Installing an Off Grid Panel and Transfer Switch. Discovered a problem with our EcoFlow Delta Pros

foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you foreign foreign hey guys I'm Evan welcome to Country View Acres today I'm down here in our mechanical room and I am installing a brand new breaker panel this is going to be our off-grid panel or our critical loads panel whatever you want to call it but basically what we're going to do is we're going to take our important circuits out of our main panel we're going to move them over to here we're going to power those up with solar that way when the power goes out this panel will go dead but this panel will stay going so the circuits we plan on moving is going to be our refrigerator our freezer we're going to move a couple of Lights a few Outlets our microwave and then we have an on-demand propane hot water heater it doesn't take a lot of electricity but it'll allow us to still have hot water so when the when the power goes out we'll still have all the important things that we need so I've already been working out here for a few hours today and most of that time was spent getting the wall covered up this was the last stud wall last unfinished wall in our mechanical room the rest of the mechanical room is already all covered up with wood and that gave us a nice solid surface to mount everything to especially like in the future because you never know what next year holds I may have more stuff to mount on here so at least we have a nice solid surface for today and for anything we add later on so I do have one more thing to mount on the wall and that is a transfer switch and this allows you to switch between two power sources so basically we're going to be able to have this panel on solar and if anything happens we can actually switch this back to the grid if needed so say you got rain for a few days you don't have enough solar power we can always switch this back to the grid if needed and you always want to have that ability just in case something goes wrong that you have the choice between Grid or solar so I'm gonna go ahead and get this transfer switch mounted on the wall and then we've got conduits to run between these three panels and then we can finally start getting this wired up all right all right I got the transfer switch mounted and I got the conduits between the panels so the next thing I can do is start wiring this up so I'm going to go ahead and start with transfer switch get it wired up first all right we're going to add a breaker to send power to the transfer switch thank you so this is a 100 amp transfer switch and we're only going to feed it with 30 amps right now later when our permanent system in we'll we'll upsize the wire and add more power but right now it's just going to be 30 amps so the solar power is going to come in through this generator Inlet for now we're going to use the ecoflows later on it'll be a permanent system out in our pole barn all right our transfer switch is wired up so the top is the grid power bottom is the solar power the middle is the output that goes over to our panel our neutrals are tied together on this side and then you can see we've got our panel bonded to ground so you can see with the lever up we're on grid power and when we pull the lever down we're on solar power so now I've got a total of eight circuits in this panel that I'm going to move over to that panel and the wires are not going to be long enough of course to reach over there so I'm just going to splice on a new wire with the wire nut and take it over and land it in that panel and hopefully this doesn't take very long we can get those on solar so I've got all eight circuits moved over into this panel now you can see all the extra wire nuts in here as we spliced into the wire and ran it over here it does make the the panel get a little bit Fuller and it's already full because of my energy monitor you can see all these white things in here that's the energy monitor I've been monitoring our power usage for the last six weeks or so so I know exactly how much power each one of these circuits uses and when I put them in here I try to put them in here balanced so the way this breaker panel is laid out the first row is Phase One the second row is phase two and then it's phase one phase two and it just alternates down your panel so when I put these in here phase one should be running about two kilowatt hours a day and phase two should be running about two kilowatt hours a day so the loads are balanced between both phases and since I'm using the ecoflow Delta Pros right now to power this it's going to help guarantee that those get drained at basically the same speed so hopefully if everything all works out I'm using about 65 maybe percent of the battery a day and hopefully that will recharge every day and continue to work we're just going to have to wait and see so right now we are on the grid for this panel so before we switch it over to solar I need to go so I need to go fix our solar panels we've got too many solar panels together and we actually have too much voltage for the ecoflows so we're going to rearrange that a little bit and get it down to a good operating voltage and then once we get that done the Eco flow should charge properly every day and then we should be able to power this with solar so originally I had two sets of four in an array and that ended up being too much voltage so I could only run three of these panels so I'm going to take this fourth panel out in each one of these sets I'm going to replace it with a 200 watt panel these are 315 we're going to replace it with a smaller panel it's going to be imbalanced but it's still going to end up being more power than what we have with three panels okay all right let's take it [Applause] you can see these are a lot smaller the way the bottoms are still matching up I don't think that looks bad foreign so when you put solar panels in series like this the voltage adds up and even though this is imbalanced the voltage is still going to add up the only thing that changes is it's only going to run at the lowest amperage and this panel is actually higher amperage and these are lower so these are going to still act exactly the same and this one instead of being 200 watts is going to act like 175 Watts instead so the good thing is is we're only you know really affecting this panel making it run less efficient so before an array of three was 945 Watts and now that we're adding this on here it's going to be 1120 Watts so just trying to maximize the problem is is my panels are too low amperage I really needed higher amperage panels and then that would cause me to have lower voltage and then I wouldn't have maxed out the voltage like I did the Eco flows are definitely back there in the dark now that I've got this wall covered up I'm gonna go ahead and get them plugged in here foreign double voltage Hub to get the 240. all right they're linked up they're both 100 charged all right I'm going to go ahead and switch it from grid to solar there we go see what we got now well it doesn't look like we're using much power right now that one's only got 38 Watts that one's got 85 Watts so the circuits I ended up putting in this panel right now this is going to get a lot more circuits in here once we have our permanent system but right now it is the microwave the refrigerator the freezer the living room Outlets the master bathroom so we can get ready in the morning the on-demand propane hot water heater so we can have hot showers the first floor lights and then the basement lights so I think that's pretty much the important things that at least get us by through most of our power outages we have plus um this is a small enough load that hopefully the Eco flows will be able to continuously run them without being charged by the grid we're just gonna have to wait and see but that's what we're testing now so it's 7 15 in the morning we've already got sunlight on the panels and we're starting to charge back up so one of the Delta Pros got down to 50 percent overnight the other one got down to about 35 percent which is a lot lower than what I had expected especially from previous calculations so I ended up I got into my Emporia energy monitor to see what was using all that power so when I pulled up yesterday's usage I could see that our deep freeze pulled a lot of power and I've had that off I've had that off for like almost two days for many hours while I have rewired the main panel and rewired the off-grid panel there was a lot of times I had the complete house turned off so I think what's happening is a lot of that food is just taking a lot more energy to get that food back down to the temperature so I'm hoping that's what the power usage is on the freezer it's definitely used more and then the other thing was it was Saturday night we actually lounged around watched a lot of TV so we ran the TV quite a bit longer than what we typically would have and those are both on that Delta Pro that was drained down to 35 percent so hopefully that freezer will even out but we're just going to give it some time we'll give us a few days and we'll see how this does over a period of days because it looks like today is going to be another sunny day but I really want to see what it's going to do on the cloudy days so it's 11 10 in the morning now both of the Eco flows are 100 charged one of them just finally hit 100 a couple minutes ago so I'm not even halfway through the day they're fully charged it is a sunny day but that tells me I'm wasting energy the rest of the day right so I could probably double the amount of batteries right now I've got the batteries are three times bigger than the solar array so I could probably go you know maybe four five six times bigger than the solar array and it would work out for getting everything charged on a sunny day and that's depending on your loads and stuff but definitely the the one to three ratio of solar to batteries is going to be too small I can see that already so the off-grid panel has been powered up by the solar panels and the Eco flow for four days now so we started on Saturday this is Wednesday at noon and you can see it is a very cloudy day yesterday was a cloudy day too I didn't think that it would charge all the way yesterday but the sun came out for just a couple hours and it was enough to top everything off but today it's afternoon and one of them is only back up to 41 percent and if we look at it taking in 273 watts and it says it's going to take 8 hours and 44 minutes to charge where there's not that much sunlight left in the day so basically we're to the point today after four days of running we're to the point where it's not going to fully charge on solar so we actually need to be able to charge it Off the Grid or we need to be able to just switch the panel back to the grid so I got a light set up here so we can see the Eco flows back here Under the Staircase so what I ended up doing is I put an outlet in here and this is an outlet on one breaker and this is an outlet on another breaker so then I thought I'd be able to plug these in and charge them but what I found out if you plug in one of them or both of them it doesn't really matter it will kick out the 240 volt mode and it will not let you charge these while the double voltage Hub is being used so if you try to charge these you end up losing power to your Inlet and then everything goes dead in our panel but if we plug these in it takes a second we plug these in this is going to end up going into an overload and it's going to kick off there it just tripped out it took a second but this one went into an overload there's a red light on here overload error 122 well I think we we definitely found a flaw using two Delta Pros to make 240 volts everything works fine it charges off a solar fine runs fine we've done it for four days but we're to the point that we need to charge it with AC because we don't have enough solar so we'd want to chart you know like plug it into a generator or something and it will not charge with the output on so I would have to turn off this output that's powering part of our house to charge it back up so that is that is a little bit of a flaw so you'd have to power this down like I said it'd take probably three hours and then it'd be fully charged and you'd have to go again so not necessarily ideal I think it'd be better if you could still output 240 volts while you were charging them back up off of a generator so a little bit of a flaw most people probably don't even need 240 volts anyway I mean all the circuits we put in here was 120 right so we could have probably powered this all with one of these Delta Pros off of the 30 amp plug in the front and then we still could have charged it at the same time that it was running with a generator we wouldn't have the same problem the problem is all with having the 240 volt mode so let's go ahead and just talk about how much it cost to do this setup right here so this manual transfer switch I bought this at Menards I actually bought this directly off of the Shelf it was a hundred and sixty five dollars 100 amp transfer switch and then I bought this at Menards this is actually smaller than what I want this is a 12 space panel 125 amps this was around 82 85 dollars and I'm gonna buy one that's actually 24 spaces in it so it's going to be twice a big a panel and the one I'm planning on permanently putting in here is a hundred and forty dollars so once I put the bigger panel in here this right here is 305 dollars so then you have some conduit and some wire we'll say that ended up being a let's just say another 150 that's probably a little much but basically we did this setup right here for what was that 450 bucks around 450 dollars for the off-grid panel and the transfer switch conduit and wire so I've had a lot of people ask me about the generator Inlet and the interlock so this interlock right here this piece of metal is like 70 dollars for that piece of metal and then this plug-in I think is around 62 dollars and then of course you need the wire to go in between and you need a 30 amp breaker so basically you can install this if you're doing it yourself you can do this the breaker the plug-in and the wire you can do all that for about two hundred dollars I'm telling you if you're a do-it-yourselfer that is the best money you can spend is putting in a generator Inlet so that you can back feed your house with some type of generator so we powered eight of our critical loads with the Eco flow in this video but that's not our permanent solution our permanent solution is we're going to build a solar power system out in our pole barn and use the roof for the solar panels and everything's going to be out at our pole barn and then it is going to sub feed this transfer switch I think with about 100 amps or something close to 100 amps of power to power up this panel and then we're planning instead of eight circuits we're planning on a total of 16 circuits in this critical load panel the goal is to be able to make enough power in the winter time to power up these 16 circuits which ends up being about 50 percent of our power usage so that's the goal now in the summertime you you make a lot more power in the summertime so our goal is we're shooting at for the winter time to be able to power this all up but in the summertime we'll make probably twice as much power we may be able to power up the whole house we'll just have to wait and see how that ends up but our goal is our 16 critical loads we want to be able to power those in the winter time with solar power and we'll be starting to put that all in here in the next two to three months so stick around there's going to be a lot more solar stuff happening here on the property and this is just the beginning uh just just getting our off-grid panel in here and and this wall set up we've got the house side almost completely set up now now we got to move out to the pole barn start working out there but I think that's gonna be it for this video guys thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Country View Acres

Views: 100,936

Keywords: Homestead, farm, farmstead, hobby farm, self sufficient, homesteading, rural life, country life, farm life, off grid, off grid panel, off grid breaker panel, breaker panel, critical load panel, critical load, critical load breaker panel, transfer switch, manual transfer switch, Solar power, eco flow delta pro, ecoflow delta pro, double voltage hub, ecoflow, delta pro, 240 volt, solar

Id: a8kDiQ1Eg9A

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023