hello hello thanks for tuning in welcome back if you're joining us again today we're going
to look at everything to do with solar and how to get it into a usable form this is
not going to be a catch-all with everything this is just what i know and how i get power
you know mobily or out to areas where i don't have shore power
there's two different ways you can do it with solar you can get it grid tie or non-grid tie
basically off off the grid anything grid tie you have to go through the power company talk to them
get permits you know what i'm showing you here is totally off grid it's not connected to anything
it basically harnesses solar panel uh solar power from the sun into the panel the panel goes through
a charge controller that goes into a battery and the battery goes to an inverter and the
inverter turns it back to 120 so it's basically you're converting energy that's all you're doing
so right here on the left you'll see that we have the solar panel and i have it face
down because i don't want to produce any power right now because it's going on the
roof i've already tested on the ground enough it works well this is the harbor freight one many
of them are similar it's 100 watt panel we'll explain what that is in a second and you know
if you actually get 100 watts of power and what all that is the batteries down here are tied to
this little house and if you can see it's got about 14.3 volts i'm gonna go inside and flip
the inverter on and turn a fan on the fan you know is a regular house fan 32 inch or whatever it is
so
so you've seen a voltage drop there basically i turned the inverter on
i turned the fan on and now i have what you would plug into your house out here
you know running off the sun so 13.6 it's under load
and that just runs into a little converter a little charge controller and that's what it puts
out so we'll see what each individual part does and how it all works together in the big system
okay right now we have the panel pointed in direction of the sunlight
and we're going to take a look at the cable now this isn't a standard cable there let's see
let's get that in good shot there we go
so that's an sca connection
normally they're mc4 harbor freight decided to go with the sca one
or sae sorry if you read it and get it set up and it'll read probably about 18 19 volts
okay if you see the unshielded pin is negative and the shielded one is positive and it produces
about 23 volts dc that's direct current not many things are going to run off 24 volts
directly there are some things but not many useful things most things run off like 28
or you know 12 to 13 so we have to be able to take all that power and dumb it down
to usable 12.6 volts so let's check the amperage coming out
got about three just over three amps dc
so 20 23 volts at 3 amps dc again that's a very small window of things you can run
so we want to be able to take this power now and charge a battery well the battery is 12 volts so
if you put the solar panel directly onto the battery it's going to overcharge and cook
the battery so you have a small device that goes in between it let's take a look at those
okay we're looking at some common pwm charge controller that's pulse width modulation it's
the cheapest simplest one it's the least efficient out of all of them but it does get the job done
i'd say for anything less than 400 watts you use one of these or a bigger style not exactly
one of these ones these are the tiny ones they work for 100 watt solar panels or 100 watt kits
like the old one so the harbor freight one the thunderbolt solar on the left honestly
stay away from sorry harbor freight you guys got a lot of good tools but honestly that was a miss
with this thing i've traded those things in more times than i can remember i just don't deal with
it anymore i keep this one just to make videos off of i'm gonna open it up the one on the right
the link will be in the description it's worked pretty well but again uh know their limits and
what you're getting into that one says eight amps this harbor freight solar panel hits over
seven amps and if it's in direct sunlight it will do some damage let me flip it over and show you
see that burn mark on the back there on the right that's from being in the sun i was just testing
it to see it still functions but you need to keep these things shaded in a cool spot the more
ventilation the better otherwise they start to overheat i did come up with a solution for it so
i'll make a video later for that but yeah you get one of these and that's going to allow you to take
that power that 22 volts at 3 amps dc and bring it into a usable state to charge the battery and
i've got one more example to show you real quick this is a bigger charge controller this one is
i think 30 amps maybe i don't remember maybe it's 10 amps i'm not 100 sure i think it's 30
because i'm gonna put the other solar panel on the roof so all these harbor freight panels will go on
the roof and then we'll see what they produce this is a bigger version of it you see i got bigger
cables down there going out to the battery to charge them and i'll kill the inverter and you'll
see everything jump back up battery temperature i don't know how there's no thermometer
as you see this at 13 2 let's see what it goes to 13 4. so it is charging
13.5 and these are the panels that are already mounted on the roof the
older harbor freight set i'll see if i can put a link in above
click that link if you want to see that they're about five years old still working good producing
good power as you can see 14 volts recharging the battery i'll turn it back on just to show you
all right well that's basically what you have now is your solar panel hooked to a charge controller
okay here we have a basic setup if you see we have the
solar panel connection coming in to a charge controller
that basically takes the voltage and regulates it and right there's all the information
battery solar and it's putting it into a battery so this is a battery box that i built it's a
mobile battery box but either one if you see you're gonna have your batteries but we have all
the solar panels coming in coming down and that's going into that green charge controller i showed
you earlier it's charging these batteries and it's going back out to that inverter on the wall
so that's the basic principle of solar you're taking the sun's power harnessing the sun
power bringing it through putting it through a charge controller so it cleans it up and then
putting it into a battery however you have your batteries this is a mobile box the other one's
stationary at that point you need to figure out how you're gonna run your devices
so there are 12 volt cigarette lighter devices and i do have a couple videos on those so i'll try and
link those above and you know there those are an option it's not the best option
but it is an option and now i'll show you how to get that dc voltage into ac voltage
okay this is a good shot showing basically everything else besides the solar panel that
you need to run don't mind the amp meter on the um positive side there i know people are going to say
i don't see a fuse yet you're right because i'm not done setting up the solar panels that's why
the other ones turned like earlier in the video it wasn't getting power so yeah i'm just doing this
quick video to show people so you're going to want some type of fuse in between your battery and your
load which would be your inverter which is the little gray box hanging on the wall there with
the white plug coming out if you hear the fan in the background i don't know if you hear but it's
making like an electrical hum like a noise doesn't sound normal um that's because the inverter is a
modified sine wave inverter so it's basically like a square sine wave i have a pure sine wave which
i'll show you in a second but they both produce power this one on the wall is less efficient
because it's a modified sine wave you always want to try and run pure sine wave when you're
running motors and computers and stuff because it just needs to be conditioned
and needs to be around 60 hertz you know everything needs to be good for
clean north american power um you see we have the charge controller down in the bottom uh
right there and the batteries outside the window so again if we look here on that charge controller
we have all those connections on the bottom there's a negative and a positive coming from
the solar panel there's a negative and positive going to the battery
and there's a negative and positive additional to run like any 12 volt load off lights or anything
like that this is capable of that you see the two usb there it gives you five volt usb
but this thing is like the brains of it like i said it regulates it
because the bat the the battery is not going to be able to take that much hit now you can do a 24
volt system but this is the simple easiest way 12 volts all the batteries out there are run together
um you know you don't need as many as i do but it'll run off one battery
that's basically everything you need to do an off-grid system
and you just got to be cautious you know if you're trying to do this to run your house
you have to get a professional or know what you're doing with electricity and get the right permits
checking your local county whatever wherever you live um again this is total off-grid shack this
connects to nothing it's a little tiny house so i'll get the pure sine wave inverter set up
and you'll hear the difference in the fan so as you can see i got the battery box running the
pure sine wave inverter down there which is running the fan i hope you can hear it
it sounds a lot better you don't hear the electrical noise or the interference
so that's basically how you have to do it you get the solar panel to charge the battery and the
battery runs the inverter and that's how you get your household power like plugging into the house
it's very simple very easy you know let's let's get everything laid out look at it and go over it
all right there it is basic nitty gritty you got the solar panel you got the charge controller
there on the left you got the power inverter there on the right and below it you got the battery or
the battery box that is simply how you would get power from a solar panel and store it for later
use because anytime a solar panel gets shade put on it the voltage decreases any time the sun goes
down the voltage decreases so if you're using an item that takes 12.6 12.7 13 volts and you're
trying to run it directly in the sun shades for a second you're going to lose things i mean if it's
a computer you can lose critical data it can mess up the hard drive so you need some way to store
that power some way that that's that's the basic goal of solar you know you want to you either want
to store it in a battery for later use or if your grid tie with your service provider you sell it
back to them depending on which way you go so i hope this clears up any concerns questions if it
helps you um the actual solar panel itself let's go out there and talk about that for a second
all right so we got the 100 watt solar panel out so now you're wondering 100 watts is this what
you get from the sun this is what it produces 100 watts is what this thing is going to produce under
perfect circumstances it's got to be absolutely perfect manufacturer most of the time you get
about half that sorry to burst your bubble but it's about 50. average is about 80 though
you know um let's take a look and i'll show you guys a little better maybe how that works
let's see if i can get the watt meter in the shot here
all right
uh
all right you can see there we're pulling in about 79 80 watts like i said you can expect about 80
watts out of 100 watt panel you're not gonna get 100 watts five five amps coming in and that's
going in and charging the batteries and then the batteries are what you use on the inverter so
it's going to give you an idea you know you got to size your panels your batteries
if you want to do anything usable with it you know um you can run stuff during the day
depending on how many panels you have you know you could run a heavy load
this will at least hold five six seven amps and you know check out my other videos but yeah that's
that's everything you need you need a solar panel you need a charge controller you need a storage
battery to store the energy and then you need some type of converter to convert it back to ac if you
want to use ac if you want to use dc you just run it off the charge controller or a battery
if you have a specific device that runs 22 23 volts then run it directly off the solar panel but
it won't be as efficient because anytime there's a power drop or a source light drop you're going
to lose wattage and if you can see here you know it's varying it goes it goes up and down
so i hope this answers your questions
it's basically all you need to run it i mean you're not going to do a whole lot
with the single panel with with this panel i can charge a battery that probably runs i don't know
um you can run medical devices cpap machines oxygen machines for a couple nights you can run
the cool or the coleman cooler you know i'll link all this stuff in the description in the in the uh
video hopefully above and it can run all this stuff all day as long as you have sunlight
if you miss sunlight for a day you know it's you got to be careful with your power
but it is a good panel does work well it served me good so far no issues
i hope this helps thanks for watching please subscribe