[Music] for clear [Music] doesn't fall I was going to say um maybe we should like prop it it is kind of propped over here but what the okay um they're 300 and something pounds of piece I don't know you need a [Music] tool [Music] I might need that knife [Music] I think the problem is you got these things stuck in there and you have to be able to go p hold on okay there okay now we got to go up with it it go right I like that idea way better too well right you're in go all the way in the room with it to do this but I can't do it by myself there's one of those and I get two of these this is another battery that I bought so these are the inverters this isn't your uh it's got handles on it this isn't your dur last th000 watt inverter from Auto Zone this is a a real inverter anyways I think me and you just man handle one of these even I can just manh handle it it's got handles handles too awkward to do that do this I can uh I can grab this I can grab one side and film at the same time oh god let's just lay it flat then okay okay box I just put it all on there that really just needs to go in the camper [Music] but so the first thing I want to say before I get into this video is that I have almost no experience with solar I'm a licensed master electrician but I just never got into any kind of thing like this before so this is going to be a whole home backup system that will include solar eventually but not in this video so this is inside the utility room inside my house this is an ICF house and so you can see there's foam on the walls we're getting that all foamed in and then we're going to put some steel over top that 16 gauge steel over top of where those wires go that way we don't puncture any wires that is a nail guard so we're putting that down before we put down some plywood I'm going to put down some 3/4 in they call it blond wood so with an ICF wall even in the basement you have to cover up that foam with something just for a fire rating you basically have to have a 15minute fire rating and 3/4 inch plywood does the trick for that you can also use drywall or cement board or whatever there's also different fireproof Coatings that you can put on or you can even put on some cheat steel but uh in this utility room I found it best to just use 3/4 in plywood that way you can attach anywhere you want so I'm just making sure that I put a lot of screws going into the wall there's ribs on the wall plastic ribs every 6 in on Center vertically and then on those ribs every 8 in vertically is a stronger point which actually can hold up to 450 lbs per screw on that strong point so I'm trying to hit those points here because the next thing I'm going to do is Mount the batteries and the inverter and the batteries are over 300 lb a piece and the inverter is a little over 100 lb and when you combine this inverter with a battery underneath of it it's about 80 in tall so I wanted to make sure I go right up to the ceiling with the plywood that way I don't have to sneak the plywood behind it later on so now you can see I'm putting up some Hardy Board and this is not required by code but whenever you have an inverter it's probably a good idea to do something to further fireproof behind it further than just sheetrock or in this case just plywood this is just quarter inch Hardy Board but it's just an extra layer of protection and like I said it's not totally necessary but I'm doing it anyways so it really doesn't need to be behind the batteries just behind the inverter just in case something ever goes wrong with it the batteries a lot of people get this misconstrued the batteries are not lithium ion batteries they're actually lithium iron phosphate the lithium ion batteries like what's in your phone and tablets and stuff they are very flammable and explosive almost but these lithium iron phosphate batteries are not and that's why people put them in their houses and don't get it confused with an EV battery because those are most likely lithium ion which are very dangerous but I would never want to put something like that inside my home and nobody else should either except for very small devices like phones and tablets and stuff but as far as a big giant battery for storage you want lithium iron phosphate which that's what these batteries are so here you can see me unpackaging the new battery the batter is going to go on the bottom I have two of these These are 14.3 Kow hour batteries so they run at 48 volts and they're 280 amp hours they're very heavy but once you set it in place it's done you never have to mess with it again and by the way I've done months and months of research staying up late at night to figure out exactly what I want to do for a system figure out what's going to work for me the best so even though I have no solar experience I have done an absolute crazy amount of research to get to this point so I hope I can share something with you guys that will help you because this system can help different people in different ways in different areas this is the back of the battery and here's the the mounting bracket and that's not really going to hold it on the wall that's just going to hold it against the wall the weight of the batter is actually going to rest on the floor so here I am pre-drilling with a 3/16 in bit and I'm going to use4 in lag bolts and by the way this battery is totally waterproof you can actually install these batteries outside whether you're in Alaska or you're in Arizona or Texas this battery can be installed outside it's ip65 rated and for those of you that don't know about lithium iron phosphate batteries you're not supposed to charge them below 32° most of them have a BMS system battery management system which will not allow you to charge them below 32° F or at the freezing temperature 0° C but these batteries actually have a self heater in them so if they're stored outside they will use I think it's like 315 Watts or something to actually heat themselves up so that you can charge them but only when it's needed so I don't have a lot of room in this basement to put a lot of batteries I figured I could put three of them I have two of them for now so I may install another one later if for some reason I really think I need more I probably will install them outside but for right now I'm happy with just the two and I'll probably get the third one and I'm sure I won't need one after that but just trying to plan for the future just in case I do want another one or two after that so with the two batteries that's 28.6 kwatt hours of energy storage that I have and I'll get into why I chose this system in a little while now I jumped the gun a little bit here and I installed the bracket before I installed this x brace that goes on the wall and basically what this x piece does is when you bolt it on the bottom now the bolts that go on the top are exactly align where they should be to pair this battery with the inverter it kind of marks out the top bolts without you having to measure anything and those top bolts are where the bracket for the inverter goes so now I'm putting the battery back you only need to put that xrace there if you're installing the inverter above the battery which in this case I install above this one but not the other battery so we figured out that if we use a bar metal plate and lift up with the bar on the battery it makes it a lot easier to lift it and then we'll just keep putting pieces of wood underneath of it once we lift it just lift it up a little bit at a time that way you're not using your body to lift it you're using leverage from the bar as soon as you get it up an inch then you shove a piece of 3/4 inch plywood underneath there to hold it and you just keep going back and forth until you got it up to the height that you need which in this case you need to get it up about 2 in above the floor because you got to drop it onto the bracket which has some grooves in it and once you get it up high enough and then you just got to lift it up a little bit just to take the stuff out from underneath of it that you put in to hold it and then it should click right in place and then there's four bolts that you have to put back in going from the back of the battery into that bracket from the sides which I don't show here but that's the same four bolts that I took out of the bracket to start with there go now it's resting on the floor and Hy Dory might just need like a 16 F an inch of a shim on one side so this is the conduit box that they give you to go on top of the unit and I didn't quite understand what all the hype was about about this conduit box but once I started installing it I realized that this thing is absolutely the way to go this conduit box hides all the wires that you need to install between the battery and inverter and then from the inverter to your electric panel and then also to your One battery to the next and you can run these inverters in parallel as well to get more power so you can go from one inverter to the other inverter with wires and that works for that as well so now I'm unboxing the inverter this is an eg4 18 kpv this is what I did all the research on this inverter right here does so many different things you guys will see in a minute you'll be amazed at what this thing does and if you don't know anything about solar and inverters and batteries and everything this might not be so amazing to you but let me just tell you when you compare it to other inverters you'll be amazed even if you know nothing about it so most people that have solar on their house if you don't have solar on your house you don't realize that if the power goes out you have no power even if you have a solar panel array on your roof or a ground Mount system or a Tracker you don't have any power when the power goes out if the grid goes down you have nothing so with this inverter this is called a hybrid inverter so basically what this does is it combines a whole bunch of different worlds into one unit so this inverter will sell back to your grid like a normal inverter will but it's also battery backup so if your power goes out you can set this up in many different ways but the best way to set it up is to have it where the electric passes through this inverter before it even goes to your panel and then that way when the power goes out you don't even know that it went out except for the fact that it gives you a warning light okay other than that this thing takes over the power instantly within 10 milliseconds but just know that this inverter can sell back to the Grid or you can tell it not to sell back to the grid like if you don't have an interconnect agreement with your utility company or if you can't get one cuz there is some areas that they won't even allow you to sell power back to your Grid or there's areas that they will let you sell back but it's at a very very low rate and it's not worth it so the whole reason I got this inverter was to be able to offset my power usage and eventually I might have an interconnect agreement with my utility company and sell them back power because I can in my area but for right now I can get started immediately and not even have to worry about that so this inverter will inject power back into your panel and it will offset your usage and if you hook up solar panels to It Whatever extra solar that you're producing during the day and you're not using you can actually charge the batteries with that and then at night time you can discharge the batteries back into your panel and so basically you can run every day and have zero usage going to the power company and that's with no interconnect agreement at all or you can connect to the grid and in my area you can basically do a oneyear offset so every year you can utilize the power going from one season to the next so in the summer time when you produce a lot more power than you need and you can't use all that power even at night time with the batteries you can offset that usage to the winter time when you're not making that much power and you're also using a lot more power for heat and such so in my area you can do that but there's a lot of areas that you cannot do that some areas you can actually sell back as much power as you want and they'll pay for every every kilowatt hour but in my area they don't do that they only do that for one year at a time which is good that works out pretty good but you'll never get paid for the power I think they let you use like 10% over but it's not much it's not enough to be worth bragging about So eventually I do want to get an interconnect agreement but I've been going over the paperwork and it's a lot of work to get that agreement that's so one of the big major points of putting this in here was to have a whole home backup so there's many different configurations that you can do to wire this into your panel I'll show you a couple of the configurations right now you can pause the video and look it over so the way that I want to hook this up is different than all of those illustrations so bear with me here cuz I'm trying something that I've never tried before and I don't think many other people have given this too much thought but for all those illustrations they require a lot of work to get this the way they want so this system is capable of providing uninterrupted power even if the grid goes down and the way that you do that is the incoming power to my panel right there is tapped and that power goes over to a transfer switch which transfers between giving it power from the grid and giving it power from the inverter and then the power comes basically into the inverter with 200 amps and then goes out of the inverter with 200 amps back into the panel but it goes through a transfer switch so that if the inverter fails you can just hit the transfer switch and you're back to the original Power and you can bypass this whole thing just in case this fails but the problem I see in that whole situation is I could tap right into the incoming power but I'll show you where it says that you can't do that because this is not the main breaker this is actually a sub panel the main breaker for my system is out in the driveway about 120 ft away and that's where the meter is and because there's also more loads coming off of that panel this is where it says that I can't use that because of that this is where it says that I can't use that whole scenario because I have loads before this panel now I want to look into that to kind of clarify that a little better because I don't think that that matters at all that there's other loads coming off of that panel but here's the thing I'm perfectly okay with having a manual transfer switch to turn on my power if the power goes off so in other words I'm okay with having an interlock device going into this panel just like you would with a generator with a manual transfer switch it's kind of like a manual transfer switch anyways so an interlock breaker would mean that you have you have a two-pole breaker right here that back feeds the panel so the power goes into the panel on this breaker and it has an interlock which interlocks with the main breaker so that they both can't be on at the same time so in other words if the power is out the interlock will make it so that it can feed power into this panel but it can't go beyond this panel because it has to shut this main breaker off and that interlock device prevents you from turning them both on at the same time and there's two reasons for that number one is when the power does turn back on you don't want that to be back feeding your generator number two you also don't want to be powering the main breaker and then going back into the utility or the grid because that's going to go through the Transformer and become 177,000 volts which if a linesman is working on the line he's not expecting that if the power is shut off he's not expecting that back feed into the grid so there's two reasons why you need that interlock so these two terminals here are for the incoming power that comes in from your main panel into here and feeds this inverter with the power that you need to charge the batteries as well as it exports power out of here to go to the grid when the grid is working you can sell power back to the grid through this connection right here that says grid the load terminals here are for a sub panel or if you're doing whole home backup basically the incoming power would be here and the outgo power would go here back to your main panel to feed that so that has 200 amp terminals so you have a chance of passing 200 amps through this inverter so that you can get several of these inverters together and then you can actually have 200 amps cuz really this is only rated for 50 amps to go out but you can parallel several of these units together and actually get 200 amps so I know that sounds really complicated and it's only going to get more complicated from there but the gist of it is I don't want to get involved in a big 200 amp transfer switch I don't want to get involved in tapping my 4 o aluminum cables coming in and I definitely don't want to get involved in a critical loads panel which is another way to do this where basically you take only the critical loads out of here and you transfer them into another subpanel so in other words anything that you want to use in the event that the power is out just a few Breakers that you want to use during that power outage you put them in a separate panel and then you feed that panel from these terminals here that's one way to do it where you isolate just that critical loads panel for when the power goes out but I kind of want to do the best of all worlds where I want to have a whole home backup so I want to back up the whole panel use anything I want in there but I don't want to go through all the hassle of doing it so I think the way that I can do it and we're going to find out is is that I can feed this from the panel the grid side and then I can feed this back to the panel with an interlock to the main breaker so my critical loads panel will actually be my main panel and the way that that can happen is by having an interlock device there the only downside to this whole thing is you don't want the Grid in the load to see each other you don't want them interconnected so the grid would have to get shut off the breaker in this panel would have to get shut off manually and I'm going to try to figure out if there's a way where I can also have an interlock device so that I can have two opposing Breakers not be on at the same time so in other words I'm going to have two two pole Breakers in that panel one for the grid and one for the load the load would be on an interlock to the main breaker the grid would not be so if the power goes off I would have to manually shut the grid breaker off before I turn the load breaker on which shuts the main breaker off so we're going to do some experiments to see because the first thing I'm going to do is hook up the grid to my main panel with 50 amps so we're going to use number six and we're just going from here to here and we'll connect that to the main panel and I think the way it works is if it senses that the power is off it won't feed anything back to the grid but it might so and if that's the case then we don't even need to worry about the load side and that would be great but I just have no way to know I've been trying to find this answer for months now does the grid feed power back to the panel if the main breaker is off let's try to find out so to get this system going the first thing I'm going to do is hook up the battery to the inverter now I only have one battery installed right now the reason is because I don't have the right cables I'm not sure if they didn't give them to me or maybe they're in a different package that I didn't find yet but you're supposed to have cables connecting the two batteries they're called parallel cables and they're this type of connection on both ends this cable right here is just meant to go from the battery to the inverter so this end goes on the battery and this is just an open end here that you just go right into the inverter with but I don't have the other cable which has two ends like this to connect the batteries together so that's fine we'll just use the one battery for right now for testing and finding out whether everything works and then once I get the other battery all I have to do is connect the communication which is just an ethernet cord and then just run the parallel cables from One battery to the other and that's done so that's like 5 minutes worth of work once I get the other parallel cable and then of course I got to install the other battery which is like 350 lbs or something but that just gives us more capacity right now we can try everything to see how things work with just this one battery so what I really like about this system is that they give you this conduit box to keep all of your wires hidden which you don't really think of it as being a lot of wires but it will be when I'm done you'll see inside of here is going to be the connection to the battery so you go in through the side here those are the connections to the battery and then also to connect from One battery to another you got some Knockouts here so we'll run some conduit over and go to the other battery here and it'll be nice and clean looking there'll be no wires exposed except for just what goes from there to the panel and that's it we got some Knockouts in here to go from the inverter into the conduit [Music] box so you can see we have a built-in breaker here for this battery we got our battery Communication cable and we have our terminals we got four positive terminals for connecting battery to battery and battery to inverter so we're going in here with the battery and for your master battery which is going to be your battery that's underneath of the inverter you're going to use two two o cables in parallel to power from the inverter to the battery and then when you hook up another battery you're going to just run one 2 cable from the other battery to this battery [Music] so actually I'm seeing now that the positive battery terminals are on the left and on the battery they're on the right so let me just slip these out we'll crisscross them inside the condo box I think that would make a little bit cleaner of an install way the positive R left I think if we keep the mess inside of the conduit box and make everything nice and clean in here it'll just be a lot better so we want to just make sure that the breaker is off which obviously they're not going to ship you a battery with the BR breaker on but you know just check it anyways take these caps off and these are a quick connect and they are waterproof too so to get these connected I realized that there is this little plate that's right here that has these tiny little screws and I think you got to take that off because otherwise you can't get these on once they're once they're pushed in then there's enough clearance here but to get them pushed in you can't can't do it cuz there's there too much of an angle there I'm sure you could try to force it but I'd really rather or not so it's easy enough to just take this plate [Music] off oh yeah now it goes right in no problem there we go I don't know I almost think that they have this plate on there so that you can't remove these cables without taking off this plate cuz once the cables are in there the plate fits right back on there but you can't you can't pull those out right [Music] now so the same thing on the negative side just going to remove this plastic cover first just take those right out so I've seen other people do this trick I've never done it before myself but there's a lot of really fine strands on here if you try to put it in that terminal they're probably gonna go all over the place so I've seen other people put a zip tie on it just to get it started once it's started you can just slide the zip tide down and then cut it we'll check the torque specs later but for right now I just want to get everything connected I'm not going to be running any hot loads on this for a little bit and when I do I'll torque them down properly they say you can run one set of 4 o cables to the master battery and they say that these terminals are capable of accepting a 4 o cable but a lot of people are saying it's really hard to get a 4 o Cable in that terminal plus these are the cables that it comes with so we'll just do the parallel two of them together all right so we got our battery cables hooked up now let's hook up the battery communication cables so remember these batteries are capable of being outside so everything has a weatherproof connection so even the battery Communication cable is going to have a weatherproof connector here so everything here is weatherproof so this can totally be outside so when I hook the other battery up we're going to hook it into these other ones here but this is the one that goes to the inverter from the m Master battery which we're going to consider this battery to be the master [Music] so we're going to be at battery so that's this one right here so at this point before we even hook this to the grid let's just try to fire it up cuz the battery will actually power the inverter without being hooked to anything else so turn this on it says it's at 56% we could actually fire this up by hitting this breaker okay [Music] first thing I don't know anything about these settings I got to go through everything there's a lot of different settings but it says export to grid we're not going to do that we're going to go zero export anyways I got to do a lot of research on all these settings so we're not not going to mess with this right now what I want to do is make all the physical connections I can and now I will run the connection between the grid and my panel so for this connection because we're running 50 amps I'm running a [Music] 63 [Music] [Music] the neutral wire goes there and the ground connection goes there and this inverter is not bonded so that means the neutral and the ground are not connected which is what I want because cuz I'm bonded much further up the line on my panel about 120 ft away so we can't bond after [Music] [Music] that okay so I got the grid terminal wired up to a 50 amp breaker here that is off right now what I need to do now is set the communications so that it's set to communicate between the two of these so to do that I'm going to make sure all these dip switches are in the up position to set Communications which they are all in a lower position at the moment so we're going to put those all up and I'm going to go down to close loop press enter and then I got to go down to Lux to communicate with the inverter all right so right now I have this actually charging at 8500 W I don't know why I can't focus so you guys can see that but it says 8,500 Watts that I'm charging that's why the fan is on right now so I'm charging the battery right now because the battery only came at like 56% charging at 150 amps at 55 volts so I'm just trying to get this all charged up once it's all charged up I'll check back in with you guys and we will try to see what we can run in this house and we'll see if we can run anything with just the grid connection but I have a feeling that once it senses that the grid is no longer there then it's not going to Output anymore so you might have to hook up the load to the panel with the interlock breaker like I was talking about so I guess now would be a good time to hook up these These are called CTS that stands for current Transformers and basically these go around wherever the last connection you want before the grid is so in my case the wires that are coming in from the grid I'm going to put these on there and basically what these do is sense the flow going out cuz it wants to make sure that I'm not having any flow going out because I don't want to sell to the grid so basically what these do is make it so that that inverter only outputs enough to power whatever I'm powering in the house and it doesn't allow any more power to go out to back feed the grid but that's only for a little while until I get connected with the grid with an interconnect agreement and then I can sell to the grid but for right now I want zero export so that's what these are going to be useful for so these are labeled ct1 and ct2 and ct1 is also line one and ct2 is line two so on the inverter I have the red on line two and the black on line one so so I need to trace those back to the bus bar and figure out which one is line one and line two that corresponds with the breaker so that's the breaker right there line one is black and line two is red I've tra us back to the bus bar so this is line two and that's line one so I just need to make sure that I put the right ones on the right phase so that's going to be ct2 and this one is ct1 so so I'll just run these wires back to the inverter all right so I've routed the cable out from the panel into the side of this conduit box and I'll tidy that up later but then from the conduit box it gets coiled up because there's a lot of excess wire there and then it comes in here and gets plugged into to the ct1 ct2 port so I don't know if I'm totally correct but I think what this means is that now this senses how much power is going into my house right now so right now I'm at about 2,000 Watts I just turned my geothermal system on so once the compressor kicks on we'll see if this is accurate or not cuz that should be around 3,000 Watts the startup for it is probably around 10 to 12,000 Watts but that's only for a half a second and then it should be around 3,000 Watts so if that's right that 2,000 watt should bump up to 5,000 Watts or so yep so that's correct cuz that just jumped up to to let's see if I can let you guys see better here 40700 Watts so yeah that's pretty cool kind of lets me monitor my usage for the whole house even without even using the system right now I'm not even discharging or charging or I don't have any solar panels hooked up or anything just kind of letting me monitor my energy that's pretty cool so last night I did a bunch of experiments and I was charging and discharging the battery and I was just testing out all kinds of things and I want to show you guys what I've been doing and the results but this screen is just not readable on this camera and I could put my phone up but that's kind of annoying so what I'm going to do now is install the app that is supposed to go with this so that I can see everything on my computer and then maybe you guys can see better so I don't want to do any more testing until I do that because I want you guys to see all this stuff that I'm doing it's really neat so in order to connect this to the internet they give you a Wi-Fi dongle that's what they call it and basically this plugs in right here and then you can connect it to the Wi-Fi so even on the app on my phone I can't really see it that well so I P pull it up on my computer so it's really cool because you can see the power usage because of those CTS that I put in it monitors everything that's going on and even though I'm not using the inverter right now it's still telling me my power usage in the whole house so I'm using just under 1400 Watts for the whole house right now there and there's no heat on there's no laundry on right now we just have a bunch of lights and some TVs and just like my computer and a few other things so not a whole lot of consumption but at night time when I turn everything off I'm sitting at around 6 to 700 Watts still with like the freezer and the refrigerator and a few other things that are running but what I was able to do last night was charge up the battery and then I used the battery for the whole night to power the house geothermal system and everything and then this morning the battery was was empty but that was using the geothermal system pretty heavy and I also had some things on that if there was a power outage I'd probably keep off but let me just show you some things that I can do on here okay so now that I have enabled the discharge from the battery basically what it's doing is it's offsetting all of my usage and see you can see the flows going from the battery to the inverter from the inverter to my house the grid is using zero Watts right now so I have no power coming in everything is being handled by the battery so and the battery is at 99% so we could run for quite a while like that that's kind of neat that's with the grid hooked up so if I wanted to sell to the grid which right now I don't have an agreement with them so I can't do that then you'd have another arrow sending it to there so in other words what you can do is during the daytime you can charge up your batteries and power your loads in your house but any excess can go to charging your batteries and then at night time when you don't have any solar going on the battery can actually be discharging into to the grid and selling back to it and powering your loads too but most likely I don't have enough batteries to be selling to the grid from the battery so what I will do at night is just let the batteries power my house that way nothing is feeding in from the grid almost ever so that's my current setup that's the way I wanted it cuz right now I can hook up some solar panels and immediately start offsetting my usage and I'll consume nothing from the grid zero watts and that's without having to sell to them now the usefulness of that is in my case it's going to take a while and a lot of paperwork to be able to set up to sell back to the grid but furthermore a lot of places don't even let you sell back to the Grid or if they do it's like not worth it they pay you Pennies on a dollar for the electric that you're giving back to them so for those situations this is absolutely perfect because you can just offset your usage and you don't have to sell back to them which is great there's so many great things about that but another thing is a lot of people live in an area where your electric rates are different at different times of the day so you have peak hours and those hours are usually more expensive so like during the day when electric is more expensive you can be discharging from your batteries to power the loads in your house and then at night time when electric rates are cheap ER you can be charging the batteries through the inverter so that's called Peak shaving and that can save you a lot of money and a lot of these options if you just get involved in one option it can save you the money that you spent on the inverter and then you have a whole home backup for free so in my case since I am not selling back to the grid I can offset my usage and I could probably pay for this system in 2 years by doing that once I get get my solar panel set up so that's my goal but right now I can get started immediately offsetting my usage and I don't have any solar panels right now but I do have a solar trailer in the works right now actually I have two of them one is going to be a Tracker trailer and the other one's just going to have an array on it that tilts so with those being portable I don't need any permits I can just basically plug those into my inverter and I can start producing power without getting any permits so that's kind of some neat things that I'm doing right here but I don't even have my uh whole home backup hooked up yet so let's go do that right now so right now I'm discharging the batteries into the inverter which is feeding my house offsetting my power that's great but if the power goes out right now that grid connection will shut down and it won't provide any power back to the panel it needs to sense grid power in order to put out power but that's where these load terminals come in and you can either do a critical load panel which you could do like a separate panel with all your important loads going into it and basically that will power that panel at all times and in the event of a power outage you won't lose any power at all it won't even flicker it'll just keep on like a UPS system but the way that I'm going to do it is hook up the load back to the panel with an interlock breaker the only problem with that is if the grid goes down I will know it because I'll lose my power but it's easy enough to go in my panel and just hit the interlock breaker turn off my main breaker and then I'll have power again so the way that I'm going to do it there is going to be an interruption and I'll have to manually turn on the backup power but I'm totally fine with that because the amount of work that I Sav from doing that is tremendous and if you want to do the whole 200 amp pass through past the 200 amps from my service in and then out to my panel you have to get a transfer switch and that's like $6 to $800 and you have to tap your main lines and you have to have these big boxes with shut off switches and I just don't want to get involved with that for me it's not that important to have anything more than just a manual breaker that I can turn on and have the house run while the there's no power so for some people it might be important if you got a server Rack or something you need some backup power that stays on all the time and never gets interrupted but for me that's just not important cuz we barely ever lose power here but when we do it might be for a couple days but I'm totally fine with just flipping a breaker having a critical loads panel here just doesn't appeal to me at all cuz then I got to transfer all of my critical loads from here wire nut them in bring a big piece of conduit over bring a million wires over and hook up my critical loads panel I just don't want to do all that work it's just not that important to me when I can just flip a breaker and be done and installing the interlock is nothing it takes like 5 minutes you put a breaker in there the only thing I have to remember is to turn off the grid connection because you don't want to be seeing both of them at the same time but that's not a code issue like the interlock device is a code thing that you got to do to stay code but turning off the grid power is not a code thing it's basically something to protect your inverter so yes I need to remember to turn off the grid breaker but if I don't it's not going to harm anything past that panel it's just going to harm this unit so let's put that breaker in there and I'm going to turn off my main breaker and I'm going to show you how I can power the whole house with the main breaker being off so to install this interlock kit they give you this template and you basically just put this where that breaker is going to go it slides right into place you take your pilot drill bit and you take a 316 drill [Music] bit [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] got [Music] e [Music] [Applause] [Music] m [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so since it's snowing outside we could kind of pretend this is going to be a power outage and let just shut the main breaker off all right so somebody just hit a pole couple miles down the road and so first thing to do turn the grid power off and then we're going to lift this interlock up flip this breaker [Music] on now go in here flip this breaker on and Power on everything in this house is running off of this battery right now main breaker is off so right now let me go turn on my computer so you guys can see what's going on right now while I'm waiting for my computer to boot up you can see that my pump is still working my heat is still on my geothermal system is on I'm going to make that kick on in a minute too but I want to show you guys on the computer so you can see clearly what it's using and everything so I can still use my hot water and my heat everything is being run off of One battery and right now I'm using 12200 WTS no lights flickering everything seems to be perfectly normal so you can see 13 almost, 1400 Watts going into the inverter into the house no grid grid connection is off and we are running the whole house I got internet I got computer I got ejector pumps I got geothermal that's going to be the biggest test let's go ahead and test the geothermal system all right so right now I'm going to just turn up the set point a few degrees let's see you guys can't see that there we go turn it up to 97 turn it on the pump just turned on so now it takes like a minute or two for it to fire up and we'll go monitor the energy now to start up that geothermal system the compressor is going to take about 10 Kow for half of a second or less so once that kicks on that'll be kind of the test I'm not sure if one battery is going to be able to handle it cuz One battery won't give you the full 12 Kow of output and then also the surge but we'll see yeah we just got a warning for no AC connection that's fine so let's uh wait for that geothermal compressor to kick on all right just kicked on little bit of lights flickering but not too bad this thing is a little bit behind on its usage though it's definitely using a lot more than it's saying right now see I don't really know this program that well so maybe we have to hit this refresh button over here here I thought it kind of updates in real time but maybe not so we're using let's see here right now the geothermal system is using 3,000 Watts so yep there we go 4200 WTS is what we're using total so it's running it no problems I could probably go turn my washing machine on that's the next biggest load in the house and then there's nothing after that besides like toasters and coffee makers and stuff like that these are the biggest loads that I have but you know what let's let's try it I got 4200 Watts that means I got like 8,000 Watts that I could keep continuously running right now so we got one of these GE Profile washer and dryer in one with a heat pump dryer so let's go ahead and just put it on a dry cycle and let's see what it does should be able to hear the compressor kick on on this too which takes quite a bit energy to start it by the way these things are amazing so geothermal system running Dryer's running compressor is going to kick on any second all right compressor is on so I don't know if you guys can hear that or not but that compressor must have a soft start cuz the lights didn't even flicker or anything I think this thing uses about 7 amps when it's drying and that's at 120 volts it uses a regular plug in the wall for washer and dryer I think it uses like 9 amps for washing and only seven for drying so let's go turn on a few other things that take quite a bit of energy and let's test this thing out so with the dryer the geothermal unit the toaster and the air fryer on along with everything else in the house we're at 7700 Watts that's about the most power I can pull in this house I can't think of much else that I could do without turning on things that you plug in like a hair dryer or like a space heater or something like that everything is on right now which would not normally be the case but there it is 7700 WTS Totally Running off the battery now this unit when it gets above I think 7,000 Watts the fan turns on but below 7,000 Watts you don't even hear that thing running it's creating a little bit of heat not much you know in the winter time that kind of helps things but um yeah this is really cool I'm like totally fascinated by this 7600 WTS um now with the efficiency of the inverter and the standby power and all the stuff I'm actually using 8,000 Watts so there's a few hundred Watts that you're kind of wasting but that's the joy of having solar panels cuz a half of a solar panel can make up for that difference but yeah I'm depleting the battery pretty quickly right now cuz I'm using 8,000 Watts but you could run that for about an hour and a half like that cuz I got 14 kilowatt hours so I can run 14 Kow for an hour or I can run 1.4 Kow for 10 hours but that's the joy of this system you just add more batteries if you don't have have enough but you know if the Grid's down I'm going to be not using any of this stuff so this is pretty good all right so the toaster just turned off so we're down to 6,500 WT 63 so now I'll go turn the air fryer off and I'll turn the dryer off geothermal pump has been running this whole time can't really hear it but it is so let's just turn this off we don't really need to waste all this energy so I like to keep it set on like 93 that's off the fan is off now cuz the the big load is off so right now with everything else running we got about 3200 Watts that's with the dryer and the air fryer and everything else in the house I also don't know which way is up and down right now backwards SC just and go came [Music] out that's way better you go back as far as you can we this this thing I guess as long as we get it on that platform why don't you tilt the battery all that way right on the corner you're good you know what we forgot to do what take this thing off the bottom now I just got this 2x4 in here that wasid looks good right good [Music] [Music] Prett whoa all right so since I'm a long ways away from setting up my solar panels outside I'm dying to try it out just to see how things work and I do have a pallette of solar panels that I bought used they're 315 Watts a piece so I'm thinking of setting up like four or five of them outside I already got the conduit running out to the part of my property that's got the Southern Exposure so I'm going to run some 12 gauge THHN wire out there and we're just going to hook them up temporary I'm going to set them on the ground and let's just see if we can get anything coming from four or five panels I think we got to have a minimum of 100 volts and there are somewhere around 50 a piece so if we set up four or five of them you know at full blast they're like 250 volts so today's a cloudy day maybe it'll be over 100 volts we'll see but tomorrow we have a full sun day so I want to kind of test it between the two days today being the worst day tomorrow being the best day and we'll kind of see what we can get from them you good you good not yet hey that works pretty good okay [Music] there we go all right I got him I'm going to head towards the pile now try and just flip this this way you so there is a PV breaker right here we'll just go ahead and flip that on actually let's turn this screen on and on the top left that's where you'll see something [Music] not much3 volts that's not doing anything so I have five panels in series and there're somewhere between 50 and 60 volts a piece so we got I don't know 250 to 300 volts worth of panels so we should be picking up something but 1.3 volts maybe there's a bad connection somewhere also we're going to try cleaning them off and we're going to try tipping them up more because the sun is really low right now so they're kind of pointed almost straight up at the sky so I knew that they weren't going to do much but I thought it would do more than this so I would not recommend doing this at home there's no fuse on this there's no disconnect it's not even going through conduit after that point this is just purely temporary I just want to try this out so don't do this at home okay so I figured out I had a bad connection on one of the panels so I only got four hooked up right now 153 volts 115 watts is going from the panels going into the inverter it's charging the battery and it's also sending some of that energy towards my house so that's kind of cool you can see that the flow is not going that way so I'm not exporting to the grid which is the main reason why bought this inverter because I'm not trying to export right now and it's nice to have that option so that's kind of cool it puts out a little bit more than I thought for not having any sun right now it's like really dark outside too all right so one of those panels isn't connected right so there's only four hooked up right now but we got some good sun and they are working working really good okay so right now I am charging the batteries which are pretty much full right now so they're just trickling off right now I'm producing 1150 Watts I've seen it go up to about 1,300 so some of that power is going back into my usage which is a little bit high right now actually but you can see that's how much I'm pulling from the grid and that's how much I'm using that's how much I'm using for battery charging which should change in a few minutes I've produced 2 kwatt hours today from the solar and that's just with four panels hooked up just randomly slapped up there no precise angle to them or anything nice SK out here all right so I wanted to show you guys this cuz this is kind of neat here I'm producing more power than I'm using and it's not feeding back to the grid so it's unfortunate because it limits the power coming in it just sort of caps it off but that's a lot better than feeding back to the grid when I don't have an agreement with them but that's the whole purpose of this charging your batteries at night is that right now I could be sending that Excess power back to the battery but I haven't been doing that so that's why it's not feeding that but once I start getting the system up and running get the solar panels rocking you know a lot more than 1,000 Watts I should be at at least 10 Kow with my first array and then I have plans for another 15 after that but let's just say I get 10 Kow so right now I'd be at you know you know 10 Kow cuz the sun right now is in full swing it's right it's pointed directly at the array so if I had 10 Kow I could be using 9 Kow to charge that battery and this would be discharged because I'd be using it the night before um it's not like that right now just cuz I haven't done that but also I haven't hooked up the other battery too so I'll have 28 kwatt hours to discharge at night and then I'll have 28 Kow to charge during the day if I use all that at night which I Pro I don't know I probably won't use all that but that's the neat thing about this whole system there's not many inverters that can do what this is doing right now it's just offsetting my power and my my power is zero right now so that's pretty cool and that's only with four panels set up with a couple 2x4s there's nothing permanent about it it's not pointed in the right direction it's not mounted properly it's just sitting on the ground the panels are still a little bit dirty we kind of clean clean them off but they're still pretty dirty so we could be getting a lot more out of them right now but um I'm really happy with the way this is going right now because this is just an example and we're going to multiply this by about eight times so that's my first array is 10 kilow and then after that I'm going to do another 10 kilow on my garage which I'm going to feed into this inverter so there's 20 kW and then I'll also have another 5 Kow that I'm going to hook up to another inverter um on a Tracker so we'll be producing some serious power here pretty soon but right now I'm just kind of just kind of testing things out and seeing how things are going and I'm really liking it so my my consumption is pretty low right now and that's with my computer on and my HRV the heating and Recovery ventilator and that HRV uses I don't know about 50 Watts that runs continuously but we also have an 885 in TV running right now and a few lights and fish tank a couple routers so that's pretty low for my consumption that Excess power from the panels that I'm producing right now just sort of disappears it doesn't really go anywhere um and it's perfectly fine to do that you could be producing 10 Kow right now and if you're only using 700 then it's fine it just just sort of doesn't use it there's no problem with it it's not unsafe to do that and remember this inverter is capable of handling up to 21 Kow um and the reason is because that way you can over panel for cloudy days it can only actually use 18 KW but you can over panel it for cloudy and dark days and that way you can produce the most power and have more panels than you need on cloudy days so pv1 has two mppt inputs and it can handle 25 amps at up to 600 volts and you want to make sure that you don't go over 600 volts but you can go over by the amps it will limit the amps and then pv2 and pv3 are separate mppts and those are capable of handling up to 15 amps at up to 600 volts each so you can have three different arrays and you can have them at different angles so pv1 you'd probably want to have on the biggest system that you have like a big ground Mount system you know maybe 15 kilow or so and then pv2 you could be like using a Tracker and then pv3 you could use roof mount that way even though they have different angles on the sun pv2 might be inputting a lot less but it's not going to limit pv3 because the they're separate mppts so if you have so anybody that knows about solar panels if you have them in series and you have one panel that's blocked off it'll limit the rest of the string but that's the point of having Different Strings so that you can not be limited by the weakest link which is what normally happens so I'll probably use pv3 for maybe some roof panels because I don't have a south facing roof so they're only going to be seeing on half of the day and you don't want to limit your other mppt inputs by having that array on like pv2 or something then you'd be limiting pv2 and so that's the whole point of having three different mppts so that you can have different times of the day when they have Peak power on certain arrays and still not be losing from that now just so you guys know I could back feed to the grid and I can limit how much I'm back feeding leading to the grid too and I can limit what times of the day I want to do it but right now I have two other buildings that are using power um between here and the meter so if I was back feeding probably up the 3 kilow right now it would never see the grid because it would just get used in other places like I have my garage and we have another uh little cabin and that uses and between the two of them they're probably constantly using 3,000 WTS cuz they're heated with electric and um you know we have refrigerators and freezers and stuff and pumps and all kinds of different things but there's a constant load of at least 2500 watts at all different times during the winter time here so we could be exporting 2500 watts and it would never back feed to the grid it would just go to that stuff first but I'm not going to risk it cuzz if you start back feeding and for some reason somebody shuts a bunch of heaters off or something then you'll be feeding back energy to the grid and then you'll have uh a representative from the utility company show up and they'll be like hey what's going on here uh we're here to inspect something because something's wrong here and then and then you can get in trouble so I don't want to do that um that's the whole purpose of having the zero export it's it's not worth it for me to to try that out right now I'll wait till I get my interconnect agreement and then we'll kind of test that out but I'm also going to have my garage built soon and that's going to be on the same meter so um I may get another inverter and another set of batteries for that we'll see but I'm definitely going to be putting panels on the roof and I may just run the DC wires from my roof over there to the house here to this inverter and then I may have a separate array on that roof which is on like a carport part of the roof which will actually power some batteries and an inverter in the garage so I think it's worth saying that if you are going to have a garage it might be more important to face your garage in a Southern facing direction for solar rather than your house because your house is meant to live in you don't want to be putting your house in a way where it's kind of weird to live in because you have it facing south in a certain way so you can have solar if you're going to have a garage why don't you just face the garage that way so that way your house is like what you want and not based on solar so you can see between today and yesterday I got 6.7 kilowatt hours today it was 2.6 and I discovered that the direction of the sun really makes a difference on this array cuz this morning early this morning I was only getting uh 4 to 600 watts but the Sun was shining on the panels but the angle wasn't directly perpendicular to the panel channels is for [Music] [Music] there [Music] fire [Music] [Music] for on all right so at this point I'm ready to hook up that second battery I finally got these connectors in the mail these are a special type of waterproof connector so these need to be crimped I have some spare two battery cable or welding cable and I and I was using this for another project with a 12vt system but I'll just use this for now cuz it's just long enough for what I need and I'll just order more for later but um I just need to crimp this on here so I have a hydraulic crimper that I bought and I've never used one of these before so let's see how this goes I ordered a few extra connectors because I figured if something goes wrong I don't want to be be down another few weeks getting these so Plus in the future I may use another battery so with that being said um it wouldn't hurt to have a few extra connectors around and on top of that too I'll show you guys more later but I have another use for these too which is basically using what they call a charge verter to charge these batteries from a generator with a cleaner power but I'll get into that more later see how much there get the uh [Music] for for sh oh my [Applause] God B [Music] not too bad all right so I'm going to feed these through the conduit and then I got to crimp after I put it through the conduit otherwise these won't go through the conduit they might but it' be a struggle [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] get so [Music] now okay so I did manage to put this com cable here inside of the conduit but when I did that it was like 8 to 10 in short so I had to actually just run it externally over to here this is a parallel cable from One battery to the next so that these two can communicate and so that this one can communicate with the main inverter so now this is all ready to test out out and and so I guess I'm going to have to make my own cat 6 cable I got to read the pinouts for it that way I can slip it in the conduit and make it look nicer but for right now I just kind of want to test it out so now we can flip on the breakers all right so I just got done setting the communication protocols for using the other battery in parallel so it took me a little bit to figure it out but I got it finally so now my charge limit is bumped up to 300 amps and my discharg is up to 400 amps so now we have the full capacity of this inverter which I doubt I'll ever need but at least we have more battery capacity now more amp hours cuz I think with one battery you're limited to somewhere around 8 or 9,000 Watts but now we're up to the full 12,000 plus we're up to the 28 . 6 KW hours instead of the 14.3 so I'm just charging this from the grid right now just to get that balanced out so between the two batteries we're at 79% but the one battery is like 99% so that'll start charging soon and and once they're balanced out it doesn't show another battery when you do that just shows the One battery but it shows you the total capacity of it so I had to leave the side covers off because remember I have this cat 6 cable just hang in there and there's really no way to Route it with putting the cover on so I left all the covers off um this cover here covers the power button and the screen so I just didn't even put any screws in that I just clicked it in place same thing on both of them but the other side has the breaker so I wanted to be able to have access to that as well so I'll just leave those off for now and once we get everything 100% figured fig it out and we test it for a while then I'll cover them back up but for right now it's not hurting anything so what I ended up doing was running inch and a half flexible metal conduit it's metal liquidtite is all it is so whenever you're running DC wires inside it has to be encased in some sort of physical protection barrier and it has to be metal you can't use regular PVC and I didn't know that until I got into this and started doing the research but so any wires that enter the house or or in the house need to be encased in metal conduit so this is the easiest way to do it you can't buy this at your local Home Depot or Lowe's or anything you got to go to an electric store but they have everything you need so this is inch and a half and this is 1 in this is my PV feed from the panels so I used one in for that and this is like a junction box it's going to go up to a shut off switch that goes back outside but basically as soon as you get inside you got a junction to metal everything's got to be metal for anything that's DC so what I also did change was instead of coming out of here with NM non- metallic wire um I wanted to bump it up to number four which I don't even think they make number four in non- metallic maybe maybe a service wire but anyways I had some of this 1 in left over so I just got a few extra fittings for it and so now one of these is for the grid connection and one is for the load um this is for the grid and this is for the load so now I also bumped up the wire from number six to number four because I got reading about it and at 12,000 Watts yeah that's 50 amps but you need wire that can handle a little bit more than that so if you follow the codes you'll know that THHN is rated for quite a bit more as long as you put it into something that's rated for that particular temperature so in other words THHN is rated for 90° C but only if your lugs are rated for that and your breaker is rated for that so in this case the breaker is but in any case my point is that the NM wire that I had in there before wasn't rated for that high of a temperature so technically even with only 12,000 WS of output you can kind of overload the wires because you're not supposed to run that kind of full Max capacity for a while so and I'm trying not to get too technical so that most people can understand me but basically that wire being maxed out wasn't enough so I had to upgrade it to number four and at the same time that I did that I upgraded the grid breaker to a 70 amp breaker cuz that's what you can have for number four wire and that's the max you can have have for back feeding the panel so this is my grid breaker that back feeds the panel and it also charges from the panel this is my load breaker that only gets turned on if the power goes out but basically you can back feed a breaker inside of the panel as long as your bus bars are rated for that the bus bars are the physical pieces of metal that are thick inside of here that connect up to the lugs up here and that distributes all your power in your panel so so if you have a 200 amp panel and and you only have a 200 amp bus bar you can't back feed more than 40 amps but if you have in it like in my case I have a 200 amp panel with a 225 amp bus bar so I can back feed up to 62 amps and the way that I do that is with a calculation that the NEC uses and I'll put it right here this calculation basically sizes what what kind of back feed breaker you can have what size and so if you don't have a 225 amp bus bar but you have a 200 amp panel you can downgrade the main breaker to 175 amps and then you can back feed your full 62 amps which you would use a 70 amp breaker for so this unit is capable of accepting up to 21 KW of solar and that's so that you can always utilize 8 of that and so even though this only puts out 12,000 WT of usable power converted to AC you can use the other 6,000 Watts from 12,000 to 18,000 to charge your batteries so in other words AC power coming out of this is only 12,000 WTS but 18,000 WTS can be used with DC to charge your batteries and the nice thing about 21,000 Watts being able to be utilized is that on cloudy days if you you have 21,000 WTS of panels you might only be getting 11,000 Watts but if you only using 18,000 watts of panels instead of 21 then you'd be down to like 9 or 10,000 Watts so you can just get more power when you have cloudy days by having up to 21,000 watts of input and so on the solar mppts number one and number two this is one mppt and it can accept up to 25 amps at 600 volts number two mppt and number three can accept up to 15 amps a piece at 600 volts one thing I still need to do and I didn't have time to do it right now but I did buy some lugs for this that I can crimp on and so I'm going to take these out crimp on those lugs and then put it back in that way there's not strained wire going up into the terminal so I'm going to take all these off and do that still and also at the same time I'll torque everything down the way it needs to be I just want to go over a few more features that this has that I want to let you know about um has a generator input Port so basically you can charge your batteries with the generator and run your house at the same time which is really nice the only thing is if you're not using an inverter generator you really shouldn't be inputting into the generator input um they make a separate module that you can buy called the charge verter and I have one on order but it might take a few more weeks to come in and basically what that does is is cleans up the power going in because you can kind of damage this inverter if you have dirty power coming in from just a regular generator so I think you can run a generator on very low amps but if you want to do anything useful with the generator you got to have that charge verter and it's only like $400 to buy the unit and then it'll just get mounted over there and then I'll input the generator to that and then that will get hooked up to the batteries and basically what that does is enables you to use any generator um even 120 volt generator can charge the batteries and it takes dirty power cleans it up if you have an inverter generator like I know they make some bigger inverter generators then you can go right into here and you don't need that charge verter but if you have dirty power you can damage the inverter by using that so A word of advice um go ahead and buy the charge verter they're selling so fast because everybody really loves them um so if you're thinking about getting one get it as soon as possible cuz it might take you a while to get one and that's made by EEG before and I'll leave a link in the description for that so to me it kind of seems like I'm rambling on a lot in this video but there really is a lot to talk about I kind of want to give you guys an in-depth look at this system cuz it's not just for people that need one specific thing that they could use this there's a lot of different reasons why you would want a system like this so I have just a few more points I want to talk about before I end this video and and one thing is I always encourage people to do some calculations on your Roi your return of investment so on this system right now my electric is running about 24 cents a kilowatt hour so if you do the math so right now I have a 10 Kow array that I'm going to be assembling and I already have the panels and I'm just getting some Engineering in the works right now for a ground Mount system and basically with that 10 Kow if you average out about 5 hours a day for the whole year and I sell back to the Grid or mostly offset and sell some back to the grid basically you can say that you're going to make 50 Kow a day time 365 that's 18 megaw and if you times that by 24 cents that's $4,300 that I can save in one year by running this system once I get the ground Mount installed so to give you an idea of how much money you'd have in this system between this inverter and these batteries and the solar array that I just bought plus the ground Mount the engineering all of everything to do with the system you're looking at less than 20 grand now that's what doing it yourself which not everybody's capable of doing but still if you take $44,000 a year and figure that that's a return on your investment for that year so that only takes you 5 years and it's paid off and also a lot of that cost was these batteries so you don't really need these batteries if you don't use these that's another like almost 8 Grand that you can take off of that price cuz these are just a little under 4 grand a piece but so you can take 8 Grand off of that price and now now all of a sudden you're down to 12 Grand well that's only 3 years on your return of investment which for solar that's really good because after 3 years you're just making money and basically once you have it set up you're not doing anything you're just sort of monitoring everything and that's only because you're curious but to take it even a step further that 10 Kow array is not going to cover all my power for the year because I'm also running a few other buildings and I'm building my garage which is also going to be on this service so I could potentially put in a full 25 Kow which is basically the most you can put in without like being a commercial operation around here if I put in a full 25 KW and they don't even count the bif facial part of that in cuz I got bifacial panels so that extra 100 Watts that you can add on to the bif facial for each panel also brings in a lot more so when you start thinking about that when I get everything maxed out at 25 Kow with bifacial panels and seasonal adjust I'm looking at saving around 10 grand a year cuz that's about how much I'm going to be spending on power right now I'm spending about 8 Grand but add that other garage I'll easily be in another two grand for power for that so there's 10 grand in one year that I'm spending on power but I could totally eliminate that with the solar system so now my return of investment is even quicker and after that I'm making even more money every year after the ROI is done so yeah if you don't have a lot of money this system may not be where you start but let me just give you a little history of where I started cuz we're only talking a few months here I've never done anything with solar until now and when I first started checking into it the first thing I started buying was these 12vt lithium iron phosphate batteries I got four of them for a bank and I bought an inverter a 2000 W Renegy inverter and I also have another 2000 watt inverter here and then I started buying all kinds of different things bus bars and um cables crimpers um switches shunts and just various things that I bought you lots and cables and this is all just like the solar stuff that I first started getting interested in and within a few weeks it just got like addicting and I just kept buying more and more stuff thinking like well I have this thing that I can use it for and I have this and then it worked its way up to the whole house system and I also have in my office here I also have another uh 12 volt battery um this is this is 400 amp hour so that this system right here is four of those batteries right there and so I'm going to be putting these in various things like that might go in the camper that I have and then once I get my off-grid cabin built up north that will go in there along with I have some used solar panels so I bought a whole pallet of used solar panels and then I bought another pallet of brand new solar panels and I just have lots of stuff accumulated already and it's only been like three months since I've started getting into this stuff so it gets addicting pretty fast and I don't think it's the worst addiction though I think getting into it and learning how to do stuff and learning what's efficient and what's not you know you start out with 12 volts and then you realize 48 volts is way better cuz you can use the same wire but get four times the power from it and these batteries have a 10year warranty on them and they're good for up to 15 years so basically at 15 years if you use them every day discharge and charge every day you can get 15 years out of them and after 15 years you have about an 80% capacity left in the battery so you lose about 20% capacity over 15 years but don't think of it like your batteries are done in 15 years you still have 80% capacity and they have a warranty for up to 10 years years and I think the warranty don't quote me on this but I think the warranty on the inverter is like 10 years as well so that's not bad for a battery that's being charged and discharged every single day once a day but honestly I don't even think I'm going to be doing that because once I get interconnected and by the way I did get my interconnection agreement started with my utility company so within the next few weeks I probably will be able to connect to the grid so I'm trying to get everything in line with the solar part of it get the engineering done get the install done so I can start selling back to the Grid in the next month or two and once I start doing that I probably won't use these batteries that much and then they'll go from 15 years to who knows how long but you do want to discharge and charge them every once in a while just to keep them active cuz they don't like being dormant and by the way when you're running the grid back feed breaker in your panel it needs to be all the way on the bottom as far away from the main main breaker is possible cuz you got power coming in on the main breaker and you got power coming in here so you don't want them coming in at the same spot and then trying to distribute from there so that's the only way that this works is if you have a 225 amp bus and you put the breaker all the way at the bottom for the back feed as far as your load breaker like I said I don't think anybody's even done this before the way I'm doing it cuz basically this is a critical loads panel which it's technically not but it kind of is in my situation but this breaker can kind of be wherever it wants to be it needs to actually be right next to the main breaker so that kind of determines where it's going to be and that's because of how the interlock works but that's just this panel different panels are different so with four used panels that are 315 Watts a piece running for 6 days now I have made 31.7 KW hours so not too bad for just some panels that I slapped up real quick and didn't do anything special and spent you know a half an hour doing it and they're used panels that I bought for like $40 a piece but that's really like nothing for solar when you start talking about back feeding the grid I want to be you know like 100 kilowatt hours a day eventually here and just so you guys know all these latches on this inverter and the batteries are all lockable with a key so you don't have to worry about kids getting into them cuz you know there is some pretty high voltage and amperage going through everything but keep that under a lock and key and you don't have to worry about that so I hope this video was helpful for anybody who's considering anything like this um I hope I covered everything that I could possibly cover in this video I do have another one of these that I'm going to be installing in my parents house with just one battery and I also have some panels that I'm installing there so that'll be a few more videos plus obviously you know I have lots of videos in the works here with installing some panels over there on that array I'm going to be installing another array on the roof of my new garage and I'm also going to be doing a Tracker system probably over next to the garage so I'll have three different arrays here on the property but also this is probably going to interest people more than anything I have two solar trailers in the works and I'm going to be making those on a big trailer one is just going to be a tiltable seasonable adjust uh ground Mount system that's going to be mounted on a trailer and then also another one with some small trackers on a trailer and those trailers are going to have inverters and batteries and everything to make um basically like a solar generator so right now I'm getting all the parts and pieces I need to make those cuz I have some property up north that doesn't have power and I don't want to run anything from the grid so I want to make those to be able to power those properties and also be a backup too like a portable generator solar generator so I have lots of videos in the works for solar stuff and more that I haven't even talked about so that's it for this video guys and if you like this equipment I have links in the description for all of it I am affiliated with them now so whenever you click on these links it does help me out which is great um I don't normally do that kind of stuff but we're getting into some big money here so it does help out a lot and I figured now would be the time to start doing some affiliate stuff so if you guys like any of this stuff click on the links in the description check it out if you buy anything I thank you ahead of time for that and I'll see you guys on the next video
