Hi this is Amy from the AltE Store.
I am here with the Hayward family in their tiny house up in Maine.
So we have Luke in the middle and you are a Sophomore in high school now?
And then we've got his dad Chris, and his grandfather Gary.
We're gonna talk a little bit about the tiny house, kind of the story behind it.
And we're gonna show you how we installed solar to make him completely off grid and
independent living.
So Luke tell me a little bit about this project, how it all started, how old you were and everything.
In middle school, in eighth grade we had to do an independent project for our last year
in middle school.
And tiny houses were kind of in the world.
Starting to appear.
And we thought it'd be cool to try to do one.
So we just looked for a trailer and put out the word and looked for free things to help
us build.
Then over a long time, multiple years we got to this point.
So you all pitched in you all built it together.
Do you have an idea around how much it cost.
I think we have probably around 3,000 into it right now.
This trailer came from craigslist, all of the lumber except for the pine came from my
dad's property and he milled it and he rough cut lumber for framing, the barn board, the
beech, the flooring came from an old side project, some left over things.
The siding on the outside came from a trade.
We traded a bike for the siding with a friend who has a mill.
The roofing came from a friend that's in the construction field.
It was $30 for some left over used roofing.
So we've been able to do it pretty cheap.
Let me just do a little spin around here.
So we're in the living room now, here's the door.
We've got beautiful walls and the benching.
So that's going to have a cushion on it?
So you can have sleeping down there?
The Guest Bedroom.
Boudoir and we go over to the kitchen.
And we've got solar system all neatly tucked under there, so we'll show you that in a minute.
And the primary energy draw is the refrigerator.
Then we've got the dining room here I would imagine.
Yeah work space, dining room.
And then back around.
And you can see the hook system for the ladder, we can put that up later.
And then our hang board for a little exercise.
And what's that metal hook in the middle there.
He'll give you a demo on that.
That is for an extra chair we can hangup.
And that came from Equador.
Love it.
And we're just relaxing when the meal's done, you can hangout there.
That's Oak right here, then this is ash and that's pine.
And what are the counter tops made of?
This is beech.
The floor is birch.
And then this wood, the weathered look.
How did you achieve the weathered pine look?
It's just been sitting out for a while.
And do you want to open the battery compartment.
So we've got our batteries in there, right now we just have one of the batteries connected.
We're running out of time so we'll do the rest later.
And then we've got the Midnight Solar Kid 30 amp MPPT charge controller.
The Midnight Solar Big Baby Box for our breakers, and then the Samlex America 600 watt 12 volt
inverter the SSW.
So say it's bedtime, I'm guessing you're not gonna be using the pull ups to do a triple
lutz up into bed, so how do you?
Nice.
Luke's solar house with his grandfather Gary, and we've got the 2 235 watt panels wired
in series plus to minus.
And the other pluses and minuses and they're going into the cabinet inside that's got the
breakers and charge controller, and inverter and batteries.
And in case you have a stretch of weather like we've got now, we've actually got a generator
that can be connected and charge up the batteries as well.
If you need to do an extra heavy load, how many watts is that?
2,000.
Yeah so that gives you the 2,000 watt capability where the inverter is 600 watts which is plenty
for everyday use.
So we have the solar coming in through the wall.
We're going to seal that up nicely later on so there will be absolutely no problem with
water getting in here.
Plus there is talk of putting a box out on the tongue for maybe the generator, so that
will give even more protection.
So we've got both the positive and the negative coming from the solar going into the breaker
box.
The negative is just passing straight through right up to the PV negative, of the charge
controller, the positive.
Is going through a breaker and then going up to the positive PV of the charge controller.
Midnight Solar Kid charge controller.
So then the output the negative comes down to a negative bus bar, where it's then going
to go to the battery.
And also to the inverter.
So that negative has got three connection points, the charge controller negative, the
battery negative, and the inverter negative.
So the positive battery out of the charge controller goes into the breaker box, through
a breaker, and then that is going to the positive of the battery.
That's going to a positive bus bar.
Because the positive is also going to be going through a breaker, to the inverter, so we
have a 600 watt inverter over here.
So we've got the positives of the inverter, going through the breaker to the positive
bus bar, which is also connected to the positive of the battery and the positive of the charge
controller.
That's all going through breakers.
So every segment of this wiring system is, the positive has a breaker and the negative
does not because the negatives are just connected together and the breaker on the positive does
your protection.
So that is Midnight Solar Kid, Midnight Solar Big Baby Box, We've got the battery bank over
here, and we've got the Samlex America Inverter.
This is amy at the AltE Store I hope this was helpful, if so give us a like and a share
and be sure to go to our website at altestore.com where we've been making renewable, do-able
since 1999.