It's Insane. My Solar Generates up to 180kWh in a Day + Passive Solar Greenhouse Tour

foreign [Music] so behind me here is our solar system we have three rigs that are actually two rigs each they they move I move them three times of the year or I moved them four times a year I moved them for each season change I just moved these into fall and spring mode which is at about at a 45 degree angle in summer mode it's about like this and in Winter mode it's about like that so I don't really move them to Winter mode until probably the end of November but I just moved them last week to this mode now and um each has 16 panels they are 435 watts each I think that's what they are about and the total amount of solar production we get here is 20 kilowatts and each rig is slightly at a different angle this one is true South this one is 20 degrees to the west and then this one is 20 degrees to the east so a lot of what you're seeing here is a lot of building materials and stuff like that around that's our generator that we've we're moving onto a new pad where we're going to put a wood boiler but this is how we get our power is it's it's all solar and um last winter we only ran the generator to burn 100 liters of diesel and that so that cost at current prices 180 dollars to supplement the power we needed for the two darkest months but if I don't have to charge my car which is electric we can technically live off entirely solar in the winter when I designed this system I specced it based on giving us enough power a day at the darkest day with enough battery storage to get us through and last winter I I looked at the darkest period which was basically um mid-november till the the winter solstice and during that 30-day period we still came out 90 kilowatt hours net positive and because our battery bank is fairly large we'll go look at it a minute even during the shortest days where the shortest days out that I've seen have we've produced 1.8 kilowatt hours in a full day so that would be it's foggy it's socked in very little power being produced to the maximum in the summer which can be you know 180 kilowatt hours produced if I have a place to put it um and so we've basically spec it so that we can carry through with the battery storage the times on the days we're not producing much because we can we can only we can go down to consumption of about five kilowatt hours in a day if we we switch some things around we turn off the hot water heater we're not going to use the electric stove we're going to use gas or wood so we can tweak things at certain times of the year so that we can minimize our electrical consumption and once the house is finished everything will be fully redundant so we have a central wood boiler that's going to heat everything and in the kitchen of the new house we'll actually have an electric gas and wood cook stove so we have three redundancies there in the summer we'll just use electricity for everything because we're over producing and there's so many so many daylight hours that we don't even have to draw from the batteries because we've got pretty much 18 hours of daylight but then we have those other redundancies just in case we need them um we also will have wood stoves in each building though we will have a central boiler that will heat everything but we'll also have wood stove so what if we don't have electricity right how do we live and so we we've thought about all these things that we can live without electricity if we had to and so we do have a 13 kilowatt diesel generator it's a Yanmar and it's going to it it already is connected to the whole system but we moved it because I had it connected to the garage but since I decided to get a wood boiler in here this generator is actually going to move onto this concrete pad here and there'll be a wood shed on here so the generator will be enclosed in its own room it has its own tidy tank 600 liters of diesel and then on the same structure we'll have our wood boiler and there'll be a wood shed on there as well so behind me is the central Hub of the homestead and this is I built this first because like I said I needed power and the power was what got me the water and the water is what got me the food and so forth so this this building was more important to do than than anything and connected to it is the pasta solar greenhouse and we'll go look at that and we'll go through all of this it's still not totally finished uh we still have yet to paint this but we have all the trim up um one thing we can see from outside is the vents of the greenhouse up here they're closed right now because it's not hot at the moment but those are very important for the greenhouse and it's all connected the square footage of this building is actually bigger than the house the total square footage with the greenhouse and the garage and um yeah it was actually quite a complicated build because the building itself is terrorist where it's it it steps down and we had to hammer this with rock but then build right on bedrock and so building this Foundation was a lot of work and it was a step foundation so we basically stepped it down on the Rock we had to expose all the the the Bedrock itself and then we drilled rebar with epoxy into it and then built foundations that stepped down on the Rock and then built it from there so it was a lot of really Technical and hard work that went into building this building much more than the house actually because the house site is all excavated in its level but we built this on stepping down Bedrock so it was it was quite complicated so inside we'll take you to the the central Hub of the power system in here and so it's just a single car garage looking back I kind of wish I would have built a bigger garage but whatever it is what it is it's a bit of a mess right now but I have a little workshop area in here where I keep my tools and I'll work on things putting irrigation manifolds together or whatever that's where I do a lot of work we also have a wood stove in here though this is going to be connected to the central boiler but we have a wood stove in here as well I had to move it so it's taken apart at the moment keep a lot of my Hardware irrigation pieces in here but this is the Hub of the whole power system this is where this is where it all comes together and so what we have here are two inverters so two of those panel rigs are connected to one inverter here and then one of them is connected to this inverter which what it goes through this inverter if you will and we have three charge controllers so we built optionality into this system and I can add a whole other panel rig out there if I wanted to with one more just I'd have to get another charge controller but then I I could run that other charge controller through this inverter so these are the batteries this is what you're looking at here is 96 kilowatt hours of battery storage these are lithium iron sulfate batteries and uh they're fantastic this this system is um it's a lot of power it's a lot of power storage and like I said in the winter time we really leverage this because if we don't want to be turning the generator on every single day we need a lot of battery storage to carry over those really dark days and all it really takes in the winter is is a half day of full sunshine and boom it can top these up and then that can carry us over the next couple weeks and so that's how I designed the system but um yeah so all of it is here and what you're looking at as far as the batteries the inverters the charge controllers the generator the panels and all that has cost me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars Canadian so not um not cheap however this exact same system today and when I I bought this over a year ago this exact same system today is almost worth double than what I paid for it so it's one of the things that I actually invested in early and did well on a lot of the materials I bought I bought when things were expensive and I actually kind of paid more than I needed to to be honest but this is one thing that we did fairly well on and it's great like I said it's got some optionality to it the generator is all tied into it the generator is connected to the control system in this and so basically the way it works is when these batteries start go down below 15 percent the generator just automatically kicks on and starts charging the batteries another thing we can do on the system is we have a bypass in here and if I wanted to just say I wanted to do laundry at the darkest time of the winter which generally we don't have to do we we can customize our lifestyle based around the daylight but if I wanted to oh we've got too much laundry and we want to do it now I can go into bypass mode and just turn on the generator and then that 13 kilowatts will just go directly to the load and then we could run heavy loads like doing laundry which consumes about six kilowatts at once so that's how that works the rest of this coming into here connects into my office which is a bit of a mess still too but this is where I do a lot of my my work and this is this door here will eventually go right out onto a deck there'll be another door connecting to the house and so this this floor level that we're at here is the same floor level of the second story of the house and so kind of my office area little my camera workstation and then coming through here into the greenhouse and the greenhouses is is really planted out because I've got a lot of stuff going for winter these are the tail ends of some of the crops that I started in the spring we've been eating cucumbers since April or not probably about late April and beans these have been going strong for months now I'm gonna pull all this stuff out soon because I have new crops started for them so on in the greenhouse the basic idea that I that I had with this design is I wanted a greenhouse that I could do it all in where I could have a nursery so I could do lots of microgreens I could start all my stuff in the early spring or or late winter and then I could have a good amount of space dedicated to production for field crops so a lot of what's in this greenhouse is greens and herbs and things like that that will start really early and eat all winter and then I have some summer crops in here like peppers and tomatoes cucumbers and things like that uh early carrots we do in here and we'll go down below and look at the raised beds but the idea with this space is that up here is the nursery So eventually I'm going to build better shelving and things like that but for now these work so we've got this concrete deck that we poured that was custom built and it's kind of a unique deck because it's not what you would typically see in a house you know we're off grid here we're out of the way I'm doing things the way I want to do them but this is not actually technically not a railing it's a truss because we don't have Corner posts down below you'll see but this is actually a trust that gives rigidity to this deck um and so it's not your your typical railing and it's not totally done yet either I mean we still have yet to put a handrail on this on this staircase but the basic idea is the nursery portion of the greenhouse is up here and there's still lots of things I'm going to do here like I'm going to put another shelf on here for more Nursery Flats but right now I can do about 36 Flats with these shelves so the nursery portion is up and out of the way and in higher is higher elevation so that it gets more light and then the field portion of the greenhouse is down below in a series of raised beds that we've built with fur the same way I did at my Kelowna home and so we've got a lot of production in here these peppers are pretty much maxed out you know we're getting the last little bits of them and uh I've got a lot of winter crops already seeded in these beds and because of the way this greenhouse is laid out we have these things called collar ties up here that that tie the rafters to the building and I can use them to hang purlins so that I can verticalize everything in this greenhouse which is really important if you want to maximize your your growing area so this is a Pasa solar Greenhouse you've seen me do zens if not hundreds of videos on pasta solar greenhouses but what we have here is a foundation that's six feet deep from here down is six feet and we have the air we have air tubes underneath here so we take hot air above if you look right up here you can see the the first part of the climate battery so this system sucks hot air down and pumps it Underground and there are there is here a header so this comes straight down six feet deep and then there's a header or a manifold that goes along that's 12 inches wide it's a it's a sewer pipe type pipe and then we have two layers of Big O pipes that come off of that and basically spread throughout the floor and they're about six inches apart and then we filled it with sand and packed sand packed sand water and you sand water and packing to make a really strong thick thermal mass and sand is the most effective and cheapest way to get fill and so the raised beds are built on top of the sand and the raised beds are two feet deep but this sand packed down on top of this clamp battery really makes a thick structure that holds a lot of heat so I'll be turning this on I've had it off all summer but I'm turning this on again soon we'll be taking all excess heat and pushing it down into the ground and then that heat will radiate for a long period going into the winter and then the climate battery will run all winter it basically just runs as soon as there's sunlight The Climb battery turns on and takes all the excess heat from above and puts it underground so I won't be ventilating this greenhouse in the winter the same way I would in the summer and that's another thing worth mentioning so the vents above the climate battery air duct up there those open up and if I keep these windows open down here it just creates a a thermal siphon and so basically by opening these windows I can open them this way too but basically by having these windows open and those vents open it just creates maximum airflow and all the heat just flows out and it's it's really incredible actually because this this greenhouse all summer long was never hotter than it was outside which is really good one thing I've learned with Greenhouse is you can never really over ventilate a greenhouse you can always have more ventilation and actually in retrospect I would have made those vents up there a foot wider but you know hindsighted being 20 20. it works great and I'm very happy with it so we've got all of our raised beds here underneath the deck I have another raised bed that seems dark right now but that's because there's all this foliage in front of it this foliage is all going to be taken down shortly and I'll be growing these same crops well no no tomatoes but I'll be growing beans and cucumbers in this bed and they will be trellised up and verticalized this way bringing more light into these raised beds and a bit more real estate that I can plant more stuff for winter but you can see all these these things are tapping out they've been going all spring and summer and coming into here we've got a lot of crops set for winter I've got a bed of greens lots of Romaine Swiss chard Dill parsley a new crop of celery in this bed I've got uh some peas seeded and some more herbs that we'll be enjoying some more loose leaf lettuce that celery has been going all summer it's going to be pulled out soon and I'll be seeding some more stuff like spinach in those beds at the end of each of these beds I've got grapes and they're new grapes and so they're going to take a while to really start producing but the idea is these are on the south side and what I want to do is send those up I've already got them trellised a bit here eventually they're going to make their whole way up to that top purlin and the idea is that they will shade this greenhouse out in the summer I did this in the same with my pasta solar Greenhouse in Kelowna it's the same idea I really like grapes in a greenhouse because you get early and late grapes you get the benefit of the shade and in the winter they drop their foliage so they don't they don't interfere with anything in the winter when you need that extra light on the greenhouse we have a double layer poly so when I originally designed this I thought I would do polycarbonate and I also thought I'd do polycarbonate on my original my my last Greenhouse in Kelowna but it's so expensive and the one challenge with doing polycarbonate on a greenhouse like this is these Rafters are 28 feet long and the top peak of this greenhouse on the inside is about 30 feet if we had to do polycarbonate they come in four foot or three foot sheets it would have been so much extra work to tie them in to each rafter whereas the poly we pretty much just rolled it down and channel locked it all around on four sides it was in comparison it was a lot easier so the cost savings is significant because to do this same amount of square footage in polycarbonate was about ten thousand dollars to do the poly for all this was 500. so significant price difference and the R value is the same if not better because we have a blower on this there's two layers of poly on the outside you can kind of see how it's ballooned out and at the center of it it balloons out probably about three feet and in the sides it probably comes down to about six inches but it creates a really good insulated layer and I like it it diffuses the light really well but we still have a nice view from our Windows here and so I'm a big fan of doing two layers of poly having done a couple of these greenhouses than the polycarbonate one thing I'll show you real quick over here this is the blower so this is what's blowing air between the two layers of poly and this isn't all finalized we'll have this wired a little bit differently when it's all finished but um that runs 24 7 7 days a week to keep that poly layer blowing in the winter it's fairly insignificant this this fan is about the same as a light bulb as far as power draw so it never it's never for the size of our system it's it's it's insignificant in the winter it's fine and in the spring summer fall it's it's it's absolutely insignificant with the amount of power that our system is producing so this is by far the coolest feature on the property and was actually the biggest selling point for me [Music] check out my site from the field.tv it's where I post all my Vlogs and the vast majority of all my content alright guys we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Off-Grid with Curtis Stone

Views: 178,264

Keywords: Curtis Stone, From The Field, Urban Farmer, Gardening, Greenhouse, Solar Power

Id: mzkJmkVd1WQ

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022