IT'S FINALLY DONE! | DIY Massive Off-Grid Power System

[Music] with our shipping container buried and our pivoting solar array mounted it's time to set our sights on the end goal a massive off-grid electrical system that will be able to power all of our dreams in this episode we have some special guests help take this project across the finish line with our panels mounted it's time to start on the inside we're gonna be insulating the inside of this thing and adding some framing so we have a place to mount stuff [Music] [Music] well i think we have to unload it all all right [Music] working in this container is very nostalgic for me we actually built a 40-foot shipping container house three years ago and we lived in that for a year it was a really fun project it ended up being a smaller space than we really wanted to live in long term but it was so much fun to build and so this kind of reminds me of that but it's very different because we're not going to live in this one i wasn't ready for snow in july that's funny we started this container project by buying an inexpensive very used container our goal for this project is to maximize our value here and really minimize our cost input and going with the styrofoam rigid insulation was just way cheaper than going with spray foam insulation so we have a plan for insulating this that i think is going to be a pretty good vapor barrier and should help minimize any condensation issues we have [Music] so [Music] you tell you want your straight edge it might be straight oh it's so bright ah [Music] does that mean you fit out the window uh you want to find out [Music] nice now one of the most asked questions on our last video was why we buried this container in the first place so our hopes is that we get some geothermal properties from the from the earth behind here to help both keep the container warmer in the winter and cooler in the summertime so we're not going to insulate this wall because we want that heat transfer from the ground into the inside of the container we're gonna we're insulating the rest of it to keep the sun out [Music] riley said that this is going to fit but i'm a little bit skeptical [Music] let's find out [Music] cool [Music] the biggest downfall to shipping containers is the beer can effect that happens if you start trying to do any sort of climate control with them if they end up a different temperature than the outside temperature they're going to basically turn into a beer can it causes moisture to condense on the walls that can make them rain that can cause mold it can cause all sorts of issues because we're not planning to live in this and incorporate a ton of moisture from cooking showering that kind of stuff i think we're going to be able to get away with not having to do spray foam but we still don't want things raining or condensing on all of our really expensive electronics so we're gonna try to do our best to prevent any air from getting behind our insulation and trapped on the metal is it terrifying a little bit i just don't want it to fall on my face on my hair the goal is to open up my hair nice i watch gordon use spray foam and it always looks so easy to me and then if i get a hold of that can there is just a humongous mess everywhere now before we go ahead with our roof framing we're going to stick our ceiling insulation in and then our roof framing is going to hold it up so another thing with this design is that the insulation is continuous meaning that there's no thermal bridging from the outside world to the inside world because our studs are on the inside of the insulation that's going to give us a lot more thermal performance out of this r6 insulation than if there were gaps in it with a stud every 16 inches like a traditional house [Music] [Music] you're making a mess around here [Music] changes but it's easier with you i'm going through changes [Music] we are only doing this small section back here right now because we have to be ready for tomorrow when someone very exciting is coming to help set up our batteries our inverters and all of our power system we kind of put this project the last minute but i think we're barely gonna make it do not drop that wait what'd they say pour from the top huh you ready yeah how much how much i don't know that much i do think that made less of a mess thanks guys that was a good tip that's a nice color white [Music] first coat down i thought i'd give you a little sneak peek of what's to come you've already seen the solar panels but here's the rest we have 12 48 volt batteries to give us approximately 60 kilowatt hours of energy storage and two 10 000 watt inverters that are gonna combine to get us 220 split phase power i am beyond excited to get this stuff installed tomorrow we'll wait for the first coat of paint to dry i'm gonna get our exhaust fan installed this is actually a temperature and humidity sensing automatic exhaust fan that comes with this flap louver on the outside it's a pretty cool unit check out the link below first things first is to see if it fits probably should have checked this a long time ago oh like a glove [Music] we've got an extension cord running all the way from the solar shed where our delta pro is all the way around up to the solar container time to test out the fan [Music] oh yeah that's a lot of air [Music] the next step is that we're going to need a way to get the wiring from the solar panels into the inside of this container i'm going to use this junction box to make this a nice water tight place to do that [Music] today is finally the day that we're installing our long-term permanent off-grid power system so court and i've been living off-grid now for a little over two years and between the camper system our generators that we ran we were building the building and then the ecoflow delta pro we have a lot of experience in some smaller off-grid systems today we're installing a massive off-grid system and i'm so excited we're so appreciative of dextre and currentconnect it's time for coming up here to get all this set up correctly with us and i can't wait to see how it goes oh you're gonna hurt yourself dude each one of these is equivalent to about one and a half times the capacity in our camper so we're gonna end up with about 18 times more battery capacity than we've ever had before and i'm excited because that's going to allow us to use whatever tools we want up here including our air compressor our welder our plasma table after living off grid for basically two years between the camper and then here we've gotten really good at being frugal with power and the thought of not having to be frugal with power is a foreign concept by now so i'm really excited to be able to do things like well i already kind of do everything i want to do but now i don't have to ask riley if we need to fire the generator up dexter just called he made it to the bottom of the hill but he's in a tesla so i'm gonna go get him [Music] [Music] [Music] okay guys it turns out we have not one owner but both owners of current connected here today so we're here with dexter and jarrett and they're gonna be walking us through every step of this installation which i'm excited about because i can already tell that i'm a little overwhelmed okay so what's step one i think we should at least get the batteries out of the boxes get the racks assembled and kind of get a layout see how things are gonna fit together and from there we can kind of just start piecing all this together awesome holy smokes so before dexter sent these to us he actually pre-programmed them for our application for using two of these inverters in series with the charge controllers and the batteries that we're using and you can tell because he includes the sheet that says exactly what's on them and this is a standard service that they provide for all victron components at no cost so when you buy victron from current connected you know you're getting the right stuff for what you're doing those are heavy [Laughter] yeah no kidding [Music] we're designing on the fly over here i would just like to put on the record that i have built three battery racks and riley has mounted two brackets we're doing a lot of talking and not a lot of work and i think it's time to get to work how would we have put that up pulleys [Music] i'm just starting to really grasp how much battery this is [Music] [Music] one down [Music] the good news is that i put the racking together properly and the batteries fit last box we're going to be charging before the end of the day i had no idea that they were gonna we were gonna be charging today and now i'm like a whole nother level of excited we have made way more progress than i expected and we're getting really close i think we have like four more cables to make and we have some solar panels to cover so i'm connecting these panels in series so essentially the positive from one to the negative of the next so each like of our rows will be a string and then they'll go down into this yeah there's a junction box yeah riley put in cool texture just yelled down at us did you know that one of your panels is broken and i said what and riley got this grin on his face because he knew it was broken because he broke it and he hasn't told me so maybe it's dexter's fault for telling me i probably would have never known but they think it's still gonna work it's just the back of the panel since these are bifacial it's the back piece of glass it could corrode over time but the panel should still work right now so riley's only half in the doghouse we had their race set up in winter mode for painting so it's time to tilt it into summer mode and then we'll also make cooking these panels up easier [Music] oh there it is [Music] okay you guys we really want to test the system today but the sun is about to go behind our hill so i think they're working as quick as they possibly can while also being safe right they're also being safe these are disconnect switches for the solar panels that are going to allow us to shut the power off from our solar panels to the dc distribution bus because without these we'd have to physically unplug the panels to turn them off and according to dextre i'm not allowed to do that under load we're putting these disconnect switches on the outside so that if something were to go haywire we don't have to go inside the container to unhook all this we can just turn the power off right here on the outside panels are already shaded so there's just a little teeny tiny spark in there sorry riley no boom i was promised fireworks [Music] look away because it's like welding you see that spark whoa that's so cool that's awesome all right we have like 10 minutes of sunlight left we're gonna try to get some power into this system i am uh i'm connecting this one to the positive [Music] when dexter flips the switch out there it's going to connect the solar panels to the charge controller and this is going to turn on hopefully hopefully the sun is going away as we speak oh what up it did it let up for a second the battery's on so now this is the most important part especially with these massive inverters um i'm using a pre-charge resistor i have this pack on and this one ready so as soon as i touch this it should charge the system up and this pack should turn on and i can make this last connection with inverters this big it's above the rating of the pre-charge circuit built into the battery so here goes nothing oh there we go things are doing things it's like our sleeping beast so now this is all live wait oh here's why it didn't turn on because guys we're making power [Music] all right now that it's all installed and running dexter is going to run us through a little more about what each one of these pieces is and what it does so these are the sok 48 volt batteries with the 12 of them we have here there's about 60 kilowatt hours of storage so we're going with these lithium batteries over lead acid because they're 100 maintenance free they're rated for over 4 000 cycles and then two with this rack mount design there's two great benefits to it one is you can start small you can start with just one battery and expand it later to fill the rack or add multiple racks as well as it takes up a ton less space than a lead acid battery so these are pretty much a hundred percent maintenance free there's no off gassing and the management system inside will even tell you if something's gone wrong so these batteries are connected up with four oct cable these are also available from us here at current connected we have a special hydraulic press that crimps these so tight i was showing a sample to riley and courtney that it pretty much cold welds the strand of copper for ultimate connectivity it's really important to me that these cables be made well right because we're expecting that this is a 10-year maintenance-free system where i never even have to look at it and so if i had 10 years worth of hot and cold cycles on this cable it would over time stretch out loosen up and could be a major fire damage maybe not tomorrow maybe not next week maybe seven years down the line and i don't want to have to worry about this in seven years so we've got the inverters the batteries the charge controllers these are what the solar panels use but all of this in the middle was the part that i was pretty intimidated by so right here we have the lynx power in it's not as complicated as it looks it's essentially just a chunk of copper that's templated and all of our cables connect on there basically a big junction box exactly from there we come here to the link shunt this has the main system fuse so if something catastrophically happens that's going to blow and protect them and this also has a 1000 amp shunt down here so essentially all a shunt is is it's a device that measures the current running through the bus bar so we know how full our batteries are from there we go to the final component of our power distribution that's the links distributor so in here is all of our fuses and final cables to go to the rest of the system we made a temporary connection here but i'm gonna get some new cables shipped down to uh to riley to fix this year that was totally my fault i bought the wrong ends at our local store for crimping onto that cable and we were so excited to get this thing fired up that we made some cables so don't do your crimps like that from there we have some equal length cables that come up into each inverter and that's very critical with this victron equipment from there the inverter is essentially the device that turns it from 48 volt dc battery power to your 120 240 split phase that then goes to the shop one of my primary goals when shopping for all this equipment was to ensure that we would have stuff that could run our air compressor our plasma table or welders and those all have a really high startup draw loads these are a transformer based low frequency unit which is essentially like a flywheel so these can do a two times search capability which means each inverter can do 20 000 watts so they've got 40 000 watts to play with whoa what am i going to do with 40 000 watts so to keep this pile of batteries charged we need some good solar controllers and we have one of them hooked up temporarily over here as you can see but there's two of these victron smart solar mppt rs these are 100 amp solar controllers which means we can do about 5 000 watts per controller so for now we're only going to be using one and a half of them and there's a fourth string ready for more panels to add on later what i really love about these charge controllers is they're rated for 450 volts which let us string more panels together and dramatically decrease the complication of installing them it also means that we can run a smaller wire size so you can see here we're only running 10 gauge wire for our panels and that means that if our panels were a long ways away we could run a smaller wire that longer distance can i mess something up if i touch no okay if not i'll fix it okay there's a menu oh something that i really like about this system is not only can it be monitored from this touch screen but it can also be monitored from an app on my phone and it's in a way that i can understand it because something that i don't want to happen is riley go out of town and i'd be worrying about the state of charge on our batteries or if we're getting solar input and so with the monitoring like this it really does make it simple so that it's easy for me to understand too so at the heart of this system is this serbo gx this is connected to that screen courtney was just showing you and what's really cool about this is they can connect it to the internet and it can be monitored from anywhere in the world which means from a support standpoint if they have a problem i can remote in and help them out i was pretty intimidated by all this i've seen a lot of photos of victron systems and they look complicated but that's because they're modular and very customizable allowing them to be custom suited to exactly our needs and after installing this today with these guys it turns out it's really not that difficult and so if you've been considering going with with victron or any other solar system be sure to go check out current connections youtube channel where they have a lot of tutorials and how to's on how all this works in a lot more depth than we've gone through today oh you guys it has been a long day i can't believe our system is set up i can tell you right now that riley is not going to sleep tonight because he's going to be waiting for the sun to come up tomorrow so he can run out and see our system working we are tired we are hungry we definitely owe these guys dinners so we're gonna treat them to dinner and we'll see you guys tomorrow to wrap this all up [Music] all right it's the morning and i'm trying to be super quiet because courtney's asleep but the sun just came up and i think it's about to hit the panels for the first time [Music] the sun is at a very steep angle right now all right we're already making 600 watts total charge dextran i spent the next day getting all the details finished up on this install so we could get it to a point where we could power our house with it because we were way too excited to wait any longer the main thing that we had to get done so that we could start using the power out of this system was to get this main breaker panel installed this is going to be the main breaker panel to feed our entire property and from here we'll branch out into sub panels anywhere else where we might need power while we were at it we wired in a couple of 110 outlets and a 220 outlet so now we can start using our welder on 220 power which as you'll see soon i've already had to do so for two weeks now we've been powering our house full time with this system and it has been absolutely awesome we haven't had to think about how we're using power we've been using the dishwasher we've been running an air conditioner basically just doing anything we could possibly want to do and we haven't even seen the batteries dipped below 95 yet even overnight that's where this video is going to end but we are so excited to put this system to the test and create more content for you guys including a long-term review and a video about how much this all cost if you've been interested in going solar whether it be on-grid or off-grid head to the links below to find out more about all of the equipment that we installed here and thank you so much to currentconnected for working with us on this system we are so appreciative and i feel like our life just changed let's get back to using power [Music] are you eating while laying down she's never done that before what a goofball

Channel: Ambition Strikes

Views: 648,253

Keywords: off-grid barndominium, diy pole barn, diy truck camper, couple builds rv, diy snow tracks, husband and wife build, off grid home build, couple builds dream home, building our off grid home, heavy equipment, bulldozer, off-grid electrical, off-grid power, off grid power, power system, battery system, off grid

Id: kisLSdFVF6I

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/rgfitness365]

Came to this from r/offgrid and just watched the whole video! Nice work and congrats!