all right we hope everybody's doing well we wanted to show our 600 watt complete solar power system
we've had it up and running for almost two years now with no issues and we figured now would be a
good time to go ahead and show everybody what we did now your local laws jurisdictions and
where you live is all going to dictate how you can install these things we didn't want
to deal with any of the power company issues or anything like that so this is an off-grid system
it is not connected to the power company's line service the power company has been out
here they've seen it and they are happy with it so this is our particular setup your area
may vary so please when messing around with anything to do with electricity be careful
and know what you're doing so now with all that out of the way let's get into our actual system
here we have six 100 watt renergy panels they are wired in series parallel so we have uh two
series strings of three that are linked up in parallel they are in the ground here with
Unistrut we got that at the local hardware store and basically we board down about
I don't know two feet down there and you can see the concrete
we use those four inch or maybe that's the eight inch tubes and we went a couple of feet down
about 24 inches two feet or so and this thing has held up pretty well out here to some winds
that were in excess of about 30 40 miles an hour and uh some old hurricane winds that came through
so it's it's been pretty well we'll come around back and take a look at it real quick all right
we're in the back of the panels here and as you can see they are just the standard renergie
100 watt panels and basically we have them on some Unistrut up there on the top and the bottom and
we just made some brackets ourselves here and as you can see it's in the ground pretty well there
like we said we had some hurricane winds come through here and they
held up pretty well everything's held up very very well so on the back here
we do have a grounding strap to go ahead and ground everything as you can see there
I believe that's eight gauge and we'll have links for everything in the description that
we can link down there as time permits but as you can see it's all the solar panels
are connected and we've been through storms like we said and this is grounded down here
into a grounding rod again about two feet down so that copper wire goes ahead and touches
all of these solar panels that's kind of how we wanted to keep it so that everything's grounded
as far as the wires we protected everything with some cheap Harbor Freight wire loom
and again they're all series parallel connected so we had to get some Branch connectors
and we got a inline fuse here so you always want to have a fuse so we got
the solar panels and then they all hit a fuse here but we got some Branch connectors here
take a look at them one there and a branch connector there and that's what takes a two series
strings and puts them into parallel and basically we're controlling the voltage and the amperage
coming down so we have all that connected in goes into a conduit here keeps everything weather tight
the sun faded the stickers we had some stickers here but the conduit comes all the way around
and it goes into the house there not touching any of the city power so we'll go inside and
take a look at it this grounding strap is actually coming from inside to out
here for the system inside the inverter and all that and that's another two feet down
all right you just have to excuse the mess in here for right now we're doing some rearranging but the
negative and positive from the solar panels come in through here and they go into a solar breaker
so that's a 32 amp I believe breaker C32 and a 50 Maybe
not sure the correct links will be in the description but this is basically for this system
and you're gonna have to calculate your own needs but we do have the panels coming into a breaker
and then they come through and the battery also has a breaker and basically
the line will come in from the solar panels go into this PV breaker and then go into the charge
controller side of the solar the same thing for the battery down below the batteries are down here
so the batteries also are in this breaker and they will go into the charge controller as well
so basically everything going the discharge controller is fused we do not want anything uh
going to the charge controller that's not fused or anything coming from the battery so basically you
get your power come in from your solar panels to here solar panels go to here it does its
magic inside this 40 amp charge controller it's mppt renergy and basically puts out DC voltage
for the batteries back through here into the breaker comes out and goes all the way down
into a fuse there and that's like one of those solar fuses that they include and turn
on the light here for you guys make it a little better there we go and that's one of them solar
cheap little fuses you can find on Amazon it came with the renergy kit and that's basically
going to go down and charge the battery here and you got the negative and positive there
um that's our shunt so we can see how much power we're generating in and out and we'll go check
that out and then we have our battery crossovers here for these batteries um big question can you
link two different type of lithium batteries we've been doing it for almost two years and we have no
issues so now you've got your solar power coming into your charge controller your charge controller
charging your batteries now you want to take your batteries and get it to the inverter that's where
this next piece comes in this is a t-class fuse here huge fuse we think it's absolutely necessary
basically when this if this fuse blows there's no chance of electric Arc over
coming through there because we got a 3 000 watt pure sine wave inverter here
and this 3000 watt pure sine wave inverter will draw a few hundred amps easily
I mean if we're pulling a thousand Watts 1500 watts we're drawing over 100 amps
if something were to catch fire you don't want that little cheap fuse there in the background
that one right there that's just basically a 40 amp fuse for the solar panels and the
charge controller coming down to the batteries but when you're drawing out
that power if you want to sleep good at night you need a t-class fuse in there
we have it coming through a marine grade huge switch it's about the size of my hand
disconnect switch into the inverter now all these wires here are two op gauge
more than sufficient for what we're doing uh we do want to shorten some of them which we probably
will shorten some of them as you can see here cables are definitely longer than they need to be
but they're working well um and then we have the 3000 watt power inverter which we have hardwired
some switches in and you have a few switches or a few Outlets here and we have a remote switch
outside which we'll show in a second but this system runs 24 7 flawlessly for almost two years
we'll show you what we're running uh basically up here we can pull 20 amps out of our 12 volt
sockets here so we'll run these Road pro products they're great they're excellent this is a heater
and a cooler that's a little crock pot I have a whole bunch of ovens from them uh excellent
excellent company and this charge controller will allow about 21 amps to pull through here
so serves all of our needs through DC power out of the cigarette type connector uh we have
Anderson power pole types of different options direct hookups so it's really Limitless what you
can do we'll get out there and show you to shunt and then we'll show you everything we're running
all right this is our remote out switch here the refrigerator or the freezers on right now so we
have 400 amp hours we got 84 left PC it's drawing down about six amps 100 Watts so not a real big
load at all for this and then we have the master on off switch out here that we can turn on and off
but we basically run all that stuff in there we can run a small refrigerator we run this
huge Frigidaire uh deep freezer stand up it's probably about six feet tall or so
so we run that whole thing 24 7. all right we charge up all of our lawn batteries cell
phones any real USB devices so the main thing is the thing you're worried about is the reserve
capacity overnight if you're going to be running things so we have 400 amp hours if we charge all
of our devices and run the refrigerator all night we might burn off 150 amp hours so we have plenty
of reserve for a couple days and that's the big thing so when a lot of people ask the question of
what you can run off your solar power system it's not in terms of how many panels you have because
we only have 600 panels here but we generate over two kilowatts of energy a day so that's a lot of
energy the refrigerator uses less than a kilowatt a day and things like that you know you may only
use a couple hundred Watt hours to charge your cell phone so I know we're gonna get some Flack
about some things from the electronic people uh in the comments but if you have any questions
or concerns drop them in the comments we'll try and answer them again this systems are running
flawlessly for almost two years check it daily nothing's ever gotten hot it charges the batteries
at around 38 amps at 55 volts or so 50 55 volts so this charge controller is maxed out for what it is
but other than that any questions just drop a comment thanks for watching