Off Grid Solar Battery! - So easy its *Almost* Cheating...

today i'm going to install an off-grid solar and battery system here in my barn and it should be pretty easy this barn is a little bit too far away from my house to connect to the grid which also means it's a little too far away to use extension cables the longer an extension cord gets the more juice it takes to push that power through and the hotter it gets we've actually melted two extension cords trying to power this place and this place needs a lot of juice we have our fleet of not a wheelchair prototypes and an electric lawnmower plus we want to install some lights up top so we can come out here at night having an off-grid power system kind of meshes perfectly with my off-grid watering system the way we're gonna accomplish all this is with the delta pro battery system this battery pack comes with the same outlets that you can find in your house with the exact same power enough to run fridges or charge an electric lawnmower if you need to the one here in the middle has 3 600 watt hours of power which is 3.6 kilowatt hours and with the expansion plugs on the back we can add two more battery packs for a total of 10 kilowatt hours which is more power than my barn is ever gonna need but it's also a great emergency backup system since it'll be connected to solar it'll always have power no matter what's happening with the grid and all of this is substantially more modular and easier to install than say you know a tesla power wall which needs to be installed by a professional and connect your control panel in your house these babies have enough juice inside to charge up an electric vehicle which we might put to the test a little later in the video at the very least we'll be plugging in our electric lawnmower the not a wheelchairs the chicken heater and lights for the building at the same time to see if these can handle it let's get started [Applause] [Music] the delta pro from eco flow looks nice enough to just park it on a shelf or leave it on the floor of your garage but here inside of the barn things get pretty dusty thanks to the miniature horses and the chickens we have yet another reason to add power to the barn during winter the water freezes over and the chickens need a little heat lamp and the 10 kilowatt hours that come with this battery is enough to supply all of that i'm going to take my battery system and plop it inside of a cupboard which is a little cozy but as long as i cut a vent out of the back side of the cabinet they should fit just fine i've already tried welding with it as you know welding probably has one of the highest power draws of any power tools and the ecoflow handled it just fine when the power bank is delivering large amounts of power or charging little fans kick on inside to keep the battery cool so the vent out of the back is pretty important the lights we're going to be using to illuminate the barn are these led modules that can be linked together end to end and the interesting thing once they're linked together they're only pulling 300 watts and if we do the math that 300 watts divided by the 110 power coming out of the normal outlets means we're only using about 3 amps which is a pretty low draw for the battery pack leds are pretty awesome now let's get these lights on the ceiling so the lights are hung up and functional we'll clean up the cords over here in a second and they are plugged into the battery bank now just one we haven't connected the other two to the singular one yet and all of the lights are controlled with this remote control which we will mount on the far door over there so we can turn the lights on and off so i have these cabinets that i'm going to jerry-rig and customize a little bit so that there'll be enough airflow for these machines when they're inside when the batteries are under load or powering something there's little fans inside that turn on in order to keep the batteries cool so i will have to add a little vent in the side as well as a compartment in the back so that they'll fit and be able to draw air in from the backside [Applause] [Music] ah [Music] [Music] so we've seen them work independently let's see if we can run them both at the same time off of the eco flow pulling almost 1300 watts at the same time and just like the back panel cut out the cutout for this vent hole isn't going to be visible from the outside so it doesn't need to look perfect [Music] [Music] for the countertop i'm using a thick slab of butcher block mostly because it makes a very nice countertop and it matches the wood aesthetic of everything else in the barn this slab is a tad too long so i am going to have to mark it out at seven feet and cut it so that it'll fit the alcove where we're planning on putting these power banks but once again cutting's not a big deal because we have the delta pro supplying all our power i'm using a straight edge to help guide the saw this last part might be a little bit overkill but i'm taking a metal plate and putting it as a barrier between the top wood panel and the batteries screwing the metal plate into the butcher block first then flipping it over and bolting the cabinets to the block itself [Applause] and just like that the countertop is finished and ready to store our 10 kilowatt hours worth of batteries [Music] this is just a test fit obviously i still need to connect the batteries together and we still need to test and see how many things we can charge at the same time we know everything fits but before we do the load testing on these battery banks let's get the solar panels installed and it's actually quite a bit easier than you think i'm installing the same snap and rack system that i used on my house drilling a hole up through the metal in the barn roof the installation process is pretty much the same except for that we're using a special kind of clamp that's made for metal roofs it's able to install on the peak of the little metal lips and screw into the sides of it without puncturing down into the roof or the insulation below the metal sheet [Applause] it's kind of smart i'm still leaving everything loose right now for when you put the rail in place but we have the roof rubber the metal bracket and then the bolt also has a little rubber washer on it as well to help keep water from going in this is where the power will go now we just need the rail bottom rail is now installed i'm leaving it loose just in case we need to slide it back and forth inside of this channel and position it better after we get this top rail installed which should be pretty easy in order to fasten the panels to these two rails that we just put down we have one silver clamp over here on the edge which i'll show you in a minute and another clamp which just comes in like this locks into place and then i can cinch it down on top of the panel once it's installed i broke my wrist hanging christmas lights a couple years ago so i'm not allowed on ladders anymore but that's okay because this thing is way cooler if we look on the back of the delta pro it says it can be charged via solar from 11 volts all the way to 150 volts dc with a 12 amp max what that means is one of these panels can generate about 9 amps worth of electricity at 33 volts so if we want to maximize the power that the ecoflow can charge with we have to wire two of these panels in series which means that the amperage stays the same while the voltage goes up instead of just 33 it would double to 66. so theoretically we could wire four panels together and still plug it into the delta pro and it would be just fine but since this is out in a barn and i'm not going to be using it a whole lot mostly just to power a small heater for the chickens some lights and then charge my mower once a week two panels will be plenty for my situation ecoflow has their own pretty trippy looking futuristic 400 watt solar panel if you're looking to be a little more mobile this guy follows the sun across the sky to get the most out of its position since my barn isn't going anywhere soon that i know of i opted for the roof mounted panels during the summer if i had three panels it should be enough to charge that main unit every single day but since i have the expansion batteries connected to the main unit i'll only get a partial charge wiring in series just means connecting the positive of one panel to the negative of the other panel which means that the voltages add up and the amperage stays the same if you were to wire in parallel the voltage would stay the same and the amperage would double electricity is pretty cool now that we have the panels mounted to the roof we can see that each of them has two wires a positive and a negative and so if we want to wire them in series we just have to connect one of the negatives and one of the positives and then the voltages will add up and then i can take the other positive wire attach an extension to it and the negative wire attach an extension to it and feed it down through the hole in the roof we have the panels mounted and up underneath there i have a little white ramp type of thing that i silicone down to the roof and that'll help keep the liquid out from the hole that we drilled earlier and i used the rails and zip ties to keep the wires from touching the roof or the panels this is what the wires look like coming inside i will put them in some conduit in a minute we just want to make sure everything's working we have the positive and the negative and this adapter is what comes with the eco flow and now with those two solar panels we are now charging at 500 watts and should charge completely up in about seven hours at least this module of course in the morning there's less power the power of the sun kind of looks like a bell curve as the sun gets higher in the sky we get more power and then as the sun goes down we get less power so i think this will charge up in about one day with both my panels in the summer and obviously it would have charged up a little faster if i put three up top but i think two is going to be plenty for what we use it for here it also has a normal charging plug on the back that can charge up from a wall outlet in about two hours but solar is quite a bit cooler plugging in the additional battery packs is easy enough they keep the extra cable in a compartment up top i can plug it into the back and move it over to the main unit then the solar power can charge up all three batteries at the same time for a total of over 10 kilowatt hours it'll take a while for each pack to balance out since they each have a different level of charge at the moment but my solar panels should be able to keep things topped off every single day with how little power i'm using in the barn 10 kilowatt hours is a lot unless i bring an electric vehicle in here to charge these batteries are probably never gonna dip below 70 or 60 percent but it's always good to have backup power kind of interesting that with the lights on right now and plugged into the power bank we are using 269 watts but the solar is supplying that so the battery isn't going down at all it's running directly off of the solar which means that the lights could pretty much run indefinitely obviously at night we would be using battery power but then during the day we would charge back up the power banks so we added a little bit of a backsplash to provide a little more room for these cables behind as well as some conduit which protects the wires coming down behind the cabinet now let's start plugging things in like the off-road wheelchairs the lawnmower and the heat lamp for the chickens we'll see what happens plugging in the lawnmower took us up to a thousand watts but we are charging which is nice with the power of a normal wall outlet so it should take the same amount of time as plugging it directly into the house a setup like this would also work well in the garage as kind of a backup solution or on an rv or some remote cabin it's a lot of power all while still being pretty portable there we have it we have a not a wheelchair the lawnmower another not a wheelchair all plugged into the same system along with the lights and we're pulling about 1200 watts it's kind of nice that we can use all the outlets at the same time eventually i think i'm gonna run extension cord over to this wall so i can park along this wall and charge everything that i need to but with the solar panels producing about three kilowatt hours a day or three thousand watts it should be enough to top off this system every single day to 100 percent with my usage at least so if there ever are cloudy days or a cloudy week i should still have enough battery storage for everything i need to charge and obviously this one battery should work for a lot of situations the expansion modules just top this one off as the power is being used and they all fit very comfortably inside of my little cabinet the solar will finish topping them off in about 29 minutes i did try plugging in my wife's tesla to the 30 amp port on front of the power bank but apparently electric vehicles need some kind of earth ground which we could probably jerry rig the plug in some way to get that but i'll save that for another video either way the 30 amp plug is probably still good for an rv or some other kind of recreational vehicle with a big power draw ecoflow also has a pretty cool app that can monitor the input and the output of the power in real time through wi-fi overall i'm pretty excited it's nice having a power system connected to the barn that's independent of the city any power outage that happens with the city won't affect the barn because we have our own power source as well as battery storage all hidden away in this nice little cabinet i'll leave a link for everything i talked about today the ecoflow delta pro down in the video description and if you have any questions also leave them down in the comments and i'll try to answer as many as possible come hang out with me on instagram and twitter i will be doing updates on this system over on instagram and thanks a ton for watching i'll see you around

Channel: JerryRigEverything

Views: 1,530,212

Keywords: Solar Power, Off Grid solar, RV solar, battery backup, emergency backup, solar generator, battery generator, ecoflow, eco flow, eco flow delta pro, delta pro, solar panel, how to install solar, how does solar work, off grid solar, diy solar, solar panels, Van life

Id: UnTJScmSLYs

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021