Simple DIY Solar Power System for Off Grid Cabins! #offgridcabinbuild #solarpower

something I've been thinking about doing for a while is uh is talking to you about my solar power setup I've decided that I'm going to give you the full meal deal folks so this video is going to be the first phase of my solar power and I wanted to bring that to you because honestly I think a lot of you watching who are thinking about doing solar power you're probably like I was and you only have so much money you you don't have enough money to put $80,000 into a solar power system for your cabin in the woods right so I want to talk about these three panels and the system that I built with them and at the end of this video I'm going to give you a complete breakdown of what it cost me to put this in back in 2010 when I put it in and I'm going to give you an equivalent system in today's cost and I'll give you the exact numbers at the end of this video in a similar basic system today and and explain to you how I did it and how you can do it without spending gobs and gobs of money money on your solar power setup so let's talk about this system when I first put this system in I used a spreadsheet calculator I'll I'll kind of show it to you here and I determined approximately how much power I needed and what I needed to have in order to generate that power and I found a website that is still available today I'll have to flip this over for you but I used them quite a bit now these panels which are the f3s they're a 205 wat panel voltage at Peak power this is important is 18.20 volts now bear in mind a 12vt panel puts out more than 12 volts right you actually have to be able to charge at like 14 1 12 to 15 volts so these put out uh 18.2 but they're open circuit voltage is 22.7 so if you think about it it's a 12vt system and they can put out almost 23 volts but what happens is when it's really really cold out and the angle of the panels is just right and maybe you've got enough snow to get reflection they can actually put out even more power than they say so I've seen these panels put out a lot now when I say 70 that's because they're in series so down here you've got a simple negative and positive wire if you take your negative here and you run it into positive and your positive to negative on the next panel you take your negative over here and your positive over here you run those back to the cabin then these are in what's called Series so those three panels I'll drop the price of them right here for you they weren't too expensive but you know 14 years ago it was a little more money for solar panels than it is today and you always try to figure your solar power system on you know uh and when when it comes to panels a lot of time you'll see them rated at you know so much per watt or dollar per watt or something like that now to build this system again I had limited funds I put in a midnight solar combiner box that takes those three panels the wire runs over here and up into that box then the power from the solar panels runs in through a breaker to a charge controller now when I built this system I really didn't understand some of the basics of how solar power really works and one of the things I didn't realize is that there are two main types of controllers one is called a PCM controller which honestly in my telecom world that would mean pulse code modulation and that's not what it means in I think it was like power control module or something I don't know I'll have to look it up and drop it right here for you the other one is maximum PowerPoint tracking and at the time the less expensive option was the PCM controller so I bought that one I bought a Xantrex C40 I think it was and I'll I'll drop what that cost right here for you so that would take the voltage from these panels in the porch and convert it to the type of power you needed for the batteries now bear in mind what what you're doing here is you're using these solar panels as a charger for your batteries that's how solar power works you know a lot of people think well you're just running off the panels right no you're actually running off of some way of storing that power which is batteries so you need those batteries that's how you can run all night long when there's no sun right or when it's cloudy or it's raining or snowing or something like that so that controller takes the voltage from these panels and it and it has a step charging system basically you have a bulk charge an absorption charge and then it can float right and and Float is what you would normally do if you plugged in a little car maintainer battery maintainer the same as I have on The Sawmill over there you know it'll just provide a trickle trickle charge is what you kind of think of that as a float charge is like a trickle charge so so you take that and it and that's what charges your batteries up now there was a problem with that and I'll mention that here in a little bit so bear in mind those of you that know solar power and you're like wait you're running those panels in series and you're going to a PCM controller what are you doing trust me we'll get there that charges your batteries now you have to be able to take the power from those batteries in order to use it right well most of you probably already know then you need an inverter and there are two types of inverters one is called a modified sine wave inverter which is really in the industry a lot of guys would call that a square wave inverter that's like a a digital representation of natural regular Power 60 HZ you know uh pure sinewave power well the modified sinewave inverter is actually cheaper by a lot than pure sign so I had a 2500 watt modified sinewave inverter from ases power it wasn't the one I originally ordered the the one I originally ordered from on El they didn't have so I found the aims it was actually a little bit cheaper so now you have an inverter that you could plug all your 120 volt stuff into right so you've got batteries you got solar panels you got a charge control you got an inverter but what if you don't have any sun if you don't have any sun we're going to have sun today but you know it's a little overcast and cloudy so we don't have a whole lot the next thing you need folks is you need a generator well we had a generator already we were already building the cabin and I had a a little Champion 3500 watt generator we got at you know one of those stores the the the inexpensive type hardware stores cuz I couldn't afford an expensive generator I couldn't afford a Honda and I bought that Champion generator for like 300 bucks and believe it or not later I sold it for 300 bucks too I had that generator to build this cabin out here so I had a generator already but I mean the generator is not going to charge the batteries up all the generator does is provide you with 120 volts of regular power so now you got to get a battery charger an actual battery charger and so I bought an Iota 50 or 55 amp battery charger that you plug into the generator and then you wire that up to your battery bank and that charges up your battery so now you got solar panels you got a charge controller you got an inverter you got a generator battery charger which is also a stepped type charger so bulk absorb float right we got to get batteries too batteries are expensive buying batteries folks that's that's big bucks right so what I had Learned was that golf cart batteries actually are inexpensive and you can get them to last 10 years now I'm going to be honest with you my first batteries lasted me about four I had to learn a few things but I bought six golf cart batteries at $89 a piece I didn't have any core to exchange on them so I paid the full price and that's the basic system so you you've got you got everything right you got your panels your charge controller your batteries your inverter your battery charger your generator that's basically it now you do have to have a combiner box that I showed you and you do have to have a main disconnect box and I'll show you that I can show you a little bit of clip of the old system here now I learned a few things one of those is that when you use lead acid batteries like golf cart batteries if you're going to add batteries to that system you can only do it within the first here don't do it after that that would be a problem so I did add two more batteries at 89 bucks a battery within one year of putting the system in that was the basic system and honestly I ran that system for 3 years except with one change the change was that I had these solar panels in series that meant that I was sending as much as you know 68 to 70 volts when I was in the middle of winter to the PC M charge controller a charge controller that quite frankly could not utilize all of the power that these panels were sending in the configuration that they were in so what does that mean well the charge controller was designed for a 12vt system it would take 18 volts and everything above that 18 volts it would just ignore that power so you know if you're thinking about how many amps you need to charge up your batteries I was only using a about a third of the charging power that these solar panels were providing me so it wasn't working very well if I had put them in parallel so that the voltage stayed the same but I had full amps going to that charge controller it would have worked just fine it would perfectly fine I wouldn't have had to change anything however these solar panels were basically 50 ft from here to that combiner box and then into the porch where the charge controller was at 50 ft you could lose 3% of your voltage that's a 3% voltage drop from the panels to the charge controller if it was in parallel so they were basically running a 12volt system 18 volts you know open voltage you could lose a 3% drop because I knew the system was underpowered I didn't want to lose any voltage so I put them in series but the problem is as I learned that doesn't work well with that controller you're wasting power so I had to replace it and I replaced it with a Morning Star mppt I think it's called the TriStar 45 which I'll put the cost right here for you that charge controller could take all 70 volts that these could give it and step it down and use all of the power to charge my batteries up and that worked very very well and that's the original system that I built for this cabin before there was a deck on it we built the porch to house it all but there was no roof there was no deck here I mean no roof there was a roof over the cabin but not on the deck and that provided all the power that we needed for short weekend trips and that folks is that initial system not expensive now I'm going to skip to being in the shop so that I can go over the same system if you were to try to buy it today and what that would look like so stay tuned let's pop over to the shop back home and I'll bring that to you all right folks well you've stuck around this long so I'm going to give you the goods which I said I would do so first of all since you have stuck around this long you must have enjoyed this video I hope you have so far we're not done I got some good information to give you but if it's been worthwhile so far do me a favor hit that subscribe button I'd love it if you did now thank you very much for that but let's get right to the point right if you're still here you want these numbers this is a 615 watt system it's 3 Sun a205 fa3 205 wat solar panels bear in mind those prices have dramatically changed and gone down but not everything so let's get through it I'm going to run through this quick there was a Xantrex C40 pwm charge controller a pv3 combiner box and a 20 amp PV breaker so that's for the solar panels they come into that combiner box at the cabin and that allows you to add more arrays I suppose you could probably get away without that I bet a lot of people do because there was also a midnight solar 250 amp dc connect with two 60 amp dc Breakers all right now we had eight regular battery cables two inverter cables and then one of the things I changed was I went to Costco golf cart batteries which cost me $89 a piece they don't cost that today folks and they didn't have the sun Inver that they had quoted me at like $290 some odd dollars and so I bought the 2500 watt as modified sinewave inverter and I also bought the Iota DLS 55 which is a 55 amp 12vt battery charger now it's a smart charger it's got four stages it's one of the better ones you can buy so for the original system was $2,668 and10 now couple things I didn't put in here the cost of the rack you could build your own you could find lots of options for that I think it might have cost me about 200 but actually my neighbor built it so I paid for materials and a little bit of effort on his part to weld it up and then of course there's some concrete there's you know ground rods and and ground wire and things like that that I didn't include in this I would call those ancillary items that you could do all kinds of things with now but that was then right this is now so as I said I would put together a system that was basically the same system today and give you the price on that now I'm going to put that one up on the screen as well but folks I want you to pay attention to a couple things number one inflation happens right prices have gone up a lot in 14 years some things though have actually gone down however you could look at a lot of these things and maybe find some Alternatives or you could choose a slightly different route so this is really just me telling you what today it would cost to build my system with components I found today and I will put links to all of these components down in the description below so if you want to go check them out you can go check them out yourself and you might be able to find places to get them even lower maybe used even so this is just to give you what that system that I put in that first system that I put in back in 2010 would cost today and I'll give you some final thoughts on that as soon as I run through this now let's get right to the point I couldn't find 205 wat 12vt panels and again I I might not even build a 12volt system today my system today is actually 24 but I wanted to put this together so if you want to build a 12vt system exactly like I originally built at the cabin for just weekend use and trust me it worked great for that this is the system to get similar to 615 Watts I put in three 200 wat 12vt panels at $198 piece for a total of $594 now I got to be honest with you folks you could probably just grab two 24 volt 48 volt panels it doesn't actually really matter what the voltage on the panels are no matter what anybody tells you you could get different panels like two 305 watt panels might not cost you much more than this but it would give you the same amount of power so bear that in mind all right 50 ft of MC 4 cable that's $62.99 now that's 50 ft of both positive and negative which is what you need to get from your panels to your combiner box if you're going to build it exactly like I did with the panels 50 ft away you could obviously change that to 20 ft if if your panels are much closer one midnight solar combiner box this is the mnpv3 which is very similar to the pv3 combiner box that I found this one was 1446 you may be able to find a different combiner box or like I said earlier maybe you just run straight to the DC disconnect 20 amp Breakers now 2343 a midnight solar 250 amp disconnect box basically the same box I have 297 so that one went up quite a bit folks $140 worth two 60 amp Breakers 38 a piece one morning star MPP TriStar 45 at $558 now that is a change I took out the Xandra pwm charge controller because frankly I wouldn't run one so in my opinion I don't even know if you can buy a a pwm charge controllers today I think everybody runs mppt you could probably find a cheaper MPP controller I happen to know that this TriStar controller is an excellent controller that mine has been running now for 14 years non-stop without an issue so take thatt for what it's worth that one was 558 you might be able to save half that by looking at some less expensive ones today um I did find six golf cart batteries 240 amp hour so a little bit more these are at Walmart for 1323 honestly I think you could get them at Costco for maybe closer to half that I'm going to say maybe 800 so bear that in mind because I'm going to knock 500 bucks off the end of this cuz I think you could get them at Costco they just weren't open when I was trying to put the prices together I put down four two out battery cables at $24.99 a piece for a total of $99.96 you actually only need three because I forgot we're only doing six batteries so we'll take 25 bucks off the end here because if you're only doing six batteries you don't need them uh one pair of two o inverter cables so those are 5ft cables for $ 5979 the Iota DLS 55 which you would need if you don't have an inverter charger right that one is 19 9.98 and a Delta lightning Serge arrestor for 4777 now that total price folks was $ 3720 if you took $500 off because you got your batteries at you know say Costco cuz I'm pretty sure you can get them for Less there then that would put you at 3520 and if you took off the 25 bucks for the other set of battery cables you don't need you're now under $3,500 for basically the same system that I bought for $2,700 for 14 years ago so I'll put that up on the screen for you now couple thoughts this is just a Weekender type solar power system or a beginner system but I want you to understand that with that charge controller you could put more power into it it is a 45 amp charge controller so if you wanted to put a little bit more power in there maybe you know two or three uh solar panels that are you know 400 watts a piece or something like that then you know like a 24volt panel which puts out about 36 volts really two of those together shouldn't push that 45 that that TriStar 45 the the 45 amp limit because those things run about 8 amps so two of those together in parallel you're running either 16 amps or if you go in series you're running eight at 72 volts so you'd be fine you could probably run six of those in into that thing so that charge controller would be one that you could use for a very long time the same with the Outback Flex Max 80 which I didn't include here but I actually like the flex Max 80 a lot as well so my point there is if you get a good charge controller if you can afford to it will be expandable later and that's something very important to understand now could you get a modern pure sine wave inverter charger like I have today for $500 I don't think you could you typically run about $1,500 so I I I think if you're looking to save money by going with modified sinewave with a system like this I think you just have to bear that in mind that some things don't like modified sign now you could run a television on that you could run a refrigerator on that you could you could run a lot of things on that but I probably you probably won't be charging up your lithium battery powered tools with that they don't typically like like Square wave or modified sine wave from what I understand so there you have it my system $2,700 14 years ago would run you about $3,200 I think that's what we came up with right about $3,200 today that's about a $500 difference overall because solar panels have gone down a lot which makes sense supply and demand more people want something so people make more of them and the more they make the less they become simple so there you have it for $500 more than I paid 14 years ago you can have a 600 W solar powered system for your cabin in my next solar power video I'm going to give you the upgrades that I did to my system at the end of 2013 because I moved into the cabin and I was going to live there full-time so that's going to be something you might want to hear if you're trying to power an offgrade cabin in the woods so stick around for that I really appreciate you being here folks thanks for watching and hey hit that like button if you enjoyed this thanks again folks yall have a great day we old jar hit out

Channel: The Old Jarhead

Views: 7,295

Keywords: Off Grid Cabin Solar Power, off grid cabin solar power, off grid cabin, off grid, solar power, off grid solar, cabin, solar, cost me to install a complete solar power system, our off grid cabin build, install a complete solar power system, off grid solar power system, diy solar, solar panels, 600 watt solar power system, solar panel, DIY Solar Power System for Off Grid Cabins, DIY Solar Power System, diy solar system, diy solar panel system, off grid solar system, solar system

Id: oC_yacKxuaQ

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024