Storing Solar Power on my ROOF!!!

the best part about solar power is it works whenever the sun is shining but the worst part about solar is that it only works when the sun is shining now one solution is to store the energy in lithium batteries but as anyone with a smartphone can tell you frequent charging and discharging reduces battery life almost immediately but what if there was a battery that could store massive amounts of energy and be cycled every day for decades without losing any of its capacity in a prior video when i charged my smartphone with power from my rain gutter i showed that energy or work can be defined as the weight of the water times its height above the ground but rather than wait for rain why not use solar power to pump water as high as possible on my roof to demonstrate the power of the height of water we're going to throw first an empty jug and then a full jug of water off of my roof first the empty one and now the full the reason the full jug was so much more destructive is because potential energy equals the mass of an object times gravity times height the empty jug weighs hardly anything while a full one is almost four kilograms meaning when it hit the ground it dissipated 260 joules of energy and to store as much energy as possible on my roof instead of a single jug i want an entire drum but that much water will weigh more than double my body weight which could be a problem for the structure of my roof so after making a quick inspection on the location of each truss i'm fabricating a platform that will distribute the weight of the barrel across at least four trusses it should go without saying but please don't try any of this at home i grew up using power tools and climbing on rooftops but am still very much aware that one slip could have me looking like that busted water jug on the concrete so exactly how much energy can this store well a 55-gallon barrel could hold over 200 kilograms of water which multiplied by gravity and height comes out to over 14 000 joules of energy but to get the water up there we need some kind of pump my mother-in-law gave me this 50 watt solar panel years ago which i'm hoping can still provide plenty of power for this project so i've asked my daughter to help me with a quick function check in the driveway to see if the pump we ordered is able to move any water at all how far can you squirt it well then it'll sit there and go rain but that is entirely the sun that is hitting that panel oh now you know what happens unplug it there you go now you know what happens when it runs out of water what do you think i think that's amazing i think so too now that we know the pump and panel have a decent chance of working it's time to connect everything and start sending water up to our barrel okay just to test it real quick i've got a bucket sitting here that we've hooked up the pump to and we're running the line all the way up to the barrel up on the roof but man this thing is getting hot and i think you can see if especially if we slow it down you can see like the motor is actually like shaking on the pump like it's maybe about to come loose because it's only plastic but uh ouch i mean that thing is hot so i got to do something to keep that motor from getting so hot or have to upgrade to a bigger pump which i really don't want to do but hey since we're already pumping water why not make a water-cooled heat sink as soon as i found a chunk of bar stock big enough i jumped on cad to route some cooling passages that will almost certainly do the trick yeah there are probably heat transfer formulas i could use but my spidey senses tell me there's no way the heat off this little motor is going to significantly affect the temperature of our giant barrel of water this is where having a cnc mill even a home built version like mine is a huge benefit you're just not going to get the same results with a 3d printer even if you have access to one that can do metal and now like a lot of my automotive projects i'm applying a liberal amount of rtv sealant and praying we don't spring a leak halfway to disneyland all right so far the heatsink is working great it's not leaking it's keeping the motor cool at least on the outside that we can tell and we're sitting here doing a little time lapse to see how long it takes to send a five-gallon bucket worth of water up to the roof so let's let's get up there and and see what it's doing up on top of the roof [Music] okay there it is there's our water getting pumped from that bucket up to our 55 gallon drum and it's not a super fast flow rate but that's okay we've got all day for this thing to pump up and that's all being done by our single solar panel and even though it's a pretty cloudy day i mean overcast skies uh it does run faster when the sun seems to hit it hit it directly but uh not bad seems to be working now i don't know if you can see this but the water level is almost up to about the halfway point on the barrel and we want to make sure that we don't overflow on this thing so i got to come up with some kind of a float here a little switch that will shut off the power to the pump so we don't just have this thing spilling out and making a big mess now this part is a perfect application for a basic 3d printer the dimensions aren't critical and because it's just supporting a switch it doesn't need to be watertight these float switches came in a bulk bag off amazon which is good because we'll be maxing out their current limit and may need to add a relay if they start burning up i have to admit i did cheat a bit by drilling and tapping for a set screw after the 3d print was done but that's common practice for any feature that needs a precise fit even with expensive industrial 3d printers after wiring the float switch direct to the panel and pump i'm letting it run while i make a giant funnel to catch all the water i considered fabing one out of sheet metal but then realized my printer is just big enough to do it in one shot while i go work on something else okay it stopped running it must be that the tank up top is full let's go check it out oh yeah let's have a look right there man just imagine how much energy is up here now this thing is completely full of water and now we can use it to power whatever we want this is connected to the barrel up on the roof let me stand back let's see see how the water pressure uh see how it squirts [Laughter] so that's the water pressure from up on the roof it's five meters up do you think that'll make some electricity probably wow that's coming out fast all right here we go first try we've got some leds hooked up to the power station we've got our tank of water stored from solar power up on the roof let's give this thing a go okay so we're getting two and a half volts no current yet how come i've got tons of volts and no current how about i just go wide open throttle i don't know why my lights aren't lighting up i'm seeing uh milliamps there i don't understand what's going on all right we'll try this again tomorrow something's failing all right i think i found it when i check the continuity on the positive side it's fine but i go to the negative i got nothing so defective power cable right out of the bag that's okay first one i've had out of that bag but uh stuff like that happens so we'll grab a different one and see if we can make this work all right let's try this out fresh cable yes okay that works all right let's go hook this up to our pump storage all right disconnecting completely from the voltage converter and we're plugging in now hopefully through the gauges open the throttle just get wet come on man oh we're not over to the ah there we go [Laughter] it switched to the other output okay fantastic we are pegged out at uh you know it's only a five volt gauge so we're pegged out well over five volts uh only 20 milliamps which i guess makes sense let's throttle it up actually can we throttle it down yes we can so run it up run it up oh man fantastic so this is yesterday's sunshine coming out of our pump storage this is this is pretty cool [Laughter] uh okay we've obviously got some refinement to do there is water going everywhere and we want this to be a closed system all right we'll do a little more work and come back to this since the printer was big enough to make the funnel we should probably try it for making some sort of splash guard too okay i gotta show you something here this is super dark and i'm fumbling around but i've got the splash guard on i'm gonna reach for the valve and just you hear the water flowing and there goes the light instead of fumbling around in the dark for a uh for a light switch i'm fumbling around in the dark for a valve and now here's our sunshine powered light it's pretty cool we've got our splash guard on here i think you can see that and i just put a uh a plate of glass on top to cut down the splash i think i'm gonna cut a special plate for it tomorrow but there it is here's our setup so yeah we'll clean up the splash guard and then gotta figure out how to make a string of lights that's gonna be sweet i want the lid to be completely clear so i'm using the mill like a router to cut it out of a piece of acrylic and my wife had an old kitchen cabinet handle lying around which i think dresses it up nicely now we can run a truly closed system without getting soaked now that our system is assembled it's time to start with an empty barrel up top and let this run until it's full it takes five and a half hours for the sun to power our little pump and move all that water from the lower barrel to the upper one so in the meantime i'm soldering a makeshift chandelier from a bag of white leds and some copper wire to hang over the table on our back deck okay now that we've got a light hooked up i want to take a second to show you something because people use the terms energy and power almost interchangeably but there's a difference energy is the 14 000 joules that we calculated is in that barrel up on the roof due to its weight and its height but power is how fast we use it so if i open this valve about halfway we can watch the light come on let's see it there we go so if that valve's about a halfway open then we're consuming about a half a watt and you can see how bright the lights are and if i go to maybe three quarters the lights get a little brighter and we're using about three quarters of a watt and if i just go full tilt pedal to the metal wide open this thing the lights get as bright as they can be and we're using a full watt and what is a measure of power which is basically how fast we're consuming the energy that's up in that barrel makes sense so what is all this for well when we reach for a light switch we want the lights to come on right now powered by 100 renewable energy like solar and wind but what happens if it's not sunny or windy when we reach for that light switch where's the power going to come from that's right because right now in the u.s we get more than 80 percent of our energy from burning fossil fuels that's because they're incredibly reliable delivering as much power as we want anytime we want it and that's something that renewables like solar and wind just can't offer until we come up with massive energy storage fortunately there's already a pump storage project being built right in my home state of oregon when complete the upper and lower reservoirs will each be able to hold around 837 million gallons or 3.1 billion liters which is the same as 15 million of my barrels and instead of just a seven meter height difference the two reservoirs have 500 meters between them that's literally a billion times more energy than the barrel on my roof that makes our 14 000 jewels sound pretty insignificant but how much energy is that anyway to find out we're going to go to a world renowned expert on future battery technology hey morpheus what's the battery equivalent for 14 kilojoules this i don't believe it it's not possible actually d.o you're right about this one according to the numbers it's more like this that's more like it and i was as surprised as anyone to find it takes a whole barrel of water on a roof to match the power of a single double a battery but that's because batteries are far more energy dense hence why it takes a whole reservoir of water on a hill to be effective for grid storage also this technology is not new there are currently 42 in service across the united states one of which has been in place since the 1920s raccoon mountain in tennessee is one of the largest used to store excess hydropower of all things which can then be released during periods of peak demand but one of the biggest surprises for me was how ugly this contraption looks sitting on my roof fortunately i found a real-life invisibility cloak to make it disappear no it's not a camera trick just some fancy plastic mirrored panels tilted back to reflect the sky as long as the sky is uniform and there aren't tall trees next to your house it works pretty well now did i go through all this trouble just so i could have some renewable light on my back porch of course not because remember build stands for better understanding involves learning and doing and that's what this channel is all about building cool stuff so we can learn physics and engineering along the way now if that kind of thing sounds cool to you please like subscribe look for me on patreon and discord and that way i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Quint BUILDs

Views: 1,007,841

Keywords: mark rober, smarter every day, Stuff made here, hydro, solar

Id: CMR9z9Xr8GM

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021

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[u/MY_NAME_IS_LAPIS]

Thanks for posting. I'll take any marriage of the maker community and creating local renewable energy. I wonder what it would take to connect this to the grid in an occupied space.