Ubiquiti SunMAX SolarPoint

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is Chris and we are out here at my solar panel setup yet again to talk about a new product from ubiquity this is the ubiquity Sun max solar point MPPT charge controller and this thing is pretty awesome alright so I set it up last Friday today is now Monday so I kind of had the weekend to play with it and test it out and in my last solar video that I did solar-powered Wi-Fi part three I had a victor on electric MPPT controller in a whole box and a 12 to 24 volt step-up converter and a POA injector and all this sort of stuff sort of crammed into this you know outdoor enclosure this device replaces all of that alright so I'm actually really happy with the way that this turned out and sort of the thought that it seems that ubiquity put into this product so the installation of this device is a little bit tougher than just installing a firewall or a switch or something like that there's a pretty decent amount of wiring and we're gonna cover all of that as part of this video but as you can see I do have an outdoor so this is an outdoor rated device this will take a photo metallic panel input of 10 to 60 volts now I'm not an electrician I'm not clear on the whole volts vs. watts what I do know is I have a 100 watt solar panel attached to this pole and when I was setting up the solar point it said up to 400 watts so I could probably have four of these solar panels connected into this thing this is not for a really big installation right this is for a smaller installation more like what you see here where I have a nano station a camera and an access point up on the very top is one of those PACA mesh access points so it says external 24 volt battery charging up to 7 amps and again that's not a huge amount of amperage to charge up I think my my older MPPT controller would do up to 15 amps so it's about half of what I had previously but it's plenty for what I'm doing here it has for 24 volt passive p OE output 10100 ports Ethernet ports and it can do 24 volt DC out to like a separate inverter ok so let's talk a little bit more about this in detail I'm gonna bring the camera around so you can actually see the device that's actually on the backside of the pole here so I think aim and see it in this shot but will actually show you the device up close as well as how I wired up the batteries how I wired up the photo metallic solar panel and all of that sort of good stuff right so let's get to that next and then later in the video we'll dive into the actual interface of the solar point and you can see all the really cool little bells and whistles that they built-in okay so starting with my battery box here this is just a storage bin right I got this for like 8 bucks or something you can get one of those like really nice sort of those green outdoor boxes that are meant to cover up your you know sprinkler equipment and stuff like that like if you have sprinkler timers but those are super expensive so I needed something to just cover my battery boxes and also have a little bit of ventilation because as you'll see so here's here we go you can see I cut a couple holes into this thing but basically the battery boxes that I got here for the two 12-volt batteries have holes on the top right there for venting the battery but you don't want to get water in there right so obviously you don't want water and your battery water in your battery case - what I did is I just got this big storage bin cut holes in the side so that water wouldn't get in and even if a little bit of water gets in it's just gonna drip off the side of these battery boxes it won't make a big deal it won't be a big deal okay so here's my two 12-volt batteries now previously I had these batteries running in parallel on my old system meaning that they were still 12 volts but I had double the capacity city for this system you have to have 24 volts so I had to change the wiring so that these are now wired in series instead of in parallel so that instead of being double capacity 12 volt output they are sort of combined as one 12 volt battery now you can also just get a 12 24 volt battery and then only have to deal with one battery as well the way this is wired is I have the positive side coming in here wired to the positive side of this battery and then I have the negative side of this battery wired over to the positive side of the second battery and then the negative side of this battery goes back out to the solar point now one extra thing that ubiquity has thrown in here is this guy right here so they give you this cable and this is called an NTC cable and I had no idea what an NTC cable was again I'm not an electrician I'm not you know an expert in solar by any means I'm just learning all of this as I go essentially NTC stands for negative temperature coefficient right so in addition to the a negative output that goes to the battery portion of the solar point there's also these extra two cables for NTC also hooked up to the negative terminal on this battery essentially as I understand it this little device senses temperature and then decreases the resistance as the temperature increases so or in other words it just makes powering the batteries more efficient based on the ambient temperature around the batteries now correct me if I'm wrong in the comments down below okay so I may be completely wrong about that if you guys have a better explanation or and explain like I'm 5 version of what NTC is actually used for definitely add that to the comments below because I'm sure a lot of people get get some use out of that okay so then we have the solar Point itself now this is the whole device all encapsulated into one this is your four port 10100 switch with 24 volt passive poa on all four of those ports as well as your solar panel input as well as your battery output and if you're using an inverter it also has the 24 volt DC output as well yeah really except there is a lot of wires so you can see my wiring I have not done any cable management yet on this thing because I sort of set it up and then I had to take off and I didn't get a chance to actually cable man to this thing so don't flame me for that but let's take a look inside here all right so this cover here flips open you can actually pull it down and flip it open and it'll sort of stay open if you get it in the right spot but in my case I'm just gonna take it off to make this easier and of course right there I just lost my solar so you see this wire came out this is hope so far this has been the worst part about dealing with this solar the solar point is these stinking mc4 connectors are really really difficult to work with this has come out multiple times and of course when the I guess this is the negative side yeah when the photo metallic negative side when the solar panel negative side wire is out you're not getting any charge into the into the batteries or anything so yeah that's a problem I'm gonna have to fix that in fact I'm gonna fix that first and then we'll continue with this discussion okay so I fixed the MC 4 connector and I connected to the interface of the solar point on my phone here and I can see that right now the battery is at 24 point 5 volts and we are collecting power from the solar panel at an eight point five about eight point five watts and it's actually in shade it's not really even in the Sun right now and then our power consumption total is five point two watts and that's from the solar point itself this UVC camera as well as the Nano Station m5 I also have that UAP AC mesh access point on top but I currently have that turned off because it was it's just been rainy and cloudy here and I didn't need it on so no need for it to be sucking up battery juice while it's not being used okay so when you're installing this thing they have a nice little checklist that you can use the first thing you have to do is make sure that you have 24 volt batteries which I do these are two 12-volt batteries in series as I already discussed then you want to make sure the NTC cable is attached to the negative pole of the battery and then the battery and NTC cables are properly secured in the four pin connector right so you have your plus and minus battery and then the two NTC connectors that plug into this little four pin connector the whole connector comes out you can put it in the connector and then slide the whole thing back up in there which is kind of nice the only thing that's bad about that design is that the initial Wi-Fi password for configuring the solar point is underneath that four pin connector so you need to write that down before you plug it in or else you're gonna be pulling everything back out again so once you have your battery connected to the solar point you can then actually configure it and start working with it it'll it'll be fired up with a Wi-Fi even if you haven't plugged into just straight-up Ethernet it'll DHCP otherwise it gets an IP address of 192 168 dot 53 it was either 53 or 150 3.1 I forget exactly what it was but there is a configuration or a sort of failover IP address or fallback IP address if you don't have any sort of DHCP Ethernet plugged in the p OE output on all four of these ports is disabled by default okay so you can't like plug in a nano station power it up and get DHCP that way you either have to have a hardwired non p OE Ethernet plugged in to configure it or you can configure it through by connecting to its wire wireless access point that's inside the solar point you have connect to the SSID of the solar point and then you can you know navigate to the IP address of the thing that route so once the battery's plugged in the thing fires up you can then plug in these mc4 connectors you have your PV plus and PV minus MP 4 connectors again those to me are the worst part about this thing because those mp4 connectors are just really suck but I'm sure that's common to any solar stuff that uses MC 4 at that point the LED on the solar point point will turn on and then you can you know go through and configure it etc but yeah that's all there is to it when you go through the wizard it sort of walked you through all the steps it gives you you know you can name it you can turn on all of these extra little ports turn on the 24 volt passive output of these four ports and all that sort of good stuff so let me get some close-up shots of the inside of this thing so you guys can see what I'm talking about and then we're gonna go inside and we'll actually take a look at the interface of the solar point so you can see all the cool bells and whistles okay so here we go a nice close-up shot here so here is the four wires that go into the battery terminal you have your positive and minus positive and negative battery input and then these two over here are the NTC input this right here this guy is the 24 volt DC output if you're opting to utilize that I am not currently utilizing it in mind on the two sides here right here and right here these are the two mc4 connectors those are your solar panel inputs and then right here of course we have I'm only using three out of the four ports but this is your four port 10100 switch with 24 volt passive on every single one of these ports again each one can be enabled and disabled and there's even some cooler features that we'll talk about only actually look at the interface back in my office now let's take a look at the solar point interface here's what you see when you first log in normally we see a full battery of course mine was discharged I had a couple of days of just cloudiness and rain but we can see that my voltage right now is twenty-six point one volts and based on your location so you can click on location over here it gives you a map and then you can zoom in and actually click where the solar point is located it looks up weather data for that area and then it sort of gives you a forecast of what you can expect in terms of solar output and device uptime based on that weather data as we can see here mine looks really bad right so we got warning low battery level probable when I first plugged it in it was a nice sunny day and everything looks great it was telling me everything looks great right so now we've got one two three four five days of rain and two days of partly cloudy in the forecast so this thing's definitely gonna go offline at some point probably tonight or tomorrow right now we have a decent amount of Sun hitting the solar panel so we can see our power election is currently right around 40 watts just even a couple minutes ago I saw it up around 70 watts but so it's bouncing all over the place and then our power consumption is five point two eight watts and that is because I have the nano station turned on the UVC camera turned on and I currently emanuelly have the UA PA cm disabled we can also see here that I have the DC power off now this interface can use a little bit of work there's a couple of weird things about it for so for instance you can see that the the forecast here will sort of disappear and then come back every so often this collection versus consumption doesn't seem to really update properly you know right now it says it's that got the three to four pm graph but it's already 4:15 so you'd think that there would be you know some data over here and in the 3 to 4 p.m. graph it says that 0 watt hours were discharged which we know is not correct because I've had this on you know pumping about 5 watts for these two devices over the past hour or more but this gives you a good idea of the interface right now it's version 10.2 to improve this and over time this will just get better and better here's the exciting step let's look at our settings so if we click on settings here we have our general settings we can set the output of our solar panel I think I don't think this has anything to do with anything other than how it displays on the graph but you can set it so right now I've got it set to 100 watts then we have your battery name installation date and then you have your battery charging target so how many volts do you want to throw into the battery before you stop charging it and right now I just have mine set to the lowest setting 27 point 4 volts you can also set the capacity of your battery and here's some really cool settings right here and this is a setting that I absolutely love so this is your shutdown voltage disable high-priority voltage and disable low priority voltage so what these settings allow you to do is set at what voltage when your battery hits it do you turn off your low priority devices and then when do you turn off your high priority to Isis and then when do you just shut down the entire solar point so right now when I get all the way down to twenty three point eight volts in the battery it's going to shut off any low priority devices and in my setup the low priority devices I have are my UA PA cm as well as the UVC g3 camera now those two are low priority because I want to maintain the internet connection to the solar point so the only high priority device I have is the Nano station M five and then of course that'll also shut down once we hit twenty three point seven volts and then when we go all the way down to twenty three point four volts we're just gonna turn off the whole thing until the Sun comes back out and charges the battery back up past these points so that's a really cool feature I like that a lot now let's look at our output and here are some extra settings so here is the DC now I can turn on the DC output I can put it on a schedule that's really cool putting this stuff on a schedule is really nice so for instance I have my UA PA cm disabled right now but if I enabled it I did have it on a schedule so I don't need the wireless mesh access point out there in my yard giving a white you know giving Wi-Fi coverage all hours of the day so I had it on a schedule of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. basically the only times when I might be outside and then I have it set to low priority so again if the battery drops below that certain voltage threshold it's going to shut this device off right now I just have a completely disabled though because I don't want to use it and I'm I have so many cloudy days in the future I just want to conserve as much battery power as possible so here we have the Nano station m5 of course this is the internet connection or the network connection for that entire solar setup so I want to make sure that that's on high high priority and that it is enabled so that it is always on not on a schedule just always on and enabled and then we have my UVC g3 camera which is enabled not on a schedule but it sets a low priority because that's the first thing I want to shut off in order to conserve battery power if the voltage drops too low so really neat options for controlling your devices and you know making sure that you fine-tune the power the way that you need it so I love all of that if we click on wireless we have the integrated 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi within the solar point device itself I have it disabled because I've already configured it and there's no need to use extra power to have a wireless you know access point broadcasting out of the solar point I'm sure it takes some amount of power to do that so I just have that disabled however if you were going to be setting it up or if you lost connectivity completely you might want to connect an ethernet cable directly and then re-enable this radio okay then we have network very simple I have mine set statically I do not have any VLANs but you can enable a VLAN ID if you want and we have I set a static address of one I to 168 219 with all my internal land information finally let's click on system and here's where we have the device name your administrative name you can change your password if you like you have your UNM s key now I have mine connected to you and M s so that I can monitor the uptime of the solar point but in UNM s there's really no special settings for the solar point it's kind of just like monitoring its uptime and you know I'm sure it's pinging to it and doing all the stuff that you and M s does but I'd love to see some more integration with UNM s like I'd love to see some of like graphs that shows like your voltage data and you know your your how much power was coming in from the solar panels and stuff like that I would love if that was eventually integrated into U n ms as well and then just some standard stuff down here we enabled our NTP client we set our time zone and then we can you know reset to factory defaults upgrade the firmware blah blah blah blah blah all of you know all the standard stuff for ubiquity devices ok so let's go back to our dashboard and there we go so that's about all we have to it it looks like maybe some some shade started to hit but maybe some clouds came over or something because now we're down down to about 13 watts and and yeah this thing's definitely gonna go off pretty soon right so I doubt that this entire setup will last through the night I'm glad the Sun came out long enough for me to make this video today but I am not expecting it to be on and of course we're coming into fall the Sun is dipping lower on the horizon and we're gonna get less and less Sun but I'm gonna leave that thing I'm gonna leave this out all winter and then we'll see once springtime rolls around again it should start being useful since the Sun will be high enough that it's going to be charging up this battery on a regular basis of course if you don't live in a forest and if you have your you know your solar panel out where it's just open to the wide open sky even in the winter time you'd probably be able to keep this thing up a lot longer than I am able to here in Oregon alright so there you guys have it what do you guys think about solar point put your comments and questions down below I'd love to read them and I will answer whatever questions I can about this setup and if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up make sure you hit subscribe and we'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 58,618

Keywords: ubiquiti, ubiquity, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, sunmax, sunmax solarpoint, solarpoint, ubiquiti solarpoint, solar, renogy 100 watts 12 volts monocrystalline solar starter kit, renogy solar kit, renogy solar, solar powered wifi

Id: WqyPQwA4w8Q

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019