The TRUTH About OFF-GRID Solar | Winter Update

foreign [Music] and welcome back to the channel we have been living on our property here in North Idaho for two years now and we have been completely off grid that entire time we've gone through several different versions of off-grid Power Systems we started with our truck camper which was completely self-sufficient but very small then we moved on to living off of larger portable power stations with a little generator and finally last summer we installed our permanent residential off-grid power system we've been using this system for almost a year now and we want to answer your most asked question which is how has it actually performed for us we'd like to take a minute to thank Thrive market for sponsoring today's video this video is going to answer your most asked questions about how our system has performed in the last year of use but if you'd like to learn more about the install of our system the components we used or how much everything cost I'll put a link to all those videos down below step one to this power system started when we had the crazy idea to partially bury the shipping container and one of the biggest questions we've been asked is why did we bury the shipping container Our Hope Was That by burying the container we would get some geothermal properties from the hillside which would help keep all the components warm because if our batteries aren't warm they won't charge so let me show you how we handled insulation and then we'll tell you whether or not that worked we ended up insulating all the walls of the container except the wall that's against the Hillside and by insulating the walls and having it in the hillside it kept the batteries from freezing all the way down to ambient temperatures outside of negative 5 degrees Fahrenheit so we never had any issues with our batteries not charging on days when our solar was producing the batteries were always warm enough to take a charge I forget how big the server is absolutely massive so one of the cool things about building the solar array on top of the shipping container is it allowed us to design the array to be able to tilt so right now it's in our winter tilt which means it's optimized for our super low Sun angle another question that we had a lot about this solar array is how's it doing in the winter as far as clearing snow all right little winter update on our solar setup it is currently snowing but it's starting to lighten up and I can see that the sun is trying to peek through the clouds it has snowed almost four inches this morning we have bifacial solar panels which means they can collect sunlight from both the front and the back side of the panel which means that even when their panels are covered in snow they collect some light off the backside the act of producing electricity in the solar panel actually heats the panel up which then starts melting the snow off exposing the front side and allowing them to make even more electricity So currently in this partially covered State we're collecting 750 watts out of a 10 500 watt array so that's just a fraction of their capability but the point is that we're able to collect Power at all so most solar panels would be completely covered in snow and doing absolutely nothing the sun is starting to poke out this morning and as the sun comes out these panels are going to produce more and more they're going to melt the snow off and we're going to see what happens throughout the day well the answer is that Courtney Knight never had to manually clear the snow off of these panels however in a few of the big back-to-back strong Farms we had snow did start piling up down here on the bottom and we had to shovel it out manually I think that could be fixed with a little more dirt work and a little more terracing this is a 1980s military surplus mep-004 generator that is a three-phase generator that's been converted to split phase when we start this generator first we have to manually dial in the frequency to 60 hertz then once the inverters start charging and there's a load on this generator we have to manually dial in the throttle to get the voltage correct which means that we have to manually come out here and start and stop this generator there's not an easy way to automate the system and so even though our inverters are capable of automatically starting and stopping a generator when they need that extra charge this generator isn't really able to be automatically start and stopped however it does have a massive 15 000 watt output which means that we can run it for a very brief amount of time and get a lot of charge on our batteries basically if our batteries are at zero four to five hours of runtime on this generator brings them all the way up to 100 trudging out here in the snow carrying fuel cans to fuel up this generator and get it started up and get it shut down wasn't ideal but it worked for this winter it may not be a long-term solution but it was a really easy and inexpensive short-term solution and it always just fired right up I kind of expected to have more problems with it but even in super low temperatures it just started right up that's sort of the show and tell of our power system but it is absolutely freezing out here so we're gonna head inside and we're gonna talk Nitty Gritty numbers with you guys our actual usage how much we ran the generator and the whole truth behind how this system actually did this winter hey guys it's Courtney and Oliver here from the future right now you guys are watching one of several videos that we pre-film so that we could take some time off work when our baby boy arrived the past five weeks have been overall win and we are super thankful for today's video sponsor for helping make our lives a little bit easier Thrive Market is an online membership-based grocery store on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable as a thread Market member you'll save on every order of high quality organic and sustainable products orders over 49 shipped for free it's as simple as that no tipping or extra fees I'm actually allergic to onion and garlic which can make shopping at the grocery store a bit tedious with Thrive Market's online platform I can filter all of their products and easily find yummy snacks and meal Staples whether you're gluten-free vegan keto or have other restrictions you can shop over 90 plus diets the convenience of being able to grocery shop from home is something that we appreciate now more than ever and that helps mean that there will always be something yummy in the pantry for me or Riley Thrive also carries cleaning supplies Personal Care items pet products and so much more so click the link in the description below and you'll get 30 off your first order and a free gift worth up to sixty dollars when you join Thrive market today and thanks again to thrive market for sponsoring this video and our family okay are you ready to talk about burning our poo what that's not this video you guys got a lot of questions about how this system actually performed because we really use it and we really live here when it came time to design our off-grid power system we didn't really know what to expect neither of us had ever lived off grid before we didn't really have a great handle on exactly what our power needs were going to be and we really leaned into the team at current connected to help us figure it all out in the end we ended up installing 10 500 watts of solar panels 20 000 watts of inverter capacity and at 60 000 Watt hours of lithium battery capacity and all of that was sourced through current connected so if you want to learn more about all the products we used and the products that current connected offers there's some links in the description down below we also have a spreadsheet of exactly used how much everything costs and that is in that spreadsheet something that we learned really quickly that was a lot different from the camper is our power needs living in an actual home we have quite a few things that have a pretty significant electrical draw and so we're going to run through those really quick to kind of give you an idea of how much power we're actually using living in our home aside from all the normal appliances like blow dryers and coffee makers our three biggest power draws kind of of our daily life or our water heater our toilet and our refrigerator our water heater is installed downstairs and it's an electric heat pump water heater over the winter our average monthly consumption of that water heater was 68 kilowatt hours our toilet is an incinerator toilet which actually means we burn our Coop if you want to learn more about that there's a video down below but that uses 90 kilowatt hours a month our third kind of biggest final constant load that's on our system is our refrigerator and that's using about 62 kilowatt hours a month and we have like we have a full-size full-size refrigerator so before we tell you our monthly we've got laptops and electronics and lights and and everything's just sort of on all the time we don't go around unplugging everything at night and plugging it all back in our inverters are just always on and we live a very normal life I use a blow dryer we use the air fryer I mean I think we were a little more mindful in Winter of our consumption than we were in summer but not by a lot and the last thing I want to say is that we do not currently do laundry here so that is not a load that's on our system that will be on our system excellent term so aside from the power that we used up here in the apartment for our daily lives we also did a fair number of fabrication projects down in the shop which included the huge deck project outside and the massive snow blower that we built for the front of our army truck and all of that meant a lot of running the welders the plasma table the air compressor the lights in the shop the furnace in the shop computers we used a lot of power down in the shop this winter I think we both kind of would look at each other and laugh like I can't believe we're doing all of this off-grid there there were moments where we've completely forgot that we were even off grid and I think that one of the most important pieces of information in all of this is how much daily and monthly power do we use so we found ourselves using an average of 22 kilowatt hours per day which is about 650 kilowatt hours per month and then I thought well how does that compare it to the average American household turns out the average American household uses about 900 kilowatt hours a month so we're not using that much less power than the average American I would say our priorities are a little bit different than the average American household I think we have a much smaller house at 500 square feet and a much larger shop at 1200 square feet but I think it still works out too basically we lived very comfortably this winter and if you're designing a system I think these numbers are important because they would allow you to really have an idea of how much power we're using versus how much power maybe you would need and so all of that info info down in the link below if you want to use that information for your own system how much did we run in the generator that was a question that we really had for ourselves going into winter was are we going to have to run the generator how much are we going to have to run the generator because we live in North Idaho it means we have very short daylight hours in Winter and lots of cloud cover the area we live is very gray we have a ton more information down in that spreadsheet but I'll just talk about December because that is our shortest month of the year so on top of only having eight hours of daylight a day in December because of our low Sun angle and our cloud cover our solar panels were only able to capture nine percent of their available capacity so that meant for the month of December we were only producing eight kilowatt hours of solar per day that meant we had to run the generator so during the month of December we had to run the generator 13 times which worked out for running it for about five hours every two and a half days and so it sounds a little discouraging to say that we had to run the generator 13 times but I think it's important to look at winter as a whole because December really was a unique month in November we only ran the generator once and by the time the February hit we only had to run it four times which means that we ran the generator a total of 28 times for the entire winter and we've earned 96 gallons of fuel which cost us about 450 dollars so in the grand scheme of things we ended up basically running one transfer tank load of fuel through our generator and it still cost us less than 500 to supplement the power that we needed to live very comfortably so through the entire winter we've produced about 800 kilowatt hours of power thread generator and we produced about 2200 kilowatt hours of power through our solar panels which means that even though we're running the generator we still produce way more electricity through our solar panels than we did through the generator really it's impressive looking and one of the cool things about the way that our system is designed is that it's designed to work with the generator so we're able to run the generator at its full capacity and that allows us to produce the most electricity per gallon of fuel possible we can then store all that electricity in our batteries and use it at a later time and because of that we were able to plan our generator use that meant no running out in the middle of the night or in the middle of the snowstorm we could kind of plan around our demands and our power needs and it really wasn't that much of an inconvenience however that doesn't mean that having an auto start generator wouldn't be really nice there was that one time where neither of us were paying attention and we did run out of power but luckily all that meant is that Riley just had to go fire up the generator and started charging again and maybe it was a good reminder that we live off grid now Winter's over spring is here and we are using power in a completely different way we haven't run the generator in over a month now we're actually heating all electric now we don't even use the wood stove we have so much power that we don't know what to do with it it's pretty crazy in our climate how dramatic the differences from December to March the sun angle is way higher the daylight hours are much longer and the cloud covers a lot thinner a question we've asked ourselves is would we make our system bigger if we were to do it again so I've done a lot of thinking about this and we would have to dramatically upsize our system to get through December without having to run a generator which would have come with a tremendous cost and I still don't know that we would be confident enough to not have a backup generator and and the cost to size our system up for just one month of the year seems silly when we have so much power the rest of the year basically we just have to know that for one or two months out of the year we're going to rely somewhat on the generator and the rest of the time we don't need the generator at all in our system is completely capable of powering our entire property and So lately our minds have started kind of dreaming about how can we use this extra power that we have nine months out of the year we've been talking about electric vehicles hot tubs even atmospheric water generation turning that electricity into water and I think that what we've learned from all of this is that even in a Northern climate like this it's really not that conducive to living off great off solar it's still totally possible there was definitely a significant investment up front but if you guys go back and watch our cost video you'll see that for us we actually ended up ahead by going off-grid versus bringing power in when it came time to purchase our system the guys over at current connected were so helpful in hoping to pick out the right components and size everything and I would highly recommend that you look them up if you're considering going off-grid we're also looking forward to sharing the performance of the system with you long term how long things last how the components are holding up and how things change as our power needs to evolve if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos like this hit that like button and please subscribe to our Channel and thanks for watching guys we'll see you next time a huge thanks again to thrive market for sponsoring this video and our growing family if you'd like to learn more you can head to the link in the description below is there anything for you in there Boone [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Ambition Strikes

Views: 500,925

Keywords: off grid, solar power, solar, solar panels, off-grid, diy power system, power system, solar powered, victron, current connected, battle born, santan solar, off grid living, diy, diy solar, shipping container, pivoting solar, adjusting solar panels, move solar panels

Id: fv68DWKQ9zA

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023