Optimizing a Small Off Grid Solar System.

let's take a look at my friend richard's off-grid solar system richard has a great example of an off-grid solar electric system which is a pretty small scale but he has been improving it over the years and it's powering his critical loads like some small chest freezers and things but it's things that he can plug in directly it's a great example of what can be done and he agreed to let all of you see it and hopefully this gives you some inspiration [Music] earlier this year i went out for a very long backpacking trip uh in the appalachian mountains while i was hiking through the rugged terrain of tennessee i i'm hiking through the mountains and one day i came to a road crossing and it's just a dirt road and sitting there was a guy in his car named richard and he was passing out cold drinks and snacks which is kind of mind-blowing to be out in the wilderness and then find somebody there but he was a local to that area and knew the back roads and just enjoyed meeting people and meeting the hikers and kind of cheering us up with a cold drink so i very much appreciate that gatorade that richard gave me and the snacks and while we were chatting richard actually recognized me from the youtube channel richard was thrilled about it wanted to tell me all about his solar electric system and he invited me back to his home like i said he was local to that area to check out his solar system and i'm like sure why not let's do it so he brought me back and showed off his solar electric system and i i commend him for taking that initiative i mean he really wanted to have his own kind of energy independence because he says he gets a lot of blackouts in that area a lot of power outages primarily richard wanted to make sure that his multiple chest freezers didn't go down now originally richard had bought a small 1 000 watt kit from windy nation and then he bought a larger one a 3000 watt inverter he had added on a couple more lead acid batteries and really he hadn't done a bad job but it wasn't yet optimized and richard asked for my critique of it now normally i wouldn't do this just being a guest in somebody's home but richard specifically wanted to know if there were ways of improving it so i gave him some advice we're looking at his 12 volt system it's got a 3000 watt 12 volt inverter and two pwm charge controllers and then inside here we've got all the batteries so uh this is one not wire with a 300 amp fuse and then the batteries are set up daisy chain which is a very common setup and unfortunately you'll notice that some of these wires are actually smaller gauge so it's a two gauge wire so now in essence we have a 300 amp fuse and the potential to draw up to 300 amps uh running through two gauge wire and all of these terminals will wind up getting hot on this if you were to fully pull all the current so my recommendation for this setup was to put on a couple of bus bars and then run a separate set of wires probably six gauge wire from each battery up to the bus bar when i first saw his solar system he had a few solar electric panels out front on a little ground mount array that he built and that looked great it was running into some pwm charge controllers now these were pulse with modulator charge controllers they're a little bit older technology and not quite as efficient then he had that running into a 12 volt battery bank with some agm lead acid batteries and they the batteries there were daisy chained together and he had a 3000 watt inverter which was putting out pure sine wave and he had an extension cord plugged into that where he had uh some of his chest freezers and critical loads that he wanted to run now daisy chaining is when you're jumping from one battery post to the next battery post to the next battery post if you watch my channel you know i'm not really a fan of daisy chaining and i try to avoid it when i can so he was chatting with me about well maybe does he need to buy a new inverter or move up to 48 volts questions like this which are very common for somebody in his situation and my recommendation was to use the equipment that he had but optimize it first go through and redesign the whole system using the equipment he already owned now this was going to keep the cost down because he already had all the major parts but also it would help him learn about how to optimize the system how to best set it up for his situation my biggest takeaway for him was to add central bus bars instead of daisy chaining i added four batteries that i already had two bus bars positive negative of course my wife was so kind to build the battery rack bench for me and i have room to add a few more batteries if i need this is under the staircase so i have a little room back there that's charged some store some extra wire solar supplies but uh let's take a quick click let me zoom in on that just a little the bus bars are a big deal because each battery is now [Music] individually wired to the bus bars which makes battery maintenance easy there's my blue c shut off switch 3 000 watt inverter and this was the biggest upgrade for me was the two midnight solar mppts what a difference now something richard already had in some boxes down there with the rest of his system were a couple of midnight solar classics these are mppt charge controllers which stands for maximum power point tracking he had not yet hooked these up he was still using his older pwm charge controllers the reason he hadn't hooked these up is because he wasn't yet sure if he he was kind of saving them for his bigger 48 volt system that he eventually wants to build to take his entire home off grid but i suggested hey those charge controllers they will work on 12 volts and 48 volts so why not start utilizing them while he has them um so the 12 volt i have two separate arrays coming in at 24 volts they're wired in series of two so they're coming in and the charge controller is set um set up for 12 volt since i have a lot of 12 volt inverters over the years so that's what i went with so if my system or my semi-inverters were to give up the ghost then i would upgrade to a 48 volt and add a couple more batteries and two more batteries wire these in series like four four 12 is a 48 so and then um yeah make it a 48 volt system but the biggest thing with the bus bars is the separation of the batteries for battery maintenance also i can hook up i'm going to hook up another 12 volt inverter which i have which is my old thousand watt inverter currently i'm powering my my loads are my freezers and i've got a tankless water heater and um running internet and my tv off of it and even on the cloudy days it's doing fine in the mornings i wake up it's you know 12.5 to 12.7 which is still good it's not drawing that much so down the road i will be running some more wiring and putting some more loads on it biggest thing i learned though is uh uh the bus bars really do make a difference um it's gonna extend the life of my batteries uh the mpp t is the way to go um i'm really happy the the system really charges up much quicker as sort of the old system where i had them daisy chained um if i was to go with a maximum load it could you know um cause the batteries to um you know not perform correctly or dry out the individual cells where the battery posts are um david came came by and looked at my system i ran into him he was in the neck of my woods and he was very cordial graceful he had that look like and i was like okay go ahead and tell me give it to me and he he was nice enough to explain everything and help me draw out a little diagram with the bus bars and everything and here i am i upgraded um i already had the stuff sitting on the shelf for a year life and work gets in the way and uh i found the um hardest part was getting started and getting it done we're going to take a step outside and i'll show you the solar panels and the combiner boxes that we added and upgrade it to hello everybody so there's my chicken coop which we want to do some function stack stacking and added 12 100 watt solar panels on there on the top you can see that and this is the combiner box coming from the 12 panels off the chicken coop i really have to thank my friend larry for helping me with this part on the chicken coop shout out to him he helped me a lot um i kind of wish this was a little neater but i'm going to wrap this in some conduit and clean that up then i have grid power going out which still needs to be done but that's pretty much it 12 100 watt panels there i've got another 12 on top of the coupe so these eight panels you see on the right side there are two 400 watt systems which are each going into the 30 amp um pwm charge controllers um that was my original system and then i added um four more 100 watt panels make it 1200 watts here and those are going into a combiner box they went with a midnight solar combiner box basically these are in series of two i numbered everything with a sharpie just to make it easier down the road mppt charge controllers are more efficient than pwm now there's two reasons that they're more efficient one they're always tracking the maximum power point of the panel but two he's able to rewire his solar panels in series meaning that he can bring in a higher voltage on the same wire which means he has less voltage drop and less losses in the wire and this is the behind the scenes here tried to do some good wire management um i did sacrifice about uh six or seven zip ties in the process for temporary holding um so what we did we just kind of scabbed on over here the other four and added these on another upgrade i did is i used um metal uh metal roofing screws for uh metal roofs so we get a good shot of that um they do have a rubber gasket on it and i just got the metal or silver stainless slick and it just gives it a neater look uh prior to that i had decking screws um with washers so they started to rust out so i had to clean up the uh rust and then i've got a little rubber on there for the similar metal separation basically went from 800 watts upgraded to 2400 watts and it's performing nicely i have this is facing true south here and my chicken coop is kind of like a little bit of a southeast that it gets sun from about nine until seven that's still bringing in um this this gets sun from about eight to five and then it starts to get some shadows but overall i'm pretty happy with the upgrades is there anything i would do different probably buy bigger solar panels because you're doing the same amount of work with smaller 100 watt panels i mean i could have you know three or four hundred watt panels that were would replace four of those but i had those in the shed you know for a couple years and just hadn't got around to installing them so sometimes the the hardest part is getting started so just get started and just do it and get it done it is a lot of work but it's worth it in the end so this worked out great richard said that his new battery bank system has been running really well now certainly if somebody else is in the same situation and they don't have an mppt charge controller yes you will have to buy that but this is richard's story and i think it's very inspiring for us to look at taking a small system and don't get so wrapped around the axle trying to think how to build the biggest best possible system out there we can really do a lot with a small setup if it's optimized well for us so with his new setup he's been able to add more appliances to it he's using more power each day than he thought he could and the system is still not dropping down in voltage to the point where he's worried about it he he's able to get through several days of cloudy weather so i commend richard for doing such a fantastic job so thank you richard so much for giving me permission to show off your system on my channel thank you everybody so much for watching if you enjoy these videos please like subscribe comment and share you

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 60,876

Keywords: off grid, off-grid, solar, battery, AGM, lithium, mppt, midnite, classic, charge controller, busbar, grounding busbar, wiring, optimize, improve, mistakes, small, cheap, battery bank, 12V, 48V, diy, build

Id: SfRTSo4sJAQ

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022