Solar Powered Mini Split Air Conditioner Tour - Everlanders see the World!

welcome back everyone in this video I finally addressed the most commonly asked question how we power our mini-split air conditioner using solar power let's get into it alright so first things first is the choice of air conditioner when I first started with AC in this truck I had a plywood plug that I just put here in this side compartment door and it had a hole in it and that fit a typical window mounted window shaker air conditioner and it was a small LG about 450 watts if I remember right and there worked okay and Canadian summers I suppose but those units depend on having a little bit of a slant to them so that the water the condensation from from cooling can drip outside of your home out the window and if you're a little bit of a slant as the truck is now that condensation will run through the machine and drip inside your home so that always kind of weirded me out second disadvantage for our application is you need to cut a big hole in your box to install this thing and then you need to trust that that's going to be the one that you're gonna use if it fails and you have to buy another one and it's slightly a different aspect ratio of hole you need to make a bigger a different hole and I didn't want to struggle with that another disadvantage of a window shaker style is they're a bit louder on the inside in my opinion the compressor and the outside fan and the inside fan is all mechanically connected to that box and it is all sort of in half way inside your living area and so they seem a bit louder to me as well as sealing around the outside they're not really well sealed so that led me down the rabbit hole of finding a mini split now typically they're all quite a bit bigger 10,000 BTU and and up way bigger this is a forest air mini-split air conditioner 8,000 BTU and it's novel in that it has this umbilical here that has the coolant lines electricity and the Condon's station evacuation chewing all in one umbilical and it all fits through a two-inch hole so I can mount the compressor here on the outside and the air handler condenser on the inside and that umbilical has a quick-connect fitting where you can disconnect and reconnect it after feeding it through the hole and so quite obviously this is the compressor it's just sitting here bolted down to a bracket that I bonded to the outside of our composite panel and the power and condensation and coolant lines all around through the umbilical to the inside and while this is a residential intended for you know small apartments or if you work in a parking booth or something like that you can put it in in the door and slam the door on the cord or whatever it is meant for residential use we've been running around with it for three years I think on the back of the truck we put a hundred thousand kilometers on this chassis since since it went on and we've had no problems still it runs like a champ and it's powered by our solar so that brings me to my next point how do we power this unit off of solar well for those who haven't seen I'll put a link in a card up here to our solar panel video but basically we have four solar panels on the roof that are always exposed to the Sun and they're collecting a whole heap of solar right now but as you can see there we can remotely deploy four more panels that pop out from underneath the top floor for a total of eight solar panels at one point four eight kilowatts of solar and that is more than enough to power our little mini split air conditioner all right so I just fired it up here and my mic is set to manual noise levels and manual levels so you've heard the sound of my voice and so this will be proportionally accurate so this is the outside compressor my mic is two feet away there normally we don't hang out at the compressor side of it but it's not ridiculously loud if you're around the other side of the vehicle the sound doesn't carry and I would say the outside part is nice and quiet and so like I said this unit does pull a bit more power it's about 800 watts 850 if you include the losses in the inverter and so that's more than 400 but it seems that when the sun is shining is when we need the air conditioner and so we generally make about what we're using running this this air conditioner so another thing that really affects efficiency of this whole system is the windows we don't have windows many of you have commented and criticized the lack of windows but it does affect your heating and cooling efficiencies so in the case of cooling not only are we not losing heat through the frame of the window and through the glass even high-quality thermal pane windows you are going to have some loss through thermal transfer not to mention the heat that comes in from light even just having our door open for a little while if the sunlight is hitting the corner of our kitchen cupboards or or the floor anything there is a massive difference in temperature from the surface that's in the shade to the surface that's in in the light from the Sun so any windows you have that have light coming through and heating up contents inside your living area are going to radiate heat into that living area that you need to then fight with the air-conditioner so that's one big consideration for why you would need a bigger or smaller air-conditioner alright so another thing that plays into efficiency quite a bit is has to do with our solar panels the top set of solar panels on our roof is about four inches up from the roof surface and that allows for good ventilation underneath and any heat that builds up on the panel and be radiated off out the bottom and the lower set of panels extends outward from underneath the top set and provides shade to the side of our vehicle most of the time if I can get the alignment with the moon just right but then the side of our vehicle is also shaded so it doesn't heat up and so that's a big thing if you can keep the heat from getting into your living space that is a big help and that's a big reason I've chosen framed glass solar panels as opposed to the plastic adhesive stick on kind is that those will you stick to your roof top and then they absorb the the heat and just transfer that right into your the body of your vehicle and then radiantly into the interior so something to consider if you're considering solar panels alright so the air conditioner is still switched on and running I can hear vaguely the inside air handler unit is still running and circulating air around inside our living space but the outside unit has shut off and that is what contributes to majority of the power consumption and so when I say that this unit pulls 850 watts there just kicks in so when I say that it's pulling 850 watts that's a big scary number but you need to consider the duty cycle and how often it's clicking on versus off so when it's on it's pulling 850 watts including the losses in the inverter and when it's the compressor is off and it's just the air handler running it's about 150 if I remember right and so on average in an hour here in Mexico at 31 degrees centigrade we're pulling or consuming rather about 530 watts I'm still gathering some data to provide a more thorough evaluation of how much power this is using but it's about 535 50 watts per hour and so if you have if you're producing 550 or more watts of solar then it's not actually depleting batteries or it's not using your batteries you're using the solar as your as you're making it and for us that works out really well because our batteries are normally charged up and then we've got these solar panels out doing nothing other than shading our vehicle but they're not doing anything anyway and so it works so good just to flip on the AC and then use up the power that way alright next part of the tour let's go inside and I'll show you the inside bits all right nice to be inside because it is a smokin hot one in Mexico today so here is where the business end of the air-conditioner comes out I 3d printed this vent which shoots the air down into the room into the main living area here one little regret is that these holes are tubular and they're so long that it really laminar eise's that air and shoots it right down the hall so out here you don't feel the breeze and here you do but it still keeps the room cool but if I was to do it again I point the tubes more more towards the middle of the room so that's that and now we turn our attention to the battery management and solar information as you can see we're still at 99% and our solar panels are clicking in and out keeping our battery topped up as this unit consumes power and now at this very moment the compressor is running and we're in the red consuming 10 amps of power in addition to what the Solar is making and then when the solar cuts out like here then we're charging at 57 amps and lastly our load you can see it's cutting in and out and that's ghost that speaks to what I was saying before about how 850 watt load isn't 850 watts an hour it averages the on and off averages to about 550 watts so that's the technical stuff I'll get into more of that and review some other charts later in the video but right now let's move and look at the air handler unit all right so this is our storage shelves at the back of our camper unit and they're full of stuff right now and it's behind here where the air handler lives so give me just a moment to pull all this stuff out you know give me a better view all right so I pulled all the bins out here and I'm sitting here in our bathroom area on our nature's head composting toilet not sponsored and just to give you guys perspective for where we are that is our back wall the compressor lives right behind there on a bracket that's bonded to the outside of the composite panel and here is the air handler condenser unit again made by forest air and it's about eight or ten inches deep and fourteen or sixteen inches square and it perfectly just jams in between these two shelves so it's just sitting there and then here again is the umbilical I'm calling it that connects the inside to the outside that has the compressor coolant lines and electrical and the condensation tubing that goes out to the back unit now one problem I did have with this after about two years is the compressor has a small pump in it that pumps out the reservoir that collects the condensation in this unit here and that unit just got plugged up with bugs or spiderwebs or something and plugged up and so I just I could have probably fixed it but there is a provision here for a manual drain and the silicone tubing here just hit a black plug in it and I pulled the black plug out and jammed in a piece of this 3/8 inch tubing and just ran it through the floor here so it just drains and thus the pump never runs it doesn't try running so no problem that way and then as far as duct work it did originally have a little flip up flippy door on the top of the unit and I just got a piece of drain tubing here that piece connected to the to the air conditioner unit was just a whi and I took it to the table saw cut out a segment and then used a heat gun to heat it up enough to mold it to the shape of the top of the forest air air conditioner unit piece there and then some 3m VHB double-sided tape holds that on a little bit of duct tape duct tape there to seal it all up really good and then that just goes into this three inch drain tubing which I'm using is a duct to the vent at the front when I originally did it I used some aluminum corrugated expanding jive Turkey thing and that actually reduced the air flow quite a bit all that turbulence from the accordioned shape of that tube it wasn't it wasn't good so by switching to this smooth tubing it just shoots out of there quite a lot faster and it doesn't have that you know harmonica whistle so yeah that's all there is to that let's put pins back up and then let's review some solar data I captured yesterday on the old compy 386 alright so let's look at some live data instead of dredging up the past as you can see we're still at 99% pv 1 + pv 2 is the collective total of our solar is at 70 point 7 4 amps or 950 watts and the air conditioning and my laptop and random camera batteries are connected to our inverter on the external load row here you can see is 65.4 or 879 watts which is less than 950 that were making so even with the air conditioner running we're only at 879 850 ish watts the trick is that the air conditioner is going to cycle in and out as as the it meets the temperature and so as you can see in this chart here this section here shows the last hour woops yeah so the last hour you can see that the load kicks in and out and we've just turned it on and so once this room gets a little cooler it will cycle off even more frequently and so the takeaway is it's not always on it's not always pulling 850 watts so the average over 1 hour in my testing so far is about 550 now if you're interested more information about that you can head over to our website ever Landers comm and I have a post there where I'm keeping a chart with all of the power consumption that we're using in the rig and just a little better average to give you a better idea for loads like this that even though it says it's 850 watts it's only using 850 watts part of the time and the rest is much much less so if you're interested in that please go check out the website and you know I think that's it for this time let's head outside and wrap it up alright so hopefully I've answered all of your solar powered air conditioner questions that's going to be it for this time I'd like to thank all of our channel members once again Steve Taylor bill dinesh Colorado 4x4 van cardinal points expeditions thanks so much for your ongoing support and lovely comments it means the world to us thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time you

Channel: Everlanders

Views: 229,886

Rating: 4.8957725 out of 5

Keywords: solar air conditioner diy, solar powered ac for rv, off grid, air conditioning, rv solar, solar air conditioner, off grid solar, solar air conditioner rv, off grid living, solar air conditioner review, off grid solar power system, air conditioning system, off grid solar battery bank, rv solar install, rv solar panels, mini split air conditioner, mini split ac van, mini split rv, Air Con RV, portable air conditioner caravan, Solar powered ac camper, Forestair mini split

Id: woZH85EiHNY

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020