Uncover the Surprising Truth About Off-Grid Solar: Shocking Revelations You Need to Know!

all right it's the middle of winter and it's a beautiful winter day I thought it would be a good time to do an updated video about my off-grid solar system this is the truth about off-grid solar [Music] alright so in this video we're going to cover five things we're gonna it's gonna be a big big tour and uh at the end of it I'm going to answer some common questions that I get all the time but we're gonna talk about firstly why I'm off grid I'm going to provide some context to my experience with this system and then we're going to look deep take a close look at the system all its components we're going to talk about seasons of the system because a lot of people ask you know what's it like in the summer what's it like in the winter and talk all about that I've got examples of peak production at every time of the year as well as lowest production for every time of the year I want to correct the record too that's a big part of why I'm I'm doing this video or a motivation for it is I had a video come out in the summer and I said some things that were Incorrect and so I want to correct the record on that and then lastly I want to answer some of the most common questions that I get about this system all right so let's first start while I'm out here let's talk about why we're off grid this is a this is a question that I think it's important to ask I think it's important to always start with the why with something why are you doing this and I see people making comments about um solar being a joke as far as environmental friendliness and and and and all of that stuff carbon footprint and to be honest I don't I don't care about any of that stuff I'm no I'm no uh worshiper of Saint Greta if you will though I do believe in being a good Steward of the Earth but I also believe we have to be practical so I'm not opposed to fossil fuels or petroleum I don't even like the term fossil fuels I'm not opposed to any of that uh for me solar is all about freedom and being off-grid is all about freedom I don't want Claus Schwab turning off my electricity I don't want to have to go through the rationing of electricity which are um malevolent dictators at the world economic Forum would want us to do so for us being off grid is all about Freedom it's all about having that freedom but with freedom comes responsibility and with responsibility also becomes limitations and so it's just the reality of the system um and when we get into the details of the system I can explain how it affects our life and all that we'll talk about how how with the loads that we use and whatnot but in a nutshell it's all about Freedom it's all about having power and when I want it when I need it and making sure that I control that and I own it and so again that comes with responsibility becomes because it means that I have to manage it it's not like when you're living on the grid with a house that has a 200 amp service and you can just do anything you want at any time you want this has limitations we can only do laundry at certain times I mean we can do it anytime if we want if we run want to run the generator but on a really soaked in cloudy day unless I want to burn diesel and we'll look at the generator and stuff in this video unless I want to burn diesel I got to wait until it's sunny and it's actually not that bad of a limitation I actually really enjoy living seasonally I've always talked about that in my videos for many years just being a farmer and and and living with the ebb and flow and the equilibrium and the limitations and the benefits of the changing seasons and so for me energy fits into that piece just lovely so it's it's all about those things but primarily it's it's the freedom it's I have power and nobody can just turn this off you know as long as I can get daylight every day it doesn't have to be direct Sunshine either I have electricity and and for the most part I have what I need most of the time and we'll kind of talk later in this video about what those what those things look like in more detail but in a nutshell it's about Freedom so since we're out here we'll start with the um greater context of the system and we'll talk about then we'll go and look at the system more in detail so my context with solar is I've actually used lived with solar power for a number of years because I bought this property in September 2020 and uh even this property came with a tiny little solar system but even previous to that our house in Kelowna had a grid tied solar system with two Tesla power walls it was an 11 and a half kilowatt system and I had that for about five years and I'd seen the ebb and flow I'd seen what are winters like what are summers like and that system was very very different than this one and I learned a lot from that system which lent which basically led me to do the system that I've done here and it's why the system is the size it is it's why I've uh not put these on the roof of the buildings um it's uh yeah it's really led me here and and really my context was getting started is I wanted to size this system based on what I need to get through winter with the ultimate goal of not even need to needing to run a generator but as you'll see for at least one month of the year that's very difficult to do and I I don't want to say it's impossible but it's it's um without spending out a massive amount of money it's it's almost pointless and we'll talk about that later uh in this video but that was my context coming in it's like we live in a cold climate we're in southern British Columbia Canada and we're high elevation we're in a mountain which actually is better overall overall we're we're we're we're sunny at least sunnier than where I was in the Okanagan Valley Kelowna BC Canada gets very socked in the winter and the clouds sit in the valley and you you get clouds for months at a time the Cloudy periods for for many months whereas up here there's really only a month so far out of the two years that I've lived here um where there is uh where you're really socked in and we certainly saw that we had a period of time was December 21st until January 19th no direct Sunshine whatsoever there might have been a couple bursts of sunshine here and there but but we ran the generator for that period of time and we burned 150 liters of diesel for that almost 30-day period and um diesel at a dollar eighty a liter it wasn't so bad it was you know just call it two bucks call it 300 dollars for that that one month period you know most people pay more than that for their utility bills in the winter when you combine you know when you look at everything so it wasn't really that big of a deal and um so that's that's kind of where where we're coming from with all this is I want to have power in the winter um within reason and so yeah let's now talk about the system in detail start one might as well start here because we're outside we'll go inside and look at the inverters and charge controllers and batteries and all that but let's start here so this is a 20 kilowatt system it's actually 20.88 to be exact we have 48 panels so there's 16 here 16 here and 16 here they're on three different rigs they're not mounted to the buildings um here a couple reasons for that one is my buildings are all passive solar so this is south and this building the front of it is a greenhouse and the roof slopes back to the north so you can't really Mount solar panels on there um and then same thing with the house it's not finished yet but it's a pasta solar house it'll be the same height as this same roof so mounting on the roof doesn't make any sense also mounting on the roof really sucks if you're in a snowy climate because these panels have to be scraped off regularly in the winter time the first part of winter starting November 4th for us boom snow I was out here at least every second day scraping these off we've had so much snow this winter now it's really slowed down it's really warming up it's getting sunnier again which is great but um so that's why they're not on the roof so and they are three separate rigs now the reason there's three separate rigs is just simply geography if I was on a in a flat area and I had lots of open space and all kinds of access to get around things then sure I would have had this all in one run you still have to when I adjust them seasonally which I'll show you in a minute you still have to do partitions at a time you can't move a whole 48 panel rig uh very easily so they're on three separate rigs for that reason mostly it's geography but also I wanted to try out having different angles um at the Sun so basically we have a 15 degrees to the east so this panel is where are we here this panel right behind me here this one is southeast South Southeast I guess you could call it this one is true South and then this one is South Southwest so 15 degrees to the West 15 degrees to the east I love the 15 degrees to the East and I love the South I'll probably I'm gonna most likely change this one this summer and just move it on its uh it's on these big concrete pads and I've got enough play on there that I can actually just move the steel racking on top and angle it straight South but I love the the southeast and the main idea with that is that in the morning time like right now um and even earlier we're up as a family we're using utilities lights are on it's still dark in the winter running a blender running stuff in the kitchen our our stove is gas and wood so you know we're not using electricity for for stoves in the winter we do in the summer though and because we have so much excess electricity but we basically have a lot of demand in the morning and yeah I could just pull that off the batteries no problem but if you want longevity in a solar system with batteries the less you cycle your batteries the better so I can have power coming in and it can go straight to the inverter which then it would just go to the load or it can go straight DC to the battery and just bank and so I would rather in the morning or I would rather optimally use solar live right off the and convert it to AC right away off the solar panels because then you're not cycling your batteries as much so that's the reason for that that panel being where it is is that just over time I'm going to get more electricity off it in the morning and then of course the South ones will give me electricity throughout the day as it's needed but it's quite significant actually between on average in the winter so call it about a two and a half three month period in the winter time yes the day lengths change as you approach the winter solstice and you exit the winter solstice now I think days are getting longer but on average between eight I call it 7 30 and 9 30 a.m in the winter time this panel the Eastern panel is producing about a thousand to two thousand more watts than just the South panel so that's really good because then I get a lot of electricity in the morning that I can use that I'm not taking off the batteries so that's the idea with that um and yeah I'm gonna move the Western one later in the season but let me just show you kind of the basis of these panel rigs so each rig is actually two rigs so there's on half of it there's eight panels on the other half there's eight and uh there's three A-frames here I'll show you this one because it has less stuff on it so there's there's three kind of A-frames here and uh you can see there's one big rig there of of eight solar panels and then one there these are 435 watt panels and 435 times 48 is 20.88 so that's the total amount of voltage or or wattage that our system will put out and so these these racks have three positions right now they're in Winter mode which is fairly straight like this and then there's a spring and fall mode that's at about 45 and then there's a summer mode which is kind of further back and then there's a maintenance mode if I want to get them just flat to to do something and they're perfectly balanced and and it's really sweet because I can just move these myself I just move one rig at a time and it takes me probably 10 minutes to move all of them and I have to do it four times a year so it's not that big of a deal later in this video I'll address a common question which comes up as is why I don't have these these follow the Sun and I will address that near the end of this video when we get to the the common questions but um that's basically how these work and you know there's a lot of snow down here right now but you can kind of see there these are these concrete pavers that I poured they're about they're about 18 inches to three feet deep because our ground isn't even here um so it's a lot of concrete it's about six thousand pounds of concrete uh for each pad meaning that each rack total rack is anchored to 18 000 pounds of concrete so these aren't going anywhere we also drilled into the Rock because my whole property is is bedrock for the most part especially this part so when we when we when we formed out these concrete pads we also Hilty drilled into the Bedrock and then put ready uh not ready Rod but um rebar with epoxy into the concrete so these concrete pads are not moving anywhere and I've seen some pretty serious winds up here and these things haven't even moved and I there's times where I've been really nervous because it's been windy as hell things are blowing around probably I mean we don't get crazy winds out here but probably 30 or 40 kilometer winds where I'm I'm feeling a bit nervous and things are moving around and stuff and these haven't moved at all even in Winter mode uh and we've seen storms like that in the summer basically every time of the year so so they're they're really anchored down well now um what else can I say about these panels so each of these panels is connected to a charge call controller inside and we'll go look at that so just coming into my garage here this is where the system is all housed so these are our charge controllers there's three of them and each of these is connected to one of the rigs out here and there's kind of four five main components of this system there's the charge controllers the inverters the batteries the the technology that ties it all together and then the generator which will go out and look at as well so right now we've got solar coming in and as solar comes in see here's a this I've got my software open here which is a great explanation of all this we can Circle back to that in a minute basically this is what's bringing in the Solar so these are connected to the solar right now and at the moment this is real time we've got 11.3 kilowatts 11.1 kilowatts coming in from solar that's a charge controller so solar is coming in it's coming towards the inverters some of it's going to the batteries directly because I'm actually charging my Tesla right now which is taking about six kilowatts and that 0.8 is basically the rest of our load and so some electricity is coming in going directly to the batteries and charging my batteries they're almost full we've been relatively Sunny lately so they're not really going down past 75 lately so some of that's going to top up the batteries the rest of it's going to the inverter and that inverter is turning the DC which solar comes in as direct current and it goes into the batteries as direct current comes the inverters there's a little bit loss in the energy loss you can see there's seven kilowatts coming into the inverters and then there's 6.7 so you lose I think it's around a couple percentage points of of kilowatts when you convert DC to AC and that's how that goes and then here's my generator and so if I were to fire that up you'd see lines going from this going into the inverter as well and it also will go to right to the batteries as well and so these are those charge controllers I have three of them and I've built optionality into the system that I could add a whole other charge controller and a whole other panel rig in fact I could actually add about 24 more panels to the system if I wanted to but you know the system isn't cheap and we will discuss the price of it I'll let you know what all this has cost so anyways we've got our charge controllers then we've got our inverters here and so basically each of these invert this inverter uh one of these is connected to two charge controllers and one of them is connected to one and so that's why I have the flexibility like if I wanted to add another charge controller and another 24 panels the 16 to 24 panels it would go to the one of these inverters the reason that they're connected to the inverters is that when when power comes in it can either go directly to the batteries or it can go to the inverters and so if you're using it live you need to have your charge controllers running through these inverters in some way I'm not an electrician and I can't explain to you exactly how this is all wired but the the principle of it is fairly straightforward and especially when you can understand this graph it kind of makes sense and so those inverters right now we can see this is showing what I'm consuming so this inverter is putting out uh 3.5 kilowatts and this one's put a note 3.2 basically that's divided amongst the load um in in the system and so this is my main panel uh once our house is finished there'll be another sub panel in there off this but that's kind of what happens now these are the batteries uh total here we have 96 kilowatt hours of storage these are called life power and these came from a company in Texas called Signature solar and I'm not promoting their them any I'm just telling you where I got them and this whole battery bank at the time cost me about 27 000 USD delivered um I don't know what that price is right now but this is 96 kilowatt hours so they're about 30 what would that be 32 kilowatt hours per uh rack here and there's six in each rack so there's 18 batteries total and so this amount of battery storage this is a lot this is this system in general is a big system but um these batteries really allow me to it basically at the darkest period of the Year these batteries allow me to go about four or five days without a lot of sun and that could be any collecting anywhere between the lowest I've seen is 1.8 kilowatt hours in a day up to maybe 10 kilowatt hours in a day this will carry me for about four or five days of course it depends on your loads and all that but that's kind of how that works out all right now let's discuss loads where do we send electricity how much do we use this is probably the most important thing if you're going to be off grid to consider because when you want to increase the size of your system it's just costs money and it's it's expensive um and so the most cost effective way to maximize your system is to use efficient appliances or tools make sure things there's not Phantom drain that you've just got things plugged in that are just sucking little bits of power um you know yeah basically just just use less power also adjust your behavior use things according to the day you know so for example I'm not going to charge my Tesla when it's not Sunny I'm not going to burn diesel to charge my Tesla that's a very inefficient conversion also you're not going to use heat with electricity that is the most inefficient conversion unless for certain times of the year so for six months of the year we're going to have a heat pump in the house and which will give us a little bit of heat when we need it not a lot but just when we need it if we need it but it'll also function as air conditioning you can have air conditioning when your solar in the summer especially with the size of our system no problem um but generally speaking our loads are about 800 watts steady now that seems like a lot and it kind of is because I kind of spec this system in a way that I could we could live our lives the way you would normally within a city being on the grid within reason so that 800 watts um actually it's not 800 watts consistent it's about 800 watts of consistent draw during the day and at night time it goes down to about three or four hundred because I have things on well no it goes down to no it'll go down to about 600 at night uh and be about 800 consistent and then you'll have fluctuations in there but so we need to get through a day we need somewhere between 10 to 15 kilowatt hours of power and for most of the year like 10 months 10 and a half months of the year the solar system gosh it's really 11 months of the year I mean two years into it now it's about 11 months of the year this system gives me everything I need all the time um the only time we need to run the generator is at that darkest period which we just went through um but we've done things like uh we you know we get our internet from Elon Musk we have starlink it's really the only internet we can get this in this remote of a location and I also make a living online so I don't really have a lot of options so but it can this thing sucks a lot of power it's somewhere around 200 volts uh 200 watts per hour like it is a major suck and so what I do with it is I have it on a timer and this timer just one of these classic plug-in timers manual it turns off when we sleep and I even have it turn off throughout the day usually by about 11 till 1 p.m we're all like nobody's using the internet sometimes I I will and then I'll have to turn it back on but that's another way I've found that I can shave off some wattage uh draining the system by just doing that that's quite significant other than that we have um three or four freezers large chest freezers that are plugged in 24 7. the nice thing about freezers is they actually consume less power in the winter because they don't need to cool the product down as much so that that's good but they are a constant draw we have a refrigerator in the cabin that we're currently living in that isn't particularly efficient but it but it's you know a new fridge um we have lights we have computer equipment and things that I use in my office we have an electric car that we plug in from from time to time um we also have two wood stoves that we use that have fans in them and I have one in the garage here and I have another one in the cabin and they suck a little bit of power not that much um and we're also we also have fans in the greenhouse um I have a fan that that runs 24 7 to blow air between the poly in the greenhouse so it's not much I think it's about it's maybe it's 50 Watts it's it's not huge but it's something like that I have circulation fans in that Greenhouse that I don't that I only use seasonally I don't run them at the darkest time of the year unless I need to for some reason and um we also are also installing a boiler that will have circulation pumps that we run and when we finish the house we also have circulation pumps for the radiant floor and things like that as well um our hot water for the moment is gas but I can also turn on I can basically just turn on the electric domestic hot water tank if I want to because in the summertime for well for really six months of the year we're over producing more solar than we need and so my problem then is I need a place to dump the electricity and so a hot water tank is great for that um once our whole home set is complete our hot water will actually come from three sources it'll be electric domestic hot water supplemented by the boiler that goes to a heat exchanger that heats uh it's a a touch it's it's called a waterless heat exchanger so it'll use the glycol water to heat domestic hot water and then we'll also have propane as well and it's actually the same for our cooking once our house is finished we'll have electric for six months of the year then we'll use gas and a wood stove during the winter time but that's all stuff we can discuss later but that's kind of how our loads are broken up all right if you're this far into it you're probably wondering what does this whole system cost now the system wasn't cheap and this size of a system is not needed for most people okay just flat out especially if you don't have children I have two young kids we're a growing family and I wanted to build this system for the zombie apocalypse basically I wanted to have enough power in perpetuity so that I could also do other things like build other buildings and send power in a way it's my own micro grid this system is large enough you know most people could probably get away with the seven or eight kilowatt system and so basically a third of the size of the system most people would do that I'm just an overly ambitious guy I like to do things hardcore and I like to go balls to the walls so that so that that in part that's why the system is this way you know most people you mean you could amortize the value of the system faster if you had it smaller and just burned more diesel because diesel is a lot cheaper in the short term and I'll kind of talk we'll go talk about the generator uh here next but uh this whole system cost 130 grand total that's all in Canadian that's what I'm into it so far 130 Grand is all the material all the labor everything that's what I'm into it as so you at USD it's still probably a hundred grand or so so it's a it's a big system but like I said most people would be able to do with a third of this and then because even if the system was eight kilowatts total so let's say I had a third of the solar third of the charge controllers one inverter and I had a third of the batteries that would be fine for eight months of the year and the other four months of the year at least in my climate I would be just burning diesel which actually isn't that bad all things considered All right so the last component of this system as far as the nuts and bolts of it is the generator this is a 13 kilowatt Yanmar diesel generator and this thing is sweet it uh it I find it optimally runs at about 80 percent so having it produce about 10 to 11 kilowatts is ideal as far as fuel consumption goes if you're maxing it which you can um and sometimes I might have a reason to do that but um and I can throttle at all using that software I can decide how much power I want to send to the batteries and then how much power do I want to have sending to the load so I can do that at any given time it's set to a default to to send um unless I want to change it and I can with just a few keystrokes on the on the software but I can uh I generally have this set so about 50 percent well not quite 50 because I run it at about 80 percent efficiency or a eighty percent load and then 40 of that would go towards the batteries and then the other forty percent of that would go towards the load so it it works out to be I can have about unless I tweak it again I can have about five kilowatts going to the batteries and then five kilowatts of available to load if my wife says to me you know like say it's been socked in for the last 30 days like it was that last period I want to do laundry okay I go into the settings of the the Schneider software and I just tweak the battery charge rate and then I'll just put less of the battery and more to the load so I'll just put like say uh 20 towards the batteries and then the rest of the load and then that is enough power for my wife to run the washer and dryer and all that stuff and and our washer and dryer aren't even that they're not efficient um they have these heat pump dryers now that'll consume about one one and a half kilowatts this thing at Full Tilt consumes six kilowatts so it's that's a lot of load but we can throttle it down we can just put it on a lighter setting and it'll it'll consume about two or three so but this is the generator and so it goes in this and we're still we're still finishing all this if you followed my Vlogs at fromthefield.tv he's kind of seen all this built throughout the summer but that's um where the generator is housed this is the muffler that comes out and uh it's it's got a insulation around it so it doesn't light the building on fire or get too hot and it's connected to this 600 liter tidy tank which has a little fuel gauge on it and um yeah that's that's where I keep all the fuel so now that we've sorted out a lot of the efficiencies in our system uh in the fall we were running our um domestic hot water a bit longer because our old our old uh propane on demand system was just it just blew up basically and so we needed to get a new one and so we had a period it was basically all of November I was running electricity to heat our water which was brutal because it meant that we were consuming 30 to 40 kilowatt hours in a day it was insane and so I burned through about 200 extra liters of diesel that I didn't need to burn through so that was a you know call it a 400 uh mistake but you know it is what it is um but realistically now I'm tracking what we're using and like I said earlier to get through that last really cloudy period we burned 150 liters of diesel so it's not that bad another question I get is why did we do diesel for the generator and not propane well a couple of reasons one diesel is just way more badass it's it's way more hardcore from resilience standpoint because you can make diesel It's not that difficult to make biodiesel also I have a lot of Machinery on the property that runs on diesel so diesel just makes more sense it's easier to store whereas if you want to store propane you need to have those big certified tanks and those those tanks actually the Thousand liter tanks you need to have a big truck come up to fill those up which sometimes they don't want to come up my driveway so and I do use propane but um it uh it just makes more sense diesel we use it I can make it it's more hardcore you know my whole off-grid system I really thought about I spent a lot of time thinking about redundancies and what is a worst case scenario so how could could we live here without electricity for one yes we could because we could we can use wood to cook on we can use it to heat our home uh because all of the even without the boiler which that's not part of this video and we haven't talked about it but that needs electricity to run the circulation pumps but we also have wood stoves in every building on on the property as well so we have redundancies it's the same with the fuel is that uh okay well what if I can't get propane well I have diesel okay well what if I don't have diesel well I have got the sun I can heat with wood eventually I want to be able to create electricity off wood that's a whole other Rabbit Hole of a conversation for an another time let's talk about the seasonality of the system since I've had two full years with it I've seen what it's like in two summers and I've seen what it's like in two Winters and now I can give you a really good idea on what you can expect for solar in a cold climate especially one that gets cloudy for a period of time of winter so with this this is a I've actually it's hard to say at the beginning this is a 48 volt system so it's 20.88 in solar it's a 48 volt system 96 kilowatt hours of battery that might help for the whole context of the whole thing but um so in the summertime like I said we produce way more energy than we can possibly use and that actually presents some problems because if you're not using that energy and your system's going into a float state which just means it's just trickling up the batteries because they're like 90 full and you're just your your panels actually turn off you'll have certain panels that'll just shut off and you could be bringing in 15 kilowatts of solar but you're only bringing in four because your system's almost full and it doesn't want to explode so that's what it does it creates a problem when you have electricity you can't use in this only in an economic sense that if you're not using that electricity and doing something with it you're you're shaving off time to amortize the value of your system and so let's say a solar system like this takes 10 to 20 years to amortize the value of when you split up how much the cost divided how many years um based on what you would say pay to live on the grid that's kind of how you would roughly amortize the system if you're not using that electricity you're you're thinning out your amortization period so you want to have a place to dump it so in the summertime we pump a lot of water and I've showed this in previous Vlogs if you look at that Homestead tour we did in the summer I talk about our whole outdoor irrigation system there's sixteen thousand thousand liters of gravity tanks that are about a hundred feet above us here up the Mountain Ridge and I pump water directly from the well it consumes about two and a half or two to two and a half kilowatts and then I pump that water up and uh then it gravity feeds down during the day so that's one of my dump loads in the summer is that the other is the car charging the Tesla the other is uh domestic hot water the other dump load this summer once the house is well the house probably won't finish the fall but once the house is finished the other dump load will be running a heat pump um and then of course another dump load is doing laundry so we have a number of things that we can dump a lot of electricity into and um yeah that's kind of how that works but so just to go back to the seasons of it all in the summertime at Peak production I've seen this where we have 18 hours of daylight but it's not full sun 18 hours of daylight right because your Sun starts low in the sky it comes up high and there's sort of a bell curve for a perfect solar day and in the summertime that can produce about 180 kilowatt hours so that means I gotta have a place to put that electricity because I only have 96 kilowatt hours of battery so I might charge the car a bit I'll for sure be pumping water uphill my wife might do some laundry whatever we'll run the air conditioning with the heat pump once the house is finished like that the worst so that would be your best day in the summer your worst day in the summer I've never really seen it produce less than 30 kilowatt hours even on the cloudiest soaked in days where it's downpour rain all day and the clouds are really low because of the long days you still even on a cloudy day will produce some solar and definitely at least enough for your daily use in the winter times on the worst of it at the best of the worst days I actually did a short video on this December 21st this year we produced 92 kilowatt hours of solar so at the shortest day of the year if it was perfectly sunny I could still get 92 kilowatt hours of power the worst of the worst days was I've had a number of them this winter but the lowest I've ever seen the system produce in a day is 1.8 kilowatt hours so if you think about the worst of the worst or the best of the best that's a hundred x uh difference between one of the other so that's quite significant but that's kind of what it looks like and everything in between is kind of just fine there's you know you'll have some variation but like I said in the winter in the darkest time it's that one month period two weeks on the shoulder and two weeks on both shoulders of the winter the solstice is the worst time for solar and that's what I'm going to be running Diesel and um yeah that's kind of what it looks like in the seasons but again there's really only one month of the year that I need to run that generator so one of the things I wanted to correct the record on because I I don't want to delete the video because it's a good video but I did a video and I'll I'll it'll pop up here um last summer where I toured the system I set a couple things that were incorrect one is I said we only burned 100 liters of diesel in the previous winter I was I was off there we burnt about 200 liters we burnt less diesel last year than we did this winter because we have more infrastructure this winter and we're we're consuming more last winter we had less stuff finished this building wasn't finished until halfway through the winter or actually most of the way through the winter and the other thing I said was just regarding our batteries I called them lithium iron sulfate they're lithium their lithium iron phosphate that's what these batteries are made of so that's what I want to say to correct the record okay now I want to discuss the most common questions I get and I want to address them because there's a number of these questions that come up um people have kind of wild ideas and you know there's just the reality of being a YouTuber is everybody's an expert and uh at least from my perspective in the comment section everybody's an expert and very few people actually do this stuff and so I kind of troll people a little bit with it it's like oh is that what you did with your system or or are you doing that with your system people always have all these ideas and things you can do and they just don't know anything because they don't run a system they don't you have to be in something to really fully understand it in my opinion you have to have it's like they say to be a Bonafide expert on something you got to put in 10 000 hours and most people don't have any practical knowledge they just have YouTube video other YouTube videos they saw so one of these really common questions I get is why don't I have these panel rigs follow the Sun well it's really an easy answer it's expensive to do that these are Big Rigs they're about 20 I think they're 28 feet across and like uh maybe 14 feet high on the panel side and then you've got all this weight here also I get snow so imagine putting this thing on a sort of gyroscoping rig is that the proper term gyroscoping I don't know but but basically if you had this follow the Sun it's quite a bit of engineering I have three of them okay so it's probably to do something like that I would imagine wouldn't be any less than ten to twenty thousand dollars per rig and some armchair quarterback out there is gonna say oh I can do it for this and it's like okay maybe you could but I can't so I'd have to hire somebody to do it um what you have to think about with all these things I'm going to mention is you have to think about what's the cost to do it and then what's the cost just to burn more diesel so let's say I made these track the Sun and let's say by some miracle I could make all of these track the sun and it would it would cost a total of 50 Grand let's just say it's 50 Grand how many actual kilowatt hours is that going to get me because during the main season for the other 10 months of the year that's of no value because for the other 10 months of the year I'm not I don't need to get more electricity I've got enough uh it might be more valuable if you had one of these Rigs and and uh you know you had less expense that way and then you had it track all season so thereby you're getting kilowatt hours all year it might be worth it but it's all about context and so for my context it just doesn't make any sense it's way too much upfront money it's a whole bunch of engineering it also would mean that during the winter not only do I have to scrape off the panels but I got to go behind it and scrape the snow off the track for that thing to move so you know we get wind up here too it's just it's just not practical to do that so that's the main reason why I wouldn't do that and again you have to think about well how much would it cost us to burn a bit of extra diesel for that one month period that I actually needed in so the other one a lot of smarty pants comment on which I find hilarious and just kind of shows how people don't know anything about electricity or off grid is people see me scraping these panels off and they say well why don't you have one of those electrical things that just melts it it's like dude do you know how much how inefficient heat from electricity is it's ridiculously inefficient and at a time that I need all the kilowatt hours that I can sending electricity when I have very little on the batteries to melt snow on panels is is just a non-starter like it just it doesn't make any economic sense and again you have to ask yourself the question for when do I need that what does it cost to do that infrastructure and then what does it cost in kilowatt hours if I didn't do it so it's just one of those things it just doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever and I'm sure there's a context somewhere for somebody that it might make sense and if that's your case all the power to you but it doesn't make sense for me the other one is why don't you get some wind power well if you can see those I do have wind power technically those are two 400 watt by 12 volt windmills and they're absolutely useless you can see right now they're not moving and that's about 90 of the time they're not moving wind in my opinion for the most part is a total nothing Burger um again just at the same thinking as the last one what's the cost to do it what maintenance challenges does it bring what potential hazards are there you know what are the weak links and then base that cost on burning a little bit more diesel and it's most likely not worth it so if I had wind maybe say at least 50 percent of the time it might be worth it there might be a case for that but that's not my situation these are about 50 I think they're about 60 feet off the ground so they're fairly High yeah they could probably be higher but um they don't move a lot and they were from the original system here and they're just they're just a waste of time the general thinking when you're off grid if if solar is the primary base of your system now if you're talking Micro Hydro and stuff like that that's a whole other animal I don't have Micro Hydro because it's not I'm on a mountain so if I was at the bottom of the mountain I might be able to have Micro Hydro but I'm on the top and so um the basic thing comes down to is yeah you might as well just add more solar if you because solar is actually as far as these three things that I've shown you generator solar and wind um solar is well even comparing it to Micro Hydro is is really Superior in a lot of ways there's no moving Parts solar believe it or not is very available solar also the only problem solar gives you in the winter is that you got to scrape off the sun uh scrape off the snow off the panels but you know Micro Hydro in the winter isn't that easy either especially if it's a small system it can freeze up on you and I've seen dozens of Micro Hydro systems and that's been the case for people in cold climates and so you know another one people say is oh Curtis why don't you pump water uphill and then use that Micro Hydro power to bring it down it's like well dude the only time I need that power is in the winter and what do you see all around me Frozen stuff so so pumping water uphill in the winter doesn't make any sense I mean if I didn't freeze and I lived in a part of the world that didn't freeze and I had low Sun it might it might make sense to pump water uphill on your sunny days and then drag it down on the winter days but I've heard a general energy conversion for that is about you get about half what you put in so if you spend 10 kilowatt hours to pump it uphill you'll get about five going down and there might be a case for that right but but it's just not practical in my context to do that it's just it doesn't make any sense so the the thing with all of these that you have to look at when you want to say well what about this or what about that you basically have to amortize that from the cost of just burning a bit of extra Diesel and just up until a week ago and it was part of the my inspiration to do this video is I was really considering adding another rig because I have the flexibility in my system to add another rig actually more than another rig technically these aren't maxed out to what those charge controllers could add I could add another 24 panels to my system if I wanted to but that's going to cost me because I'll have to have another place to have the panels mounted there's not really it's not really going to work on my roof of my buildings because the roofs actually slope to the north I could potentially put it on the face I've looked at some different options it just creates it's just more wire running around it creates a bit of a Rat's Nest with the wire and it's just inefficient that way but uh you know it's it would cost around at the very bare minimum 10 grand if I did a lot of the work myself and sourced the materials myself I could maybe do it about 10 grand I'm not that good of an electrician to do all the final stuff but that's okay I could I could do most of the work have somebody else do it so what I have to look at is okay if it's 10 if it's ten thousand dollar investment that investment's only going to be used at the darkest time of the year and I have to factor that in well what does it cost just to burn a bit of extra diesel for that month and so like I said earlier in this video it costs about 150 to get me through the darkest time of the year in diesel or 100 no 150 liters so let's say it's about 300 bucks 300 bucks divided by 10 000 is a lot of years to amortize so it just doesn't it just doesn't make sense for the most part so that's basically it you guys I hope I nailed everything in there if I have missed anything let me know your thoughts shoot me your questions add your comments down below if you guys liked the video please smash the like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and share this videos with your friends if you got value out of it check out my site from thefield.tv it's where I post all my Vlogs and the vast majority of all my content alright guys we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Off-Grid with Curtis Stone

Views: 292,053

Keywords: Curtis Stone, From The Field, Urban Farmer, Gardening, Solar Power, Solar Panels, Off Grid, Off Grid Living, Countryside, Renewable Energy

Id: f1ZyZNRYezA

Length: 50min 0sec (3000 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023