Replacing Our Gas Generator with EcoFlow Delta Pro for Whole Home Power Backup

foreign well it's not one to start even for this video my breath hey guys I'm Evan welcome to Country View Acres so in today's video we're going to be replacing our gas generator the one that we use to power our house during a power outage we're going to replace that with a portable battery backup system and power our whole house with that instead so it's going to be pretty cool system so stick with me so we live on 41 acres in Southeastern Illinois I've only got two neighbors that are within a mile of my house so not very populated where I live so when we do have a power outage the power companies are going to focus on the cities and the towns first so my area is typically last ones to get the power turned back on so this is my 5500 watt generator that I have used to power up our house as long as I wasn't running the air conditioner or the clothes dryer this would power everything up now the problem is as soon as the power goes out the first thing that goes through your mind is am I going to get it started how many times am I going to pull on this cord to get this started it can be a struggle sometimes and I can I can fight it for several minutes and if I'm gone this is something I definitely don't want my wife to have to struggle with all right so I do everything right I mean I turn off the fuel I let it run out of gas and then I turn it off I've got stabilizer in the gas it's still a struggle to start so even if you do everything right these things just ain't as reliable so we're gonna get this thing moved out of the way so our friends over at ecoflow ended up sending us their Delta pro model I believe this is the biggest one that they make so this is a battery backup system it is a power station a solar generator it could be called all of those things but basically there is a Lithium-Ion battery inside of here pretty good size one 3.6 kilowatt hours worth so that's a lot of energy stored in there and then it can send it back out as 120 volt Outlets it actually has a 30 amp outlet that's the same outlet that our camper used so you could you could plug it into a camper or travel trailer and Power It Up has USB ports for all your devices and then there's a little side panel here if you open it up there is some 12 volt ports in here just and one just like you have in your car so anything you plug into your automobile you could also power up so this is pretty versatile on all the different things that you can use to power you know power up with this but then it's also very versatile on the way you can charge it so you could charge it on the wall and power it up make sure it's all charged up and be ready for a power outage you can also plug it into your vehicle into the cigarette lighter in your vehicle and uh you can charge it up that way you can charge it up with solar panels which is what I end up planning on doing I've got some ordered they're not here yet but we're going to plug in some solar panels and then it would charge every day when the sun was out and just recharge it up every day so fairly versatile you can charge it with AC and DC on the charging fairly versatile with the charging but the cool thing about this is this the Delta Pros are expandable in a few different ways so you can get two different units you can tie those together with a special cable it's going to double the power double the voltage so it'll make 240 volts 7 200 watts and then you get a generator plug in just like the one we had and you can power up the house just like we did with the generator except this has got 1700 Watts more power than the generator did you can also expand it with batteries each one of these units you can add two batteries to effectively tripling the storage capacity of each one of these now you can charge these up with solar each one of these will do 1600 watts of solar so if you have two of them you effectively can double the solar now you can have about 13 3200 watts of solar so that is pretty cool um but you can you can build this system several different ways and expand it several different ways you can go with one unit and add batteries to it you can go with two units double the power double the voltage but I think just these two units right here I think these are going to power up our house just fine I think they'll be able to do more than what the generator used to do so let's go try it out so these Delta Pros are actually very heavy they're like 99 pounds probably should lift this with two people but it does have nice solid handles and it's actually meant to be carried like a piece of luggage right so you just extend the handle and roll it wherever you want it so get them to the house so I think what I would do is I would just keep these charged up in the basement ready to go and then I can just roll them out here so this here is the double voltage Hub and basically this plugs into each one of the solar generators combines them together and then you end up with 240 volt plugs so you've got some 20 amps and then you have the 30 amp 240 volt plug and this is the one you're going to plug into the house all right to get this hooked up these plug into a port in the bottom right hand corner here called the infinity Port I think so get one plugged in get the other one plugged in and then to power this up there's actually a on off button so we'll turn on they should link up and then this Powers up so there's a little Link light in the corner of each screen they know they're connected now we got 240 volts we're ready to hook it up and here's the generator Inlet this is where you plug the generator into your house all right I think we got everything out here ready to go I'm going to go ahead and head inside to the main breaker panel we're gonna go ahead and switch it over to the generator and we'll see if it can power the whole house so in my breaker panel I have what they call a generator interlock and that is this piece of metal right here it prevents the main breaker and your generator from both being on at the same time so to turn on our generator we have to turn off the main breaker foreign spinning down in the house so you have to lift up on the interlock and then you can turn on the generator like that so now you can see this is actually up and you can't turn on your main breaker so we are powered off the generator right now so this generator interlock is probably the most cost effective way to power up your whole house and still be legal because you can't accidentally backfeed the grid you cannot have the main on at the same time as the generator input from outside so definitely cost effective it's the easy way to go if you're looking to power your whole house up like this all right I'm gonna walk around real quick we'll make sure everything's powered up so I'm down here in the mechanical room we've got two freezers down here that are powered up all our utility stuff is down here too so we have got an on-demand hot water heater it is propane but it uses electricity to ignite and for the little blower motor that's in here so we've got hot water we've got our water softener it's on this is our furnace this is a propane furnace it has a heat pump outside this is the backup this is the air handling unit and it's actually running so we are actually circulating air right now I'm gonna have to check on that we might actually be running the heat pump all right we're upstairs looks like everything is powered on up here of course I did lose the clocks on the microwave when I switched that over runs microwave fine everything seems like it's working okay so look up at the ceiling you see we've got our lights you see our ceiling fans are going that is stuff you normally don't have when you use extension cords right so when you power your whole house up like this you get all your normal lighting all of your normal Outlets everything just works it's really the way to go so let's look at this see what's going on looks like the fan is just running just the fan so I'm going to turn that back to auto I'll tell you what we'll do I normally run the furnace so let's kick on the furnace make sure it works it should work because we already had the blower motor going so it looks like everything's powered up just fine the furnace did kick on and it's actually raised at one degree already so I normally use the fireplace in the winter time so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this back off for now and we'll head back down to the solar generators so I've had the whole house powered up for about 50 minutes now everything seems to be working fine now I could go up to the displays on the front of this and I could look and see how many watts are left how much time is left but you don't necessarily have to do that they're smart devices they're actually on my Wi-Fi they're on the internet basically I can monitor them anywhere so I've got the ecoflow app and I've got this opened up you can see both of the Delta Pros on the app and I'll look at number one here you can see it's running 501 Watts it's got six hours seven minutes estimated time left on it and then if we look at the other one you can see it's running 367 Watts and it's got about seven hours and 50 minutes left on it so you can you can see your power usage you can see your estimated time you can also see if you're charging it with solar you can see that on the display and see how much it is charging so pretty cool on the app you can see and monitor these from inside your house or from at work or something like that so you can monitor these from your phone so I'm sure I could get these to last longer if I would manage the loads I just turned the whole house on just to see what would happen but if I went inside and turned a few things off like let's say the ceiling fans do I really need the ceiling fans running during a power outage probably not I bet if I go inside and I turn those two ceiling fans off I'll probably gain a couple hours on these Delta Pros all right I went ahead and I turned the ceiling fans off just to see what would happen and the first Delta Pro here dropped down to 392 Watts it's got 7 hours and 35 minutes left on it now so it ended up gaining a little over an hour's worth of run time just by turning the ceiling fans off so definitely helps you can manage your loads see what you have on and off you can make it last longer you could buy batteries to make it last longer but pretty cool little system you see that it's just plug and play pull it out here plug it in turn it on just got to flip the switches inside and it's ready to go so definitely should be easy enough for Rebecca I can show her and it'll be way easier than trying to pull on that generator several times trying to get it started up so while I was standing here they just the fans on them just kicked on and got louder so you can tell that it took on a load so Rebecca's turned something on so she either turned on the dryer the dishwasher maybe the oven so let's see what she turned on all right I came upstairs and Rebecca is baking bread so she's got tell us what you got I can burger buns yeah so she's made some hamburger buns here and she is getting ready to cook them in the oven so she's got it heating up right now and uh so that's what that load was so I pulled up the app I can actually see we're putting out over 2000 Watts coming out on each of the Delta Pros coming out power in the oven this is a 240 volt load and it looks like we're going to bake some bread using the Delta Pros today what's that what setting do you use the dryer on which one of these normal cotton okay all right I think I'm gonna do one more test I'm gonna try the dryer it's another 240 volt load so it'll definitely be a test for the solar generator and uh normal cotton see what happens well I think the dryer just kicked in because we are up to over 3000 Watts on here and just at 3 000 Watts on there so total of 6 000 Watts being outputted right now so it looks like it will successfully run the dryer it may not it'll really drain the battery pretty quickly so if you're in a power outage like this of course we're just playing around we're testing it this is actually the first day that I've played around with this seeing what it'll do so you and me are testing this out first time together and it is pretty cool that it can do that much power and power the dryer I guess if you needed it but in a power outage you're going to be a little bit more conservative right you're going to not turn on all the lights you're probably not going to use your big appliances and then this will last quite a bit longer so like I said this is my first day testing out the Delta Pros I did I did charge them up a few days ago but this was my first day off you know to be able to get out here and actually plug something in and uh ended up plugging in the whole house and it and it powered it up at least everything I had on it powered up we didn't go crazy trying to turn on everything but uh it did run the oven and then it ran the dryer and the dryer was the biggest test just over 3000 Watts was going through those they max out at 3 600 watts so I think that was a pretty good test today for him and so far I think I'm I'm pretty impressed I think this whole thing is neat there's a lot of stuff packed in to that package we didn't really touched the surface on everything that thing can do so my initial thoughts is I think that's going to be way easier um you just roll it out like a set of luggage plug in a few cords turn it on and you can power up the whole house I think it's going to be way easier than than the generator the generator I I tried to start that for the video today I think it took me at least five minutes to start it up and I had to stop a couple times to catch my breath because it did not want to start and uh of course it's going to be way quieter than the generator that generator out here in the country you can hear for Miles so you can hear that generator for Miles I know I hear people running chainsaws for miles and that is way louder than a chainsaw so the Delta Pros are quiet unlike my ducks I can probably hear my ducks out there but the Delta Pro is quiet it's got some fans on there so a lot quieter you can actually take it in your house you know if you didn't need 240 volt you wouldn't really need two of these right the only reason you need two is if you want a 240 volts to power up your main panel in your house so if you just had one of those I mean you could just take it in your house you could just plug in your devices anything that you would need it would last you for a really long time so a pretty neat little system especially with the solar the solar I think is probably the coolest thing about it just because I like the whole idea of putting some solar panels out here and then it charge every day and you almost have like infinite power without having to pour gasoline in it right so it just charges up every day so I think that's probably one of the coolest things about it so I know this isn't exactly for everybody these aren't exactly cheap right this is some pretty advanced stuff this is some high-end technology here all packed into that little case so this is going to be for people who have a little bit more disposable income on hand to be able to purchase one of these so one of those units is I think 36.99 right at thirty seven hundred dollars and um you know if that's ended up being too much they make several models like I said this is the biggest one they make and I think they make seven eight different models that are that go down in size and in price but if you want something to back up your whole house you're not going to find a lot of portable options out there this is this is pretty unique feature right here being able to tie these together and power up the whole house now I know that I'm a very lucky person to be able to have those on hand to be able to test out and do some stuff with these so like I said I got some solar panels coming I do plan on doing a lot of stuff with them so we're going to hook a bunch of solar to them we're going to find out exactly how long I can run my house with them and then I may end up uh kind of getting them installed in the house and hooking them up to my like some critical loads in my house and see if I can power a small portion of my house 100 of the time with them so I've got some neat stuff to do to try out on these so stick around if you want to see any of that one of these units would be perfect for an off-grid cabin I I think in my mind it fits perfect for an off-grid cabin or a camper one of these units would be great so uh I think that's gonna be it for today's video I just kind of doing a quick test today I think we ran it for about three hours just playing around and we'll have more to do with the Delta Pros later but uh definitely going to be messing around some solar this year and this is uh part of the system that we're going to use to do a bunch of testing so stick around and there'll be more to come so that's it for today guys so thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Country View Acres

Views: 966,371

Keywords: Homestead, farm, farmstead, hobby farm, self sufficient, homesteading, rural life, country life, farm life, Delta Pro, double voltage hub, 240 volt, EcoFlow, solar generator, whole home battery backup, power station, battery backup, generator inlet, generator interlock, solar power, portable power station

Id: ddI0e46Dbb0

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023