Simple Solar Power System for an off grid Cabin

[Music] how's it going everybody my name is dave whipple and you're watching bush radical today we're going to build a super simple solar power system for your off-grid cabin we're going to use a car battery a 100 watt solar panel a harbor freight charge controller and about a half an hour of our time let me run into the shed real quick and grab our solar panel this panel is made by a company called renegy and it'll set you back about 110 bucks as for the battery well we've got vehicles all over so we'll just borrow a battery from one we're not using at the moment now the beautiful thing about this is not only do you have a battery that you can use out of a vehicle you're not using but it's also going to keep that battery healthy by charging it constantly and the battery is going to last longer by being charged and not just sitting in an unused vehicle now the battery that's in this 78 ford van it just happens to be a marine deep cycle battery so it's a battery that's probably better suited for solar applications anyway give me a second to get her out of here and we'll move on now we're going to need a set of battery clamps to clamp our wires to the battery itself luckily i have this stanley charge thing i found at the dump it's got two wire clamps on it so i mean it's it's gonna be just what i need a little bit of delicate precision electrical work here and we'll have these cables adapted to the need that we're going to put them to just like that [Music] one other thing that we're going to need is a whole bunch of let's say 14 gauge wire just something to hook one part up to the next part i'm going to use this chunk of old extension cord as my source for wire [Music] what i'm going to do here is i'm going to take about i don't know 15 feet of it and i'm going to cut the casing off of the extension cord wire there'll be three wires inside there there'll be a black wire a white wire and a green wire and you know they're all going to be the same exact gauge so they're going to work out just fine for what we're using all they're going to be doing is the functioning is hookup wire so once i get the casing pulled off of these three wires i can just wind them up set them aside now the concept is really simple at this point we're gonna have a solar panel from the solar panel we're gonna have a charge controller this is the charge controller that i'm using comes from harbor freight it's like a twenty product basically all this does is it keeps the solar panel from just cooking the battery once the battery reaches a certain spot this charge controller will just shut off the charge it'll break the connection the panel will no longer be charging the battery this is what we're going to use for our outlet basically what this is is a dual power point connector just like you'd see in your car for charging your cell phone or your laptop or what have you gonna put one of these in the house basically you have two powerpoint kind of cigarette lighter type plugs so if we have a powerpoint type plug inside the house how do we use that in the house to do house type of stuff well of course for a cell phone charger just like out of your car you can plug a cell phone a dual usb adapter into it that way you can charge your cell phones inside the house without the generator running also now this is a cheap 200 watt inverter that i usually have in my car this will run a laptop just fine basically what an inverter like this is doing it just converts 12 volt dc which is what you're getting off the battery into uh 120 volt ac like you'd get out of your wall now there is a bit of a loss making that conversion from one type of power to another type of power but if i wanted to plug my laptop straight into this it would power it just fine anything that's 200 watts or less that's just a household appliance you could plug it right in to one of these sockets you could plug a lamp into one of these sockets and run it off a car battery because this little box is making the conversion from dc to ac and from 12 volt to 120 volt well let's get right to it first things first we need to put our solar panel on the side of the house that's going to get the most sun and i think this corner is probably going to be the sunniest [Music] the solar panel has mc4 solar type connectors so i'm going to use this pigtail adapter i'm going to cut off the mc4 connectors from this little adapter what i'm going to do is i'm going to wire them to my battery and to my charge controller so i don't have to mar the solar panel in any way i'm just taking the last probably inch of insulation off with the blade of a sharp utility knife and getting these all prepped and ready to hardwire in to my system [Music] from here i'm gonna need to get some wire ready so i'm just gonna take the two colors that i'm using the black and the white and i'm gonna pull the green off of the other two wires and it'll just all come off on a big rat's nest that leaves me a black and a white wire which is all i need two different colored wires so i can make the connections that need to be made and not be confused as to where i'm hooking what up to what once again i'm going to strip off about an inch of insulation on each one of these wires and get it all prepped and ready [Music] now this is a very very technical operation here this is what's called twisting two wires together don't try this at home here's the charge controller this is a 19 unit that i bought at harbor freight excuse me might be 21 it's got a little picture in the corner basically shows you how to hook it up if you can look right close here you see there's a solar a load and a battery set of wires one goes to your outlet one goes to your battery one goes to your solar panel very very simple the problem with this is it does have connectors that i don't have other connectors for so i'm just going to cut those ends off prep all my wires and hardwire everything together [Music] and there's my charge controller pretty much all set up and ready to go i'm ready to hardware all my lines into it right now but first these mc4 connectors i want to make sure that they're all ready to go to i've got one more of those to do so let me get that one taken care of see that delicate job of twisting two wires together very important now of course you could solder these together if you want a really good connection and you could use a heat shrink tubing to totally seal that connection keep any of the weather out of it but just not that guy so i'm going to use black tape that works perfect now once i get done with these two mc4 connectors being all ready to go i can clip them into my panel because the panel has the other side of each one of these connectors already in it and it's ready to go now i've got my clips and i can clip them into the solar panel and then i just have bare wire leads going out that i can hardwire wherever they need to go here's a real good close-up look at those mc4 connectors notice they actually have positive on the one connector and they have negative on the other connector that really helps you to make all your connections right you don't have to guess because they're both black and the wires that go to the panel are black one thing i really want here is i want enough of this wire that i can move this panel around to kind of follow the sun this cabin is kind of facing west southwest so the sun comes across kitty corner on this side of the cabin it'll be fine half of the day but it would be much better to rotate it to catch the sky that way anytime after about two or three in the afternoon so i'm going to put it right here in the corner of the cabin and i'm going to leave enough wire so that i can manipulate that solar panel to get the most out of it here's my battery clamps my jumper clamps now you can see these are these are made for like 500 amps this is a nice big fat cable i only need just a tiny bit of that so i'm going to get the insulation off these and i'm going to cut that copper core down to something i can actually use because right now it's way more than i need but it was free now you could go to the hardware store and just buy two little battery clamps with a little bit of wire that generally comes with them already attached but you know like i said these came from the dump they didn't cost me anything they're good quality they're heavy duty i don't need all this extra wire so i'm just going to pair this back and cut the excess off this is still probably even more than i need but that's what i think i'm going to stick with everything else can just get pruned like so there's my two battery clamps ready to be installed i believe right about here is where i'm going to pass the wire through for the panel and on the inside is where i'm going to have my uh output it's where i'm going to have my outlet and where i'm going to have my charge controller what i will do is i'll take both of these pieces of wire tape the ends together then i'll try to stuff them through that hole something like that here on the inside i'll just pull this wire through my outlet is going to go right up underneath the seal here first things first let's cut and strip these wires on our solar charge controller these center two wires right here that's where the solar panel needs to be tied to right by each of these little words there's the positive sign and the negative sign on this particular plug the red is positive the black is negative the wires i have to work with are black and white so you know they're all mismatched but so long as i know what it's doing i suppose we're fine that's ready to get taped up i'm going to do at this point is i'm going to take this wire that i pulled through the wall everything that's left i'm going to stuff it back through the wall and this is going to be the line that goes to my battery both the positive and negative coming in from the solar panel are tied in now the positive and negative that are going to go out to the battery this is where my outlet is going to go [Music] there we go that looks about right [Music] right about there's where that plug is going to go [Music] now i need to take the wires that are going down to my battery and i need to hook my battery clamps to those wires i'm going to start by making sure the ends are stripped about an inch back and of course i've already got my battery clamps all prepped and ready to go let's twist them up together get them taped up and that we can clip them onto our battery and once we have it all ready to go we can put the battery anywhere we want so long as the wires are long enough to reach there and for this application i think the battery is probably going to end up underneath the cabin just so it's totally out of the weather there's one cable a little bit of tape work there's two cables these guys are ready to go nice as you can see our charging lights on now everything is hooked up our dual outlet plug is hooked up our solar panel is hooked up our battery's hooked up let's take a reading on this battery right now to see where it sets and it looks like we're great in the ballpark of about 12.6 volts that's pretty good now what i'm going to do is i'm going to put this battery out of the way this is going to be the final resting place for this battery is up underneath the cabin that way it's not going to get rained on i don't have to tuck it underneath the solar panel it'll just stay down there out of the way and it'll be fine so the question is what is the value of a simple solar system like this well you can't do a whole lot with it you can charge handheld devices cell phones ipods if you still have one of those i do you can also plug in an inverter like the one i showed you earlier this one is a 200 watt unit so it'll power any ac appliance up to 200 watts power consumption for me doing youtube means running a laptop a lot of the time now i have a little generator i can use and i do use it quite a bit but as opposed to running that with the solar system like this it's just keeping the battery charged up enough that i can run my laptop i can charge my cell phone so basically i have my telephone needs taken care of and i also have my laptop taken care of and with the laptop i'm using it 90 of the time for editing videos just like this couple that with a lamp or two and that's pretty much my electricity needs in a nutshell thank you guys so much for watching bush radical my name is dave whipple be radical eh see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 1,526,282

Rating: 4.9072886 out of 5

Keywords: Off grid, off grid solar system, solar power, off grid solar power, cabin solar power, solar power for your cabin, off grid cabin solar power

Id: xal5xzC0MOc

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020