacier this is the ecoflow portable DC fridge it has a battery built into it and right now I've got it charging up on solar I'm at 71 percent and it's only 11 o'clock I mean this was at five percent this morning because we had horrible weather yesterday I didn't get any charge so this ran for two days and then I have a clear sunny day today and in like two hours we're up to 71 percent from five percent really like that and I'm just using the ecoflow bifacial 220 watt solar panel here on that unit this has two zones in it it can do fridge and freezer it's got a ice maker in here as well as a battery you can charge from your car solar panels all of that let's get into the testing of this first of all I want to do a heavy drain I'm going to connect this battery to this unit we're going to put a heavy drain on it and see if it can really handle 2400 watts output consistently for at least 15 minutes and if it can do that then for me it's totally good for running high power our output devices and then we'll charge it up from solar we're going to start with 600 watts into one input see if it works that's just three 200 watt 12 volt panels we'll see how it works I do love this storage compartment up here but what I'm going to do this battery is at 100 and the main unit this is about 50 pounds by the way this is like 40 pounds this one's at 88 and you can see that tool Mark that's up there saying that it needed some repairs or something like that the firmware is up to date and I have confirmed with customer service and tech support that's there and it's fine I don't know why it's there but it is what it is there are two battery expansion ports on here I'm gonna go ahead and connect to the first one by the way I'm on Tick Tock now just Minuteman prep on Tick Tock if you're interested go check it out there it's a lot more short content so that way if you want to get a lot of information in a short amount of period go check it out I'd truly love to have you guys over there as well and those who support me on patreon you guys make all of this possible thank you so much so if you want to be a supporter of the channel and get direct access to me go to patreon.com Minuteman prep okay so I've changed my setup here the expansion battery is meant to lock and there's actually a Groove here on the bottom that's meant to lock this in it is designed to stack which was really nice the original Delta pros and Delta 1 Max were not I'm going to go ahead and plug this back in to that battery port and now we see this battery sign show up here and this is our connectivity so I do have this connected to my phone app output is 1540 and then I need to add a little bit more to get close to that 2400 watt output so we grab another heat gun I'm going to put this on a little bit lower setting oh we hit 2400 per second okay we're at 23.90 we're jumping between like 2300 and 2400 it's good enough for me I'm gonna go ahead and let these run for about 15 minutes and we'll see if there's any issues it's actually been 27 minutes then 54 here 68 here go ahead and turn those off right there that ran for 27 minutes non-stop without any issues definitely very good basically twice as long as I was originally planning and we can see now that there's still a balancing act going on between these this battery is discharging into this battery so they will get pretty close to same state of charge they don't always get the exact same and that's pretty normal if you have a huge difference where one is staying at like 100 neither one is staying at fifty percent then you want to charge the other one to match whatever the higher percentage is or drain the higher one down to lower one then reconnect them restart the system and that usually will rebalance them if they don't Auto balance but usually they rebalance on their own like this this is my solar panel array that is used for testing lots of different things so I've got three of these panels connected in series let's go see what kind of voltage we're getting got my Fluke meter set to volts on DC wow look at that 56.5 volts I expected it to be much higher so perfect we're within range I also forgot to mention earlier that there's this switch here you can see on the diagram it has a slow and fast charge AC speed so if you want to charge at 1800 watts you flip it over if you want it to be a slower speed flip it over to the right and that gets you a different charge speeds without having to go into the app go ahead and connect this xt60i right here into pv1 put everything together right here let's see what we get that's Max input is 500 watts I have 600 watts connected getting 472 Watts right now that's actually I'm totally good with that it's really common for solar input to only be even as close to 80 percent of the rated output whereas this is above 95 of the rated output so I'm totally good with that so we know we're about 470 Watts one of the cool things you can do with these clamp meters is this clamp here is designed to be able to test amps or current that is running through a wire so I've got this set to DC amps you want to take the negative wire put it right through these are getting the reading of 10.9 amps right here almost 11 amps going through and so if you want to know exactly what volts are going through you just take the Watts input which is 474 divided by 10.9 and we're getting 43.5 amps going through right now so your question may be why were we getting about 56 volts when we first checked it and now it's down to around 43 volts that's the difference between VOC on your panel the back there's a sticker VOC is your volts open circuit that's when there's no load when they are not doing any work like charging a battery your volts will be higher and then when it starts working the volts will drop typically to around the VMP which is volts maximum power and that's going to be how many volts the panels are going to be outputting while under load doing work like charging the batteries so when it comes to charge parameters before you connect your VOC has to be below the rated input and then after you connect it needs to be above the minimum rated input so VOC is before you connect don't go over the max input and VMP is don't go under the minimum input with your solar panels and we hit 481 so we are getting really close to the 500 watts input this is incredible I like it a lot of people get hung up on the term solar generator that's the loose term the name that has been given to these systems because it makes it simple for people to understand it's the exact same thing as when you say to your family hey everybody get in the car but you're actually getting in a van or a truck you're not actually getting in a car or even a sedan or a coupe you're not being specific on the exact thing that you're using people say it all the time hey on your iPhone look this up an iPhone is a specific model of a brand so I don't say hey will you look this up on your Android you say hey look this up on your smartphone it's just a general term that's used to make it simple for people so another term is power station which makes a lot of sense and I'm totally good with that I call them both pick a camp and stick with it and then forget about the camps Okay the reason I like these solar generators is because of security and long-term Effectiveness I have multiple generators and I've converted all of them to be dual fuel so that way I can use propane or gasoline and the reason that is is because for emergency preparedness when one I want either multiple fuel types and or just propane that's what I majority of the time run them on because propane doesn't go bad it's easy to store and even in Grid down situations oftentimes it's easier to get than gasoline because the vast majority of people are getting gasoline for their generators so whether I'm going to Home Depot or a gas station and I'm swapping out tanks or in my case I have a 500 gallon tank that has a refill option on it so I can refill the small tanks or you can oftentimes go to a gas station where they have a big tank and can directly pump it into your smaller tank it just gives a variety of options the reason I moved into solar generators one of the biggest reasons was many years ago I went through a hurricane when we lived in Texas and we were without power for weeks well not us we were prepared we had a gasoline generator at the time solar generators were really not a thing at the time so I was a teenager at the time and I specifically remember when my dad walked into the room and said hey I just poured in the last gas can of fuel into the generator after this we will not have any more power if I remember correctly it was about week four so the details may be a little here and there but that's what I remember and it was like an hour after that that the power got restored to our section of the grid it was weeks into the aftermath of the hurricane and we were actually helping our neighbors run their fridges and so it really dawned on me that we needed a solution that was longer lasting and easy to use and especially for security reasons silent and so the beauty of the solar generators is I can run them in my garage or in my bedroom there is no off-gassing there's no fumes there's no anything and they're darn near silent at the very most you'll get these fans blowing inside of here and that's only under high load right now I've got about 500 watts of input going in and I can feel the fans blowing in fact I'll put my mic right next to it there's nothing you really can't hear anything going on so the fume free the safety the long lasting the Cycles I mean this is going to be 10 to 20 years before I have to even think about replacing something on here and so the reality is I never need to worry about replacing it and that's just in my opinion but with a gas generator I need to know how many hours it's been running I need to check the oil I need to keep extra oil on hand I have to keep fuel on hand I have to keep enough fuel for whatever emergency I'm preparing for for me in my opinion the best thing to prepare for is an EMP attack because if you prepare for that you're pretty much prepared for everything so we're talking minimum two years of no power from the grid if that's the case I know the sun's going to show up every single day yeah it may be cloudy there may be alternate things going on but that's where I use my gas generator as a backup to my solar generator because this with the fast wall charger that's built in I use my gas generator to recharge this in about two and a half hours with this extra battery and then this whole setup right here with just a fridge and a freezer easily gives me 24 to 36 hours of run time depending on the ambient temperature how full they are there's a lot of factors there the point being I can exchange about two and a half hours of fuel in my gas generator for 24 to 36 hours of run time off of here and especially in this case where I'm using the ecoflow products I have their dual fuel Smart generator I can literally connect that up to this through the other xt-150 port on the side here so I could have one battery one main unit connect the smart generator to the other side here and I can tell it to automatically start recharging as soon as this whole setup Hits 10 percent and to stop recharging when it hits 80 or 100 I can set that in the app very easily and that becomes a fully automated system so I have a propane tank which is connected to my smart generator my smart generator is connected to the second port on here and then this will recharge and operate off of solar and the batteries and everything like normal without the smart generator running and only when I hit that bottom threshold level will the smart generator automatically kick on recharge this while also doing solar input to the set parameter that I have on the top maybe 80 percent and then it will automatically turn off and I will start draining again off the batteries it's completely automated and it's a quiet smart generator as well and that has fumes and noise and all those things but it works perfectly with the Delta II the Delta 2 Max and the Delta Pro systems to make sure that they are operating continuously in the worst conditions possible as usual I'm going to keep doing tests on this to see how well it performs over time that's what I do with all these systems here is I continue to run tests on them month after month until I find failures in them so that way I can report them to you guys just like I found recently with my Delta Pros but ecoflow has done an extremely good job of taking care of my Delta Pros everything's been under warranty and they've been paying for the shipping back and forth and all the repairs and have had really good communication so I've been very pleased with the customer service from ecoflow I know everybody's gonna have different experiences but overall that's the feedback that I get and with us working with ecoflow on the dealer side as well they've been very good to work with both as a customer and as a dealer if you want to get the best deals on the solar generators that I recommend go to poweredportalsolar.com this is one of the best ways to be prepared in my opinion and that's why I like reviewing this equipment for you guys see y'all in the next video

Channel: Minute Man Prep

Views: 18,077

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Id: NHXdXbqXFZ8

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023