My Portable DIY Home Solar Powered Battery Backup System for in Case the Grid Goes Down...

hello there YouTube solar fans welcome to my garage and a tour of my Harbor Freight powered solar power system let's take a closer look so what we have here are three arrays Each of which is composed of six 100 watt Harbor Freight solar panels for a total of 18 panels or 1800 watts of generating capability nominally plus I have this Standalone 310 watt panel that my neighbor gave me it was a leftover from his much larger solar installation so adding the 300 watts to the 1800 watts We have basically a nominal 2100 watt generating capability here okay so here is the heart of the system is this power cart I'm using this red cart from Harbor Freight cost me I think 70 bucks it holds eight lithium-ion phosphate batteries that are each 100 amp hour 12 volt uh 1280 Watt hours so eight of these combined uh totals 10 kilowatt hours of storage and then I have uh this inverter which is a 3000 watt inverter although I don't expect to go that high and I haven't yet um and I have this 500 amp battery monitor but this is the cart that can be used Standalone to provide Power overnight to the essential systems in our house which is the refrigerators the freezer the furnace and the aquariums uh because I had a power failure years ago where the aquariums were uh the filters and air pumps weren't working and the fish died in less than a day so I consider those essential and uh that's an overview of that okay so here's a quick overview of the controller board I have four renegie Rovers that are each 40 amp mppt charge controllers are all identical uh within this series of controller the 40 amp version was the best value in terms of dollars per amp um each controller is connected to an array each one of these arrays with six panels each of those panels is rated at 6.2 amps so six of those is going to be 37 amps it actually turns out it puts out a little more than that which is a good thing but I get about 38 39 amps out of each one of these arrays which is a nice fit for these 40 amp controllers okay so this board just slips over the side of the cart [Music] um by means of those wooden hooks I guess you could call them uh on each of those two shelves and so it sits like that and then you can connect these cables together which again I will do actually I won't do that right now because this is just kind of a show and tell so when those are connected and you turn on this switch it supplies battery power to the charge controllers then when you hook up the solar panels to those cables you can turn on power solar panel power to the charge controllers so um that way uh you don't accidentally and I numbered them so so that the sequence of switch operation would be clear you power up the charge controllers first with switch number three and then you power on or connect the solar panels with switches number four and five so that's that and it all works pretty well okay so here in the garage I have the three solar panel arrays stashed away and there are three of them standing on and they're each the width of a two by four and they each have three casters on the bottom so the idea is that these solar panel arrays are portable or at least movable they weigh about 150 pounds each so let's take them out and see how they work ready [Applause] nice okay that's good thanks guys and here's the generator port which I have plugged the solar power cart into now um it is only providing 120 volts the generator actually produces 240 volts and Powers the whole house including the air conditioner to use that in this port I had to get this kind of special adapter from a company called AC works uh there it is they sell a bunch of specialized adapters and connectors this takes it from the regular 110 120 volt Outlet on my inverter to the specialized 240 volt interface on this so um that's cool it all works well okay so to use generator power or solar power I have to disconnect from the grid so that I don't feed power back into the grid and to do that I have to throw this main breaker here that cuts us off from the grid and I can slide this interlock up and turn on the generator Port so these Breakers connect the generator port uh to the rest of the system so it uh is impossible for me to connect to the grid and to my generator at the same time so it's pretty clever setup when I connect a generator I don't have to flip off any of these other Breakers I know I've seen people they go through they just turn on essential things but I don't have to the generator runs my whole house except not the dryer at the same time as the microwave for solar power I do turn off this dryer circuit breakers because uh the solar does not provide 240 volts the way I have it set up okay so here we have the solar arrays out and providing the power to the house right now they're all connected up they're all generating let's go see what the charge controllers are doing I don't know Sandy okay so here's the power cart in my garage and each of the four charge controllers is connected to one of the solar arrays out there at the moment this one is pulling in 36 amps this one's pulling in about 38 and a half amps this one's pulling in about 23 amps and this one which is the stand-alone 300 watt panel is pulling in about 17 amps so my house has been running on the system for the last few hours this is the inverter it shows that it is currently providing about 660 watts to the house and here's the battery monitor which says that it's providing about 700 Watts that we have about 761 amp hours in the battery right now the battery is charging right now because we see the voltage down there at the bottom is 13 and a half volts plus we're adding 52 amps to it along with taking out that 700 Watts so we're still providing net inflow into the batteries even though the house is uh consuming right now about six or seven hundred Watts and that is the two refrigerators the freezer and the aquariums with their filters and air bubblers that's pretty much uh what's being consumed right now but also the garage lights where I'm at but this would be representative of what it would be doing overnight which is what I designed this around was to provide Power overnight for the refrigerators the aquariums and the furnace so I have tested the furnace with the furnace uh that added about another three or four hundred Watts as I recall so so I just turned on the microwave which is about a thousand Watts and we see that it is now providing uh 12.4 volts and 2.2.13 kilowatts so it's about so it is about 2 000 Watts the inverter fans are on but still um the battery is nearly 100 percent charged there is a draw on it of 82 and amp I think the microwave just kicked off just kicked off and now we're back down to 600 watts 760 Watts so okay so here's a fun fact with the inverter turned off and the battery fully charged and battery fully charged what are the charge controllers doing because they're still hooked up to the panels and we see that one's putting out 2.7 amps that one's putting out basically zero basically zero and almost zero so that much all works all seems to work yay

Channel: The Matheson Family

Views: 260,315

Keywords: harbor freight solar, thunderbolt solar, solar power, off grid, emergency solar, solar panel, back up solar, 100w, 100 watt, 2000w, 2000 watt, harbor freight 100 watt solar, diy, battery backup, portable solar

Id: Gor3hUR6MoQ

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022