EcoFlow Delta Review How Well Does it Work in Real World Usage

so in today's video we're gonna be going over the Eco flow Delta 1300 solar generator or power station whatever you want to call it now this has been said to be one of the top solar generators on the market right now and we're going to put that to the test so stay tuned you won't want to miss this one don't forget to click that subscribe button down below as well as the thumbs up that really helps out the channel and then of course you get all the updated information as it comes out about new solar generators preparedness items and so on so first of all we need to go over the specs of the Delta well I got my cheat sheet right here so first of all it's called the Delta 1300 and that's based on the battery size it actually says it's 1260 watt hours so close to the 1300 but not quite it is a 12 volt system its draw capacity off the inverter is 1800 watts it is a lithium ion battery now it's surge on the inverter is 3300 watts usually it's double what the continuous wattage is but is 3300 so it's a little bit less than double now it says its life time cycles is 800 now all the inputs are actually here on the back so this is your AC you reset button if you happen to go over 20 amps you hit this reset button here on the solar input it says 65 volts at 10 amps max and it has an exclamation point next to that so basically with that it's gonna be really easy to get for 100 watt panels on it but past that I don't know how else we can get panels on it now the wall charger is extremely fast it can charge up to 1200 watts at a time now this is an XT 60 connection and this actually comes with a car charger as well which is very nice and it comes with a very nice and long XT 62 mc4 adapter so with that that means it's fast as charge times about three hours 15 minutes if you have absolute maximum solar input and that's gonna be easier to get the maximum input because it does have an MPPT charge controller in this that's very good it is pure sine-wave and it only weighs 31 pounds so it's really not that heavy to move around and these handles here do make it quite easy to move now as far as outlets go on the AC side we can see that there's actually a common ground here shared between the two outlets what this means is that you can use up to three three prong devices on it and then if you're not using any three prong cables then you can actually put up to six two prong plugs so it's got plenty of outlets which is great I always like to see at least four it does have the car outlet here and then on the other side here it's got two USB a and these are up to 12 watts I believe and then two more USB these are up to 28 watts and then to USBC up to 65 watts or 60 watts the odd button is right here you have to hold it down the display is really nice and I do like that it shows the actual percentage of the battery I really don't like screens that just have segmented parts where it's giving you a range I'd love to see the actual percentage because then it's easier to know how much power you really have left now when I was opening the box there was like countless papers that said activate your warranty activate your warranty read this check out your warranty and it does say that it comes with a 2 year warranty so that's really good now I've never had to use a warranty from eco flow so I can't say how good their warranty stuff is but it's a two-year warranty so that's nice now one of the coolest things about the Delta and it's also kind of one of its drawback is that you can actually connect up to 6 Delta's together and that's really cool because with an 1800 watt inverter in here you're able to run quite a bit which is really good and a 1300 one hour battery is pretty decent but the hard part is you have to buy an entire other Delta just to get a battery expansion so I really would have preferred to see just expandable batteries but it is expandable and that's very good now as far as I've been told with every Delta that you do connect together you can actually install an extra set of panels for every single Delta so that keeps the charge time the same which is very nice now the biggest outside to the Delta is its solar charge speed it would have been really nice if they had bumped it up to a little bit larger charge controller because the downside to having a low solar input is that if I'm running 200 watts of equipments am running my fridge and some fan during the day if that's using 200 watts and I can only get 400 watts to go in that would mean that I take my 400 watts going in - the 200 Watts going out to run my equipment which leads me with a surplus of 200 watts that 200 watts is going into the battery the issue with that is let's say I use it all that long I wake up it's at 0% and I need to recharge it it's gonna require a minimum of 6 and a half hours at that rate of 200 watts per hour to recharge this completely and we know for most places in the United States it's about five to six hours for maximum solar peak hours so what that means is it can be charged in a day even while running some small equipment but if I were to jump it up 250 watts of output and then it's basically not gonna be charged in today the real issue comes in on when it's a cloudy day if I'm having to use my equipment to keep my food cold and it's a cloudy day well I maybe I'm gonna get a hundred watts out of my solar panels well I'm not going to be able to charge it in a day now that being said that doesn't mean it's bad unit I just wish it was a little bit bigger charge controller for the size of the battery and the size of the inverter but enough about the specs let's get into some testing so this is a pretty straightforward test I've got a bunch of light bulbs here these are each rated to 100 watts these are the old-school incandescent light bulbs since we had a hundred percent I got my plugs here and then I got all these light bulbs on these power strips plug this in turn on oh there's a button here that you have to hold now one of the things I did notice is that we're not running any light bulbs but it doesn't say that there's any power being drawn off it at all even though the fans running the inverter is running so there should be some sort of charge being detected there okay so for one light bulb is if it's using 98 watts that's pretty close to a hundred so that's good so I've added a couple more things here to get it up to its full 1800 watts so everything is a pretty stable draw and that's what I want to test with this is how we'll handle a steady drop 1800 watts so let's go as close as we can to that gonna start off by turning on these heaters and the fan I don't know if you can hear that but the fans have really picked up inside here and now they kind of slowed down a little bit because we're just below 400 watts I'm gonna turn these on here we're at 1780 it says the runtime is going to be 42 minutes the fan is really blowing hard we're just 25 watts under it's a maximum load so let's see how long this runs so with the full load it actually ran a total of 32 and a half minutes now we could say it ran a little bit longer simply because it took a minute or so to get everything turned on now this keeps turning off the fans are not blowing anymore it is definitely quite warm it's not hot we call it 33 minutes that's a big difference from the estimated 42 minutes that it said so for right now I'm actually just going to use the wall charger and one of the nice things I really like about this wall charger is there's no adapter this is it so I got the wall charger like this in okay so now it's giving me this error code and I've seen this happen before well at least we've got the wall charger going here it is blowing out this hot air I was surprised that the fans didn't keep blowing even after this was done because it definitely needs to cool off as much as possible so it says it's got zero input going in it's flashing an exclamation point with a battery and a thermometer with the Sun next to it and what that says high temperature recharge protection recharging time exclamation and high temperature icons flash together frequently occurring after a heavy battery use recharging can be resumed after battery cooling down so basically this just has to sit and will not charge until this is completely cooled down so we'll just have to wait and see how long that is until the starts to recharge so you can see it's about 56% right now it's charging back up it didn't start charging for about an hour and a half and the vents here are still blowing out really warm air which is not necessarily a good thing it's not shedding off that heat very fast but the good news is that charge really quick with the wall charger right now it's putting in about 650 watts now I really prefer my solar generators or power stations to have a three-prong 30 amp RV plug built into it the only one that I know that's actually rated to the full 30 amp capacity is on the Titan but because this has an 1800 watt inverter which is larger than most power stations and solar generators out there I feel comfortable using this three prong plug adapter now this is rated to 1800 watt so I can plug this in and it actually use this up at my cabin to run the downstairs portion of the cabin and I'm going to show you how I do that here in a little bit so right now I'm just gonna let this get fully charged one thing that I found that was interesting last night I left this fully charged and then unplugged it before going to bed but left it on and now it's at 98% so it there is a draw on this obviously it's not a large drop but it doesn't show the actual output of just having the inverter and the unit turned on okay so we're here at the cabin I've got eco flow and it's little carry case here so right now the cabin is actually running full time off the Titan but I want to see if we need to actually do the same with the Delta here I'm going to connect the Delta up right now set up the panels we've got to cook some stuff in the oven run lights fans TV stuff like that we're gonna try to run just like normal and see if it can handle that if not then we know we need to tone it back a little bit now because it doesn't have an RV plug I have to get my own adaptor plug that in the downstairs runs off of this big plug and then the upstairs runs off of this plug that in and then we've got some chargers and extension cord stuff like that runs off this so with that I can't fit any more I might be able to get one two prong plug to fit in there but really even though it has six outlets they're really too close even now this is they're all pushing on each other kind of pushing each other out okay so I'm going to keep it right here for now we're gonna turn the oven on here it actually uses about 800 watts I believe and all that is is keeping a little piece of metal glowing red hot since it's a propane oven that little piece of metal stays glowing red-hot so that way if the gas has to get ignited again it's already there so that's one thing we didn't realize at first is that our propane oven actually uses a good amount of power so the oven just kicked on this is jumping up to 160 170 and it's gonna keep climbing for a while while that gets heated up I'm gonna get the solar panels connected ok so right now it says it's only using 200 watts but this has been going up to 650 watt so it's running the light our cell signal booster the oven it seems to be maxing at about 650 watts so that's good the oven isn't using as much power as we thought and it doesn't always stay on at that high draw the entire time I've got my cables run I got to connect them into here and remember to ignore colors just stick with male-female connectivity it's the easiest way to keep yourself from getting confused go ahead and plug these in hopefully this work so we can see here it's showing rather than the net value it's showing what's the total input and the total output which I actually prefer in many ways because I like to be able to see how my panels are doing so this is really nice I like this display it's very intuitive it's very smart what this means right now is that we're actually charging the battery rather than just drawing off of it so this is great that says recharge time it'll take 3 hours to get that last 12 percent because really we're only making 70 80 watts here is the difference it's a little bit later in the afternoon so we're not in peak solar hours right now there also is a bit of haze in the sky which is going to make a difference but you can see that this just jumped up to over 600 watts and now this is saying rather than charge time you can see that this circle is not spinning it's saying that our run time is now 3 hours now this does feel really warm on the top right here so hopefully it doesn't get into that heating issue like we did on the other test because we're not running this super hard but it's definitely warm on the top here ok so I'm just gonna let this run we'll do a check up here in a little while probably after the Sun Goes Down and see how we're looking I get the question all the time of how I bring my cables in for our Titan with the permanent installation I actually have a hole in the wall but for normal use at home I mean I'm having to use a setup like this there's a door gasket here all I do is just close the door like that and you can see it's just barely a tiny opening there and I'm okay with that I can still lock this and everything it's only been a little bit but I noticed that the screen keeps turning off and that's something I really dislike I like to be able to look at a distance see where we're at we're at 86 percent so we're still holding pretty good so I've been outside the last three hours or so been doing yard work trimming trees and all sorts of stuff getting our cabin cleaned up this has been running the entire time my kids did about an hour and a half of playing the Wii they're playing just dance so they had the TV the Wii the lights the fans all of that stuff running now that's something that we usually do each time we come to the cabin they love playing that game and we only have it up here at the cabin so we are down to 21% it says we have one hour left and we're currently using about 120 watts basically to run the lights the fridge and things like that so this is clearly not gonna last us through the whole night so I think maybe it would have done better if we had not run the oven well we only ran the oven for about 25 minutes so that was only roughly 200 watt hours of capacity so that really didn't use much what this tells me so far is that we're gonna actually have to pull back on using a lot of things if we were to use this as a battery backup and solar generator for the cabin we probably wouldn't be able to run the TV if we had just stuck to using the fridge maybe the oven for a really short time maybe using the microwave instead if we had done that I probably would have left us with a little bit more battery so that's really good to know I'm glad we did this test I definitely think this would work but only just running bare minimum essentials so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to switch back over to the Titan for the night because I know this isn't gonna last the whole night but then I'll let this recharge by solar tomorrow and then we'll give it another go and see how it goes yeah well it's early the next morning the Sun just come up over the hill I have these panels position for the Evening Sun that way so go ahead and turn these around so in a couple of hours the Sun will be up kind of high pass these trees a little bit and then I'll rotate these panels so that way they're ready for a full day of sun exposure but right now let's see what kind of charge this is getting a little bit of shade coming through through the trees so obviously we're not gonna be getting full power right now but it says we are getting 52 watts in so it says that her current rate is gonna take 19 hours obviously that'll change as the Sun gets up higher so I didn't get it recorded but you see this is over 300 watts charging now panels are in full Sun it's been about two hours since this was at about 52 to 57 watts and the solar panels were in full Sun and it was still saying 52 watts so I was really confused I checked the panel's check the cabling and everything like that and then I unplugged the solar cable from the Delta waited about five to ten seconds then plugged it back in and it jumped right over to three hundred watts so I don't know what's up with that but it seemed like who's getting no charge and then a slight charge and then it just got stuck there and it's something you may not notice because the screen will turn off on its own and so you have to constantly be pushing a button to get the screen to turn back on so as I'm walking around the cabin doing things I can't see if this is actually getting a good charge or not so it's really annoying that's probably one of my biggest gripes so far about it is just the screen will not stay on now the reason that's a really big concern is because the last two hours this could have been charging at a much faster rate and it wasn't and that's a really big problem because now I'm behind on my charge today two hours at 300 watts or even 200 watts while the Sun was still coming out could have made a big difference in my battery charge and being able to run stuff so that's really a big problem because if I can't depend on this just to charge you know on its own then I'm gonna have to reset the cable everyday that's kind of annoying already it's been another two hours I've been outside doing tons of yard work cutting trees and stuff like that we're still close to about 300 watts since it's got about one hour left to charge up 75% so that's about how fast it's charging okay it's been another hour this now says 40 minutes what I'm starting to realize is that it either says one hour or two hour but it doesn't tell you like 1.2 hours or one hour 15 minutes or whatever so it can be a little deceiving on how long this will actually take to charge or its actual run time so that's something to keep in mind as well it still works we're almost fully charged at 250 watts right now so it looks like I need to go adjust the panel's a little bit so that we can get a little bit more some it's okay it's been an hour and a half and this just got to a hundred percent and stopped charging so that took a little bit longer than I thought it would to charge but I think part of that was due to the fact that it wasn't actually really charging this morning it was only at 50 watts when it could have been probably around 200 or more so I'm gonna do another test where we come back and use this without running the oven and just running the bare essentials and see if it has that same issue with recharging so it's actually been a couple of days I've left the panels out here and left the delta running been doing more tests and things like that and as you can see here these flex panels I did not secure them on the bottom and this is what will happen when it gets kind of windy is it can kind of push these in so that might be one reason to go with a rigid panel over a flex panel the advantage of the Flex panel is that it's very lightweight and very easy to move around and set up the disadvantage is that it is flexible and so unless it's really pinned down they can move around a bit and that would definitely not happen with the rigid panels all in all they're still working perfectly fine I'm obviously gonna fix the one on the right there and we are using the Delta to run the whole cabin again you can see we're doing a bunch of yard work here cleaning out a bunch of old wood and stuff like that but for now the Delta is running everything just fine just like before we're gonna give it another go see if we can make this work running just the essentials so we can see here we're actually at 36% we've only been here for a few hours but sadly with how much time is left in the day we are definitely not going to be charged up again before it's really dark so what I'm noticing so far is that the battery's big enough to really handle really light loads and that the solar inputs big enough again to charge in a day but it's got to be running like just a refrigerator or something like that because even with this load I mean it hasn't been a perfectly clear sunny day so I can see this potentially working with something like an RV running real basic LED lights and stuff like that but running TVs in addition to everything seems to be taking up a decent amount of power so we can see right now there's actually a huge fluctuation in the solar input it's down to ninety seven seventy it's fluctuating quite a bit because the clouds are coming in so this is definitely a real-world experience when it's not perfect weather which is definitely a good thing to see well snacks morning the panels are adjusted to be facing more east so that way they can get the early morning Sun and at first started at about 30 watts and now we're up to 130 watts so it doesn't seem to have the same issue that it did last time where it didn't go above a certain number so we'll give a little bit more time here to charge up it's still pretty early in the morning and see how this goes couple hours now and it's obvious that the panel's didn't have that stall because we're over 200 watts we're at 55 percent I got a couple hours left until the charge anywhere from 2 to 3 hours but now what I want to do is actually use this car charger and see how well it charges we're about to leave the cabin so I want to see how well this works and how fast I can charge what does charge rate is okay I've got a plugged in here and plugged in to the side and it says we are currently doing 129 watts input and it's charging so it's gonna take anywhere from four to five hours to charge so we don't have that long of a drive but it is nice that it's got a car charger and that we can use that in case we need it too while on a long drive so we'll be driving around enough for a little while here you definitely want to make sure that your vehicle is running because otherwise this will drain the battery and then you'll have a dead vehicle so now we are back at the house and using the car charger I was able to get this up to 70% that was driving back and forth going and picking up lumber and stuff like that for a project that we're working on that I'm about to show you I know this isn't that 100% but one of the big test is can it run a chop saw now we're actually gonna be building a big shed or a shop here on the property and I'd like to be able to build the entire thing off just solar using the solar panels a solar generator so I want to know can this handle that it's supposed to be one of the best units out on the market it's got an 1800 watt inverter so it should be able to run something like this it might only be able to run it when it's at a hundred percent I don't know so let's go ahead and give this a try and be doing this with no load no wood or anything let's just see [Applause] okay wanted to start but it didn't go all the way sounds like the fans turned off and I need to return on AC power yep I have to give this another try see what happens yeah see it's just flashing oh that does say 50 Hertz interesting okay so it turns off get the power back on now it says 60 Hertz that's really weird okay well that didn't work so I'm gonna go get this fully charged real quick and we'll try this again all right so now I got this at 100% I want to go ahead and plug this is the moment of truth hundred percent full load here we go same issue now of course not everybody's going to be running a big chop saw like this this might work with a smaller chop saw but with a big one like this it's not working so that's really too bad but all in all it's still a pretty okay unit it'll it'll definitely run the smaller items I just wish it could run this bigger one okay I want to do another test here got a 5000 BTU air conditioning unit it's just the window unit now the general rule of thumb for an air conditioner is you take however many BTUs it is and you multiply it by 10% or 0.1 and that gives you the average amount of running watts when the condenser is running so we're gonna give this a test and let's go ahead and turn on the fan this has a fan low cool high cool and turbo cool let's blow on the fan no problem and then I have this it's got a scale from one to seven I got all the way up on seven says we're using about 81 so pretty normal for a family okay I'm going to turn on the low cool you hear the condenser kick on no problem there so that 10% average is pretty accurate so far let's go to high cool okay for 70 not bad turbo cool for an idea okay so he just running it no problem at all the deal is this has to stay running it can't turn off the condenser and just be running the fan and then kick back on and keep running so basically if you can keep it running with the condenser you're good to go cuz watch this so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to simulate that the room has gotten cold enough that the condenser turns off and just runs the fan and then as the room temperature rises the condenser will kick back on that's pretty normal for how these things run so I'm gonna simulate you heard the condenser kick off we're down to 83 watts I'm gonna turn it down to low cool so it's on the lowest setting and now I'm going to simulate the condenser kicking back on while in normal operation now if I reset this you turn off the AC fan on so if I go straight to turbo cool it doesn't work so it just needs to start up slowly so in an RV or something like that word has a slow start as long as that works while it's in normal operation to slow start back into the condenser again I think I've got one more test to do it says it's 65 volts in 10 amp max but I've tested this on other units where we can actually go a little bit above these parameters and still get a good charge but as you can see I've got six solar panels laid out here I got these three connected in series those three connected in series and then it comes to a splitter to go to parallel ok well it's actually working it's only getting 160 watts or so right now so hopefully we get a break in the clouds and I can test this in full Sun so this is what I wanted to show you I did another test where I left the delta plugged in all night long and turned on what the panels connected that way as soon as the panels could start making power they would start inputting into here now this has been charging for about two hours now at about 74 watts as you can see this full Sun out panels are in full Sun but right here it's still showing just above 70 watts it's not getting higher than 76 so far so unplug this you see immediately you can see just like that now it's showing to 50 to 57 so you can see right there it's exactly what happens with the Delta if you leave this plugged in overnight apparently it only happens sometimes but it will not get the full power of the panel's unless you reset it have no idea what causes that but I'm really glad that we found that out on the bright side it is really nice to know that we can get 6 100 watt solar panels connected to the Delta rather than just the 400 watts that it originally said well there you have it it definitely is concerning when you run it really hard and then it takes forever to cool off in order to recharge again that's a bit concerning we did have that one issue where the panel's were getting sunlight and it was almost midday but they were still only making about 50 watts and then they had to disconnect and reconnect it into the Delta in order to be making full power for the day so all around I think it's an OK solar generator or power station or solar rechargeable battery whatever you want to call it stop freaking out about the name whatever you want to call this and I think it's pretty ok and it's definitely not my first choice but it is something that I feel would be ok to recommend as long as you are running just bare minimal essentials the other thing that I would definitely recommend getting with the Delta is one of these splitters you can use a normal power strip if you've already got one but the reason I like these is because they're rated to 1800 watts which is the full draw capacity of the Delta it just gets too cluttered with how close all those outlets are if it's for a weekend getaway with the camper or you're going camping I think it would be great long-term power outage just bare essentials and it's it's very risky if you don't have a lot of good Sun thank you so much for staying with me to the end of this video I know they can be quite long I hope it was educational I hope it was helpful for you to let me know the comments down below if you think this is something that would work for you or if you need something bigger or smaller what are the main things that you need to run I'm always looking for things that I can test off these solar generators that everybody uses in everyday life so if there's things that you want to see run off these different solar generators go ahead and comment down below and I usually do a pretty good job getting back to those comments pretty quick you have more information about the Delta please visit powered portable solar comm if you have questions about the Delta other solar generators or just solar in general shoot me an email at info at powered portable solar comm and I'd be happy to help out don't forget to give me a thumbs up it really helps and of course if you like this video don't forget to share it with someone who also may be interested and of course don't forget to subscribe cuz we've always got good information coming out I am NOT sponsored in any way by eco flow and they did not send me this unit for free I paid for it out of my own pocket I did all of my own testing out of my own pocket and my own time so that way you can get an honest true review about it if you feel that the Delta is something that will work well for you go ahead and go down to the links below and you'll find links to where you can purchase this as well as the other recommended items like cables adapters and so on thanks for tuning in everyone we'll catch you guys next time

Channel: Minute Man Prep

Views: 101,825

Keywords: solar generator, ecoflow delta, power station, portable power station, portable energy, RV solar, emergency power

Id: 8rCK1rOxAGI

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020