hi i'm ricky and i'm on a mission to build the most sustainable house that means producing our
electricity ditching natural gas and eventually figuring out water but we bought this new house
because there's a second house where we run our business out of but it came with a huge
problem it has really ancient electrical built back in the early 70s and there's a bunch of
old equipment and other stuff so when ecoflow reached out and said hey ricky you want to check
out this ecoflow smart home panel we said heck yeah because we knew this was an issue and this
was just the motivation we needed to finally get out there and fix this so full disclosure ecoflow
did send us a smart home panel but we had to pay for the installation and materials and
everything else and our opinions are our own also this video is for entertainment purposes
only hire licensed contractors electricians for all your work and we're not responsible
for anything that you might do so at the core of our electrical issues is old wiring
which is not especially safe and prone to fire issues and it's ungrounded which means that all
of our electronics aren't grounded when we plug them in secondly they're all kind of undersized
they're 15 amp circuits which limits how much power you can draw so we wanted to upgrade all
that and go with modern romex wire and 20 amp circuits so that's exactly what we did
okay so the walls are all clear the floors are clear next up is the dirty and the part that i'm
not looking forward to which is getting under the house and replacing all this older style
electrical wire and just as we noticed there's no ground wire it's just
neutral and load and that's what the issue is with this old style wiring so we're going to rip
all this out replace it with this here which is 12 gauge 20 amp rated romex so we're gonna do i think
is unscrew all these outlets unwire them pull this down see where it leads pull it all out and then
replace it with new wire all right so part of building the most sustainable home is getting
rid of all the natural gas so this was the heater we had before and brim and juan had complained
that when they ran it in the winter they gave him a headache so i think there's just maybe a little
bit of a leak it's old doesn't really matter ripping this whole thing out so this line here
look at how bad this looks you see it's falling apart this is just a fire hazard waiting to happen
this is turning into an absolute nightmare i knew that we'd find crazy stuff down here old
houses always do but there's a ton of absolute crap like for example look at this you have like
four different wire seams all butted up not in a junction box just kind of wired up and taped
it's turning into a far bigger project than i thought it was going to be i was thinking one
day get in get out but we're on day two is that right we're on day two and i'm thinking there's
gonna be another day so really the electrical loan is gonna be taken up three days which is
gonna come out of juan's budget what sorry juan we were able to successfully remove all the old
stuff if you get in tight here take a look so this is how they used to make the wire it was braided
but you see look at this area that i pulled out it was completely unprotected now
you know there's nothing actively rubbing it's not like there's an airplane where it's vibrating or
anything but still this is completely unprotected and look at how bad this was we've also upgraded
a lot of these 15 amp lines to new 20 amp lines so that means in the kitchen we now have two 20
amp circuits that have two 15 amp circuits which means you have an extra 500 watts you can pull
the living room where the team will be working out of is a 20 amp circuit the studio will be
recorded 20 amp circuit so between that upgrade and all new electrical we're looking pretty good
now the next step will be to prepare the area to the left of the service panel for the eco flow
i feel like somebody's gonna call me out on my painting i don't know how to paint
it's probably gonna be claudia too i'm sorry
so now let's talk about exactly how the smart home panel works it attaches to the side of
your main electrical service panel here in the us you'll typically have two 120 volt lines coming
into your panel where these trunk lines are distributed throughout your house via branch
circuits next circuit breakers are installed on the bus bars of the service panel each circuit
breaker will alternate between the legs of the 120 volt service it connects to the purpose of the
circuit breaker is to mechanically switch off a circuit if it detects it's drawing too much power
everything in your system needs to be sized correctly for example a 20 amp circuit breaker
will trip and turn off if it detects more than 20 amps for being drawn for a period of time
this protects the wires which also need to be sized for 20 amp as thicker wires can carry more
load without overheating without a circuit breaker you would risk possibly running too many things
and overloading the wires and possibly causing a fire then electrical lines connect to each circuit
breaker carrying electricity to various branch circuits in your house with the eco flow smart
home panel circuits aren't directly connected to the circuit breakers instead each circuit breaker
is fed to the appropriate input line in the smart home panel wiring harness then on the output side
the output wires run from the smart home panel back to the service panel where they get tied into
the branch circuits by doing this a smart home panel is now in control of either pulling from
the grid or powering your electrical loads from the batteries so with the smart home panel you can
power up to 10 circuits that can be backed up even if the grid goes down you should also know you
need two dedicated circuits for input to charge each of the delta pro batteries once everything
is wired up you're now good to go and the smart home panel can jump in in about 20 milliseconds
to back up your home if the grid ever goes down so we mentioned that we're gonna get
rid of natural gas which means that we had to take care of a couple of pretty big appliances one was
our natural gas water heater which actually never worked so once we were able to get that out of
here we now have a need we got to figure out our water heating solutions let me know in the comment
section below we're thinking heat pump water heater but yeah we're open to ideas second we
had an old furnace so now that we have the furnace removed we're all clear we still have to do some
drywalling and other finishing touches but pretty soon we're going to have a heat pump heater and
air conditioner that runs on 110 watts it's not a very big room and i think we could fit all that
and have it run in the smart home panel so you might be wondering why should you care is this
something that you should consider for your house and that's what i want to tackle next so
for us we mentioned we have a lot of electrical needs we're going to go all electric heat pumps
and so we needed to have a pretty sizable system also because it's a smaller house we only have
10 circuits in its entirety so this ecosmart home panel can back up 10 circuits so our entire house
is backed up every outlet will now work even if the grid goes down we'll do some testing in
just a little bit but for you if you have a bigger house this might not back up the entire house it
might only be 10 circuits right so you'd have to pick and choose which ones you want to run i would
recommend refrigerators right maybe the lighting maybe one of your core rooms other critical things
that you can't live without but if you need a bigger system you actually can install more than
one of these and hook them up to batteries but at that point there's probably a better solution
for you this is really made for somebody who likes the portability and the modularity of this system
i mentioned i had these batteries before so if you have a delta pro from ecoflow already
well this is a pretty reasonably priced upgrade right and i like this because i can unplug the
cables and take this with me go rving or camping so if you like modularity and you want to be able
to start with a system you can grow on and add to in the future this might be a good option for
you so here are two ecoflow delta pros and the smart home panel but each of these can hook up
to two additional batteries and if you were to max it out with six batteries you'd be looking
at over 20 kilowatt hours of storage so let's talk about the pros and cons of going with this system
as i mentioned you can get the smart panel and the battery separately which is really nice
but these batteries do take up quite a bit of space as you can imagine
you need about three feet because these are the ports that plug in to the smart home panel
and they plug in the front you can kind of see that there but the battery cables that plug
these batteries to the add-on batteries the smart additional extra batteries they plug in the back
so you need to have a couple of inches behind the battery as well also this cable that plugs in here
to the infinity port has to be six feet from the battery this cable is only six feet long so you
can't just have the batteries you know in some other part of the house it all has to kind of be
together as you can see in their diagrams but if that scenario works for you yeah absolutely
just check it out okay and now the moment of truth let's simulate a power outage the lights
are on everything's on and connected to the grid i'm gonna go turn off that entire service panel
one two three do you notice anything anything flickering
okay so now you look at the app the green arrow representing the grid is turned off which means
we are powering off of the ecoflow batteries so currently both batteries are about 50 charge and
let's see how much energy we can use okay so step one let's do two minutes on the microwave
okay
now we are pulling
1.6 kilowatts let's turn this on this is a little air fryer similar levels of power consumption
so now that's running we should be around three kilowatts now we are there's three kilowatts okay
here's a space heater which is probably about one kilowatt turn that on
and yep there's 3.8 kilowatts that'll speed up a little bit more no there it is 4.3
so 4 300 watts now that we're using here is a industrial size heat gun i'll put that on high
which gets us to
where are we at there we go 5.8 so it takes like five or six seconds
to update the numbers sometimes depending on your internet connection possibly
so now we're at 5.8 kilowatts finally a shopvac
and with all that running we're at 6.8 kilowatts so 6800 watts which is close to the limit
but still under their max capacity and at this rate we would be out of energy in 29 minutes with
those batteries well that's pretty cool right if you have a big air conditioner or big power tools
you could run it all on those 10 circuits with this ecoflow battery
okay so now maybe we'll do a transition to grid back on i'll turn the grid back on now
okay grid's back on and seamlessly turn back and even though the grid is on i have it programmed i
can't even you can't even hear me so even when the grid came back on the batteries were still
powering everything because i have a program right here that says between midnight and
11 p.m basically all day power the house so what i would do in the future is change that to say
charge for example at midnight and stay charged and stand by and then run from four to nine pm
when energy prices are higher but all that is up to you you can program it to whatever you like
and have a charge or discharge for your own personal needs and of course i have a power
outage mode where no matter what's happening the power goes out 20 milliseconds which is really
fast even faster than my power wall the power wall typically had a little bit of a light flicker uh
if i remember correctly in my previous house this was even better than that all right so now
we've seen how it jumps in in 20 milliseconds when the power goes out and powers your house
this is super awesome but we're not done yet this is only actually part of the puzzle because as i
mentioned up next in the future video subscribe and stay tuned we're going to build an entire
enclosure out here to house all the batteries and second we need to add solar because as cool
as this is currently it's just battery backup or energy arbitrage right if you have cheaper
prices at times of the day charge these at cheap times and power your house when it's expensive
that's pretty cool but for us i want to have full solar coverage so the smart home panel doesn't
really involve solar but your batteries can so each delta pro has a 1600 watt solar input direct
current input from the panels so what i want to do i got the panels ready i've been dying
to do this so in a future episode we're going to clean up our roof put the roof racking hardware
and install solar and feed it directly into the batteries that way all day they're charging from
the sun and powering the house and we can go completely 100 percent off grid so yes we still
have the main house to deal with and i'm not sure what i'm going to do there just yet but thanks
to ecoflow and the smart home panel our office is officially going to be able to be off grid when we
finish off this project what are you doing you already fix the office and things dad's job is
never done you know that come here let me tell you about the internet the software all right so
i've been playing the software for a couple days now it's um there's a lot to it i'm still kind
of figuring out all the interfaces and stuff but here's a general overview it shows you the grid
right and it shows you the house consumption right now we're using about 280 watts which means that
refrigerator is turned on i know that and we're feeding it from one eco flow delta pro battery
so the reason why it's feeding the house and not the grid right now we're totally off grid
the reason is because of this rule here so if i were to turn it off let's see what happens so
this rule says that between midnight and 11 10 at night power the house it was just for
testing right but i can turn it off here let's see what happens if i turn it off i heard a relay
just turn off and now we're pulling from the grid cool so this is where i mentioned the time of use
plans if you have energy arbitrage options program this to say okay add a new rule if you know from
from this date of that day every day less at a time from midnight to
six a.m here in san diego that's our time then recharge delta pro right port one and two
and you can set the charge speed and the charge level that's pretty cool so i can say okay
charge at 1800 watts and charge it to 90 because if you don't want to run it to 100. cool and
then i hit save please for the start date right the start date will be today and the end date
i don't know why i can't just do like forever but all right a couple years into the future
and i hit save so now my batteries are charged from midnight to 6 a.m which is when the energy
prices are cheapest then i could say 4 to 9 pm power the house but that's not actually what
i'm going to do because my goal is net zero which is the more i think about it kind of crazy i want
to go all the way so these batteries are going to power the house the entire day while the sun
is shining they'll charge all the way up and then they'll just run slowly all the way until the next
time the sun comes back out and i'll share with you if i'm able to do that but with 3200 watts
of input between the two batteries from solar and all the sunshine that we get i think we just
might although we do have some trees and some shade later in the day we'll find out but we'll
share that with you so that's a quick look at the software we're going to do a more in-depth review
later this is kind of our first take in installing it i still need more time to play with it and see
how it all handles but color me impressed i think this is a really great option if you're the right
kind of person as i mentioned the modularity and the ability to expand over time as your needs grow
this might just be something for you guys to check out and take a look at we'll have a full
write-up installation steps all that stuff on our website which will be linked below thank
you guys so much for watching i'm ricky youtube davinci and we'll catch you guys on the next one