this video is sponsored by Bouge RV
I love solar in fact my first breakout video on this channel was in 2017 on my system five years later the only video that has more views was a video on my same
solar system 10 years later I've covered all the savings data on production and my experience to
help you guys understand what to expect but now I've moved and it's time to start all over again
so all the things I've learned over the years I'm taking it all to build a definitive solar
buyers guide with everything you need to know and you're probably wondering about going solar
this is episode one and we'll cover planning and solar panels. I'm Ricky this is Two Bit da Vinci
let's start with planning your system and what you can expect in terms of cost the first step is to
understand what your goal is by going solar for example for some it'll be saving money on their
electric bills or use more energy like running the AC More Often without fears of crazy high cost for
others it'll be the environment and finally for some it'll be about self-reliance and emergency
preparedness or some combination of all three for me it's all three coupled with the why is
the how if you're planning a solar system for your home you'll need to decide if you're going to be
going on grid or off-grid most people will go on grid meaning your solar panels will supplement
the power that you pull from the grid and require permits and operating agreements with your utility
this is because if your panels are producing more energy than you're using you can feed this back
into the grid for your neighbors or others to use check with your utility to make sure that
they'll give you some kind of a credit for this so you can offset your usage when the Sun goes
down there are different rules around this and if your utility doesn't reward you for excess energy
you'll want to add a battery to charge up when you don't need it or get a smaller system off-grid
means there's no grid you'll need a much larger solar system and quite a bit of batteries to
ensure adequate power throughout the day and year winter summer day and night energy offset is a
term to help explain how big a system you'll need so an energy offset of 100 means your system would
produce a hundred percent of the power you'll need so for an off-grid system you might actually
want to consider maybe a 200 percent offset to account for cloudy days bad weather and so forth
we'll come back to this in a little bit finally maybe you want to go solar for your RV or travel
trailer an increasingly popular option and one I've got my eyes on and I'm thinking about making
a series about an RV is basically an off-grid system of batteries with limited space so other
design considerations come into play like weight and size we'll touch on all three feel free to
check out all the chapters and Skip around if RVs or homes or on or off grid matter more to you just
check out the chapters and find the part you want to watch about odds are you're going to want an
on-grid home solar system that's what most people will go with your options will be a roof mount
system or a ground Mount solar system this one is a pretty easy choice if you have acres of land
that you have no use for a ground system can be a good choice you can easily access your panels if
you have to service them or clean them and there's no roof penetrations or other risks to your roof
costs are actually pretty similar to roof mount systems because you have to run a very thick wire
very long distances and do trenching poor concrete footings and other structural installations which
all add to cost in 2023 I'd say three dollars a watt is a decent price here in the US prices
will be roughly similar for a roof mount system around three dollars per watt but now you'll need
a roofer who will be installing brackets on your roof to mount a racking system that holds your
panels hire a good Solar Company that does a good job and you won't have any roofing issues or leaks
at all in all the 11 years I had solar on my old house we had zero issues even through some record
rainfall Winters I'm a huge fan of rooftop solar because this is a space not used for anything else
and also keeps the sun off your roof and your attic cooler so for me roofs were just made for
solar panels but make that decision based on how much land you have versus roof space and what you
want to do but the first piece of advice here is to make sure you have a good roof with at least
20 years of life left on it before you get solar panels installed my roof of my new house is not
in good shape which is partly why I was able to afford buying it and to get a feel for how bad our
roof is you can see it's not in the worst shape but it's clearly falling apart all of this needs
to be changed plus being over 20 years old the underlayment that really the part that keeps you
protected from the weather is probably decorated as well so we got to rip all this out and in some
areas like over here it's really bad you can just tell the parts where the Sun hits it most
it's weathered quite a bit let's talk about cost for me I actually have two roofs to redo the main
house and our little detached office Roofing is quoted in squares where one square is 100 square
feet feet so our main house is 42 squares and the office is another nine we decided to go with a
50-year asphalt shingle roof because we'll cost at 600 per square I'm looking at thirty thousand six
hundred dollars for a brand new roof the dream was a standing seam metal roof but at Seventeen
hundred dollars a square my quote was 86 700 and yeah it was just a dream especially because
I also have to get the solar panels afterward so now let's talk about the actual installation of
your solar panels the first thing if you're gonna do a roof mount system like I'm doing you can see
here the racking is kind of going down here are my inverters we'll talk about that in episode two
all the conduit has been kind of placed the first thing you want to do is make sure you have a good
roof I've been in this house for a year and I'm only going solar now and the reason is I just
got my new roof put on and the reason is you never know what kind of damage is underneath
my roof was bad it was old I had a hot water pool heater system up here that was leaking if you have
a choice to just put new Roofing over old Roofing don't do that take the time to replace everything
fix any old or rotted wood do everything the right way because this is your roof if there's problems
up here you're going to regret it so step one make sure your roof is going to be good for the next
at least 20 years because your panels will last well over 20 years and you don't want to have to
mess around with it again these are traditional solar panels right here to install them you need
racking so the racking is what you see over here so now what you'll notice is this flashing goes
under your roof shingles or tiles whatever you have and that way you're waterproofed and secured
the water can't go back in underneath and script roof from there you've got these footings that are
into the joist of your roof and then you got the racking that goes right here and the panels will
sit on top covering these micro inverters and everything else and get bolted down that's your
more traditional install but let's talk about the bourge RV Sig solar panels and let's talk about
how you install those so unless your plan is to just have one solar panel which that's easy the
odds are you're gonna have more than one so how do you connect them well that comes to the first
decision you'll have to make which is series or parallel so let me show you that here are the
two leads of a solar panel right these are called mc4 connectors and don't do this but yeah they're
they're made to be very weatherproof and to withstand the elements and sunlight and everything
else so you have two choices the first you have to put them in series so here is the positive and the
negative of one panel and I'm going to connect them together right so now we have the leads on
the end so these now were connected in series what that means is that the voltage goes up so these RV
panels are 25 volts each and now this is now 50 volts right but the current stays the same we'll
talk about the benefits of either system here but now let's go ahead and plug this in to our battery
because of these connectors you can't really screw them up because there's a male and a female end
and you can't really get into too much trouble but here we go okay so we have both panels connected
and we have an input so the first drawback of doing it this way is that now if you have
shading on one panel it'll hurt the output of both panels so if I put my hand here
and block the output it'll actually hurt both panels production that's the first problem of
going in series but there are things you can do if you go with a traditional panel
you can get optimizers on each panel but then you get the added cost of going that
route here's your second option we'll take these two right so we'll take the
positives of one and connect it to a adapter like this okay so now the positives are tied together
okay and the negatives will tie together
so like before these panels are now connected together but now that they're in parallel
the voltage of these blue driver panels will not change it'll still be 25 volts
overall but the current now is twice as high okay so we'll plug this in
thank you
and we're making power okay the benefit of this now is if I have shading on one panel it will not
affect the other panel because they're in parallel but the drawback is the current is twice as high
now because the voltage hasn't changed so the wattage overall is current times voltage so either
way you wire these technically the wattage will be the same right you have two panels but now we have
better shade performance because if you have trees and things like I do you can kind of see back here
I have tons of trees shading is a big problem for us and the second thing is because the current is
higher now these wires are going to have more heat in them so the wire size is one of the limitations
that you're going to have you can't put more than about 20 amps probably through these wires again
check with your cables and everything else but that will be your upper limit so the way most
people will go around this is by putting them in series of course if you're going series you're
going to likely have a string inverter which is one big inverter which we'll talk about in
episode two but those are your two ways of wiring these up now a really fun fact about these bourge
RV panels is these actually perform quite well under shade and like cloudy days much better than
a traditional panel does my testing about 15 like I mentioned and it's also just so easy to pull
up so if you're doing a permanent install on your house you'll likely go with the traditional panel
and racking and everything else but if you want to just roll these out really quickly if you have
a patio and you want to just put up some panels and charge a battery or something else you could
do that but the really key advantage of something like this is the portability so if you're looking
for an RV or you want to put them on top of a car even I've tried that or an RV this would be so
easy to install there's no racking or anything else you can just take off the back adhesive
and stick it down and that is the reason you would go with this yes they're flexible as well
so that means if there's any situation where you want to just roll them up put them in your car
take them out take them with you to a campsite for example that's a great use case grab one
of these batteries you can plug in your laptops and everything else you want to run while you're
camping power them off the Sun and stay topped off for those kinds of use cases this is by far one of
the coolest things I've ever seen because there are other flexible crystalline silicon panels
out there in the market but those are thin film solar panels and they have very low efficiencies
usually around seven to eight percent this has the efficiency closer to a traditional panel in this
form factor and that is what's so cool about this and this is kind of a new entry into the market
Sig solar panels were not very common in the past they were always very expensive and they still are
on the more expensive side that's where for this you really want to have a good use case weight and
flexibility right I could just come in unplug this panel grab it roll it up and take it with
me a traditional panel like the ones that have over there that one panel is 400 watt and that
weighs about 55 pounds these are 200 watt each and they're actually not all that much bigger in
terms of size like footprint but these two panels weigh 10 pounds so a weight reduction of about 45
pounds and the flexibility of rolling it up like this so if you're a big Avid Outdoorsman if you
have an RV you're going camping at all this year and you want to just have a little battery to top
off your laptop other things like that run air conditioning or a little mini fridge boo driver
you have some really cool mini fridges that I'm looking at as well this is an amazing way to go
so enough fun for me let's get into the good stuff the data from my first year and my new
house my highest usage was in September at 1704 kilowatt hours it's actually pretty usual for San
Diego with our later Summers our lowest month was June at 763 cold hours when I reduced my
pool filter pump till we're only running about 50 of the time now over 12 months we use nearly 13
000 kilowatt hours or 13 megawatt hours but remember that's our whole house and our office
and our entire business operation everything you see on tuba DaVinci falls into that 13
000 kilowatt hours the average in the US is about 30 kilowatt hours per day or 10 950. so if my goal
was a 100 offset let's calculate how big my solar system would have to be there are different ways
to do this but because I have historical data from my previous house I came up with a way to
calculate the average number of sun hours per day this is a generalized estimate but it is based on
real world data a way to average solar power rise and fall curves from Sunset to sundown to
an estimated average each day the days are longest in the summer and shortest in the winter and here
are my sign hours for my old house I came up with 2.2 Sun hours at its lowest in December
and a high of 6.3 hours in the summer this number is calculated by taking my old home's total system
size 5 kilowatts and resulting generation each month and then dividing it by 30 days pretty
simple but pretty powerful because again this is based on my actual data from my old house but my
new house has a problem we live on a hill and our setting Evening Sun is blocked by the hillside
blocking slow Generation by around 3 P.M in the winter and 6 p.m in the summer as a result I
subtracted one solar hour from each month to come up with a projection for my new home I chose one
hour because the evening sun drops off in output anyway so it's not like it's losing Peaks on time
so I think one hour is a good estimate with this rough estimate I calculated that a 10 kilowatt
system on my new house will produce the following amount of energy over 12 months I'm projecting to
produce 13 138 kilowatt hours to totally cover my usage now there are a lot of factors like
time of use billing which charges you more money at peak times versus off-peak times like four to
nine PM would be more expensive than midnight for example and also tiered billing where your energy
in excess of a threshold let's say a thousand kilowatt hours a month is built at a higher rate
than below that threshold but that's why I just wanted to use averages for everything to help us
get an accurate measurement and take away some of this crazy datas and surcharges and all the stuff
that you see on your electric bill using that three dollar per watt figure this system would
cost me thirty thousand dollars plus a tax credit of nine thousand dollars for a total system cost
of twenty one thousand dollars so how long will it take me to recoup let's go back to my table to see
how much money I've spent on electricity my lowest bill was 332 dollars in November and my highest
was 676 dollars in September and my yearly total was five thousand five hundred and fifty six
which was an insanely High number and why if you live in California going solar or something you
should really consider based on my projections for yearly generation I can offset this entire
amount each year but let's assume there are some fees and things you don't consider so let's say
that probably I'll pay around 500 a year on electricity or a five thousand and fifty six
dollars per year savings which means my system will pay for itself in just 4.15 years which is
pretty amazing my system in 2011 cost about three times more per watt and had a payback
period of over eight years this means the rise of electricity prices coupled with the fall and
solar prices have cut the payback period in half I hope this has been helpful and I'll be
sure to put links to the descriptions to some of these calculators and spreadsheets to play with
be sure to make a copy when you open it so you have your own copy to Tinker with if solar is
an economic decision for you this should really help you understand if it's financially worth
it it's hard to put a price on being energy independent or self-reliant so if those are
your motivations this won't matter as much but if you're looking into saving cold hard cash
check out the calculator and see how long it would take you to recoup your cost so this is
just the beginning part two is going to be about inverters and how that factors in so don't miss
that but here's my final takeaway my big goal is to reduce the price of Solar for all of you
guys so here's some fun ways you can do that how about buying used solar panels that could easily
save you 15 on the price of panels next week we'll talk about how you can save on inverters
and other things so subscribe if you like this video leave us your comments and questions we'll
try to address them in future videos and as always I'm Ricky and this is stupid DaVinci