hey everybody sam here and angela and welcome to our channel so we've reached the point of
our off-grid electrical journey for those of us who are following this will be i think the third
video of the series part one we built the wooden solar ground mount array part two we mounted the
panels to the wooden solar ground mount array and now part three we're juicing everything
up and telling you guys how we are juicing it up and how the juicing up goes let's go
to start this story we're gonna have to go back in time to this morning
it is the morning and with our power situation right now we run our generator throughout the
night it is able to run about 20 hours on one tank of gas which is really awesome
the reason we run our generator overnight is that we have some appliances inside the
camper that need to run all night we have the heated water hose for our camper since
it is the dead of winter but that needs to run overnight and otherwise we would
deplete the blue yeti and not be able to use solar at night so we'll go walk over here you
guys come with me turn the generator off kind of let you see that situation and then we'll
talk about the power situation as a whole and everything all the components and all that stuff
so the generator is an inverter generator so it is super quiet
which is really really nice the last thing we want to hear and especially the neighbors want
to hear is that thing going all the time and i want to say that it's around 50 decibels at
running what you heard now was its baseline which is you know very minimal power usage
obviously as we like fire up the toaster oven or the microwave or something it will rev up
to meet the electrical demands but usually it's pretty quiet so that's nice all right i'm going
to switch everything over from the generator to the blue yeti so we can run off the solar
this is the cord for our water hose heater we don't need that right now this is the
main camper power so we transition from the generator into the carport to the blue yeti
so we'll go ahead and plug up the camper we have this little adapter here this
adapter converts it from the camper plug to a regular house style plug
so it goes in there and then we turn the ac on
that kicks on the inverter and is now powering the camper as i look the camper is currently using 347
watts and the solar array right now at 10 o'clock in the morning is producing 560 watts so very cool
over here on this side is the solar input we've got a string of cables this is the core that comes
with the blue yeti and it's got an adapter this comes with the blue yeti and then where it stops
is here these are your mc4 connectors these are specific to solar connections they're waterproof
and they are positive and negative color indicated from here these are 50 foot long 10 gauge wires
they run from here in the carport out to the solar array so we'll go out there and i'll talk just
a little bit about how they're wired together to give us the power we need for this setup right now
so welcome to our solar array if you have not seen this build there's two videos on it there's a link
to those down below we have four panels right now and these are rated at 270 watts brand new
these are old commercial off lease panels we bought them used so they put out i want to say
around 225 watts so still perfectly fine it's very cheap to buy them used i think we paid a quarter
per watt so that was a great deal i'll put a link to the company where we got these from down
below as well so right now we have four panels and the way that blue yeti can handle voltage
i'm able to run these four in series what that means is each panel has a positive and negative
so i hook the positive to the negative positive to the negative positive to the negative pretty
much creating one big loop from this whole four panels turning them into one giant solar panel
what i'm left with in the end is one positive and one negative wire coming out of this jumbled mess
and i've not cleaned the wires up yet so they will get cleaned up don't worry so from here it runs
into the carport to the blue yeti and that is our solar array now the reason i chose to do these in
series is because i wanted to have as much wattage going from here to the blue yeti as possible
while still maintaining being within the voltage range that the blue yeti can handle every solar
array is very unique and very specific to the components that's connected to it so don't take
for granted that you can connect four panels in series and work great for your system you've got
to check the voltages of each panel multiply them figure out how much it's going to push to your
unit your blue yeti or whatever the box you have and if that box can handle that voltage so that
being said it's very specific and unique to our setup but this is working well for us so far
it is now two o'clock in the afternoon our panels are in full sun so let's go on in the carport here
and see exactly how much power we are bringing in from our solar array and pumping into blue yeti
uh oh we have a fault what's the fault
adapter over current oh no too much power whoops okay so we are over paneling the blue yeti
and we are overloading it on solar power solar electricity says and blue yeti says no so this is
a good showing or a good example of what happens when you overload a blue yeti it'll actually just
stop the allowing of energy coming in and it won't fry itself so very cool it's got built-in faults
the ac side is still pumping out juice to the camper we're currently using 84 watts so not
much but then again we're not really doing much in there right now anyway so cool so what's cool
about the blue yeti is that even though we are over paneling it right now and we are pumping
too much juice to it as the sun moves it gets lower and we don't produce as much electricity
it'll automatically pick up and allow it to come back within range and then start pumping juice
to it to charge the batteries so that's pretty cool however that being said i don't like that
we're over paneling it and we're causing faults so i'm probably going to take one of those panels out
of the mix to take one of the panels out of the mix it's as easy as disconnecting the two wires
that come out of it so we'll pick on this one just take these out of the loop and then connect
the ends that are then free plug it back into the blue yeti and you've successfully removed a panel
from your series and brought yourself back into proper voltage so you don't upset mr blue yeti
all right cool that fixed it blue yeti's happy the battery's at 100 so it's not going to show
any kind of power coming in from the solar array but that's because the battery's charged and it
doesn't need to do anything else with it i did check the voltage is down to 104 so
that's well within the working range and so we should be good now so that was bad on us
to juice up blue eddie that much but at least it shows you guys the real life how it shuts down
saves itself from catastrophic failure and how to fix it when you have a solar array like this
welcome back now we get to have a little um tell we had the show now we have the tail
so what are your thoughts as far as our off-grid power setup how's it working what are the problems
what are the great things about it so far i have been actually really shocked i'm somebody that has
known nothing not literally shocked no no no no one's been shocked yet anyway shut up sam i have
been totally shocked because i know like close to nothing about solar other than wow it's magic so
i was afraid that i wouldn't be able to run my vacuum cleaner that i couldn't use the toaster
or the microwave and i've been shown wrong that you can use all of those things and some even at
the same time and it's not a big deal and we have so much sun out here that you know at least on the
bright sunny days it like keeps up with it really well yeah totally totally as you guys saw earlier
we had to take a panel out of the loop of the series because we were juicing up eddie too
much that's what we call the blue yeti his name is eddie so it's pretty cool that we have the
capability run solar and our generator i have to say out of truthfulness this video uh what we've
had the gender for a month i believe probably that generator knock on wood thank goodness has
been perfect no hiccups no issues i mean we got it out of the box and okay well there was one little
tweak that i knew was gonna happen anyway outside of that so we did buy the generator and that was
expensive cost for us i want to say is around 900 but kind of along the lines of buy once cry once
and it's well worth it it's been great and i don't regret investing in that
um for those of you who are like oh my gosh why didn't you just get your temporary power pole
it was going to be more expensive we were looking at 1500 or more in order to do a temporary power
pole which we wouldn't benefit from in the future because we would have to then get our regular
power pole for our home so this is something that we can use if we have power outages or anything
like that it has more than one purpose definitely also adding to that that the power company
out here did not like the idea of us getting a temporary power pole they said yeah you can do
it it's really not designed for what you guys are doing it's really more construction blah blah blah
so honestly if we could somehow set up an off-grid system and not have to hook to the grid although i
think we will anyway with the house but if we can have as much off-grid generation of power
that would be awesome in my book it would i agree one more level of being self-sufficient
and not relying upon something so you don't have to worry about power outages that way
right or if you do you know exactly who to reach and fix the power outage don't you yep
as far as limiting factors of our system by far it is the battery capacity blue yeti only has a 2
000 watt hour battery which means that we can pull 2000 watts out of it for one hour and they're done
so that is probably the biggest limiting factor we're able to run throughout the day
completely on solar because we rarely well rarely have to pull or use more power than it's
generating from the array when it's sunny i mean yeah there's a lot of causes to that one i guess
so even though our batteries are limiting factor it still works really well for our setup
and i think probably anyone else in our shoes could be able to run off of this fine i mean
between the generator and the blue yeti we've got all the power we need plus more well guys thanks
for coming along as we showed you our solar setup how we use it and how we kind of go off
grid with our camper if you have any questions or comments below leave them for sam because i
don't know this stuff and otherwise we'll see you guys next time on one of the homesteads see ya bye
right yeah we did buy that generator and
what am i saying what is this i don't know you're excited well i am
construction blah blah blah so it's fun honestly if we could come how we come out dang it okay
that you ask and then i'll try and answer um
and then i go blank wanna try it again i guess okay
well guys thanks for watching us well okay thanks for coming along as we showed you
okay well guys thanks for coming along as we showed you our solar
you