What do I need to build my own solar power system?
So a big problem with solar power systems is that you actually have to build it and if you screw it up, your system could catch on fire and burn your house down. So today we’re, going to talk about an integrated, all-in-one solar power system in a box.
So this has the inverter the charge controller, the AC charger, the automatic transfer switch. The circuit breaker is all the wiring. It’s all in one package, so all you have to do is connect some solar panels and a battery and then connect an AC extension cord so that you can power your AC loads and connect to grid.
If you wish – and you’re done, this will do everything and it’s, also cheaper than if you were to buy the system. Components individually and the entire system should only take about an hour to install.
It is very easy and you can also buy these cables prefabricated on my website. So literally it’s, a positive and a negative going from the battery to here and then a positive and negative from your solar panels going into here.
The hardest part of this system is cutting and stripping an extension cord, but you can buy this at Home Depot or any other store, and I’m going to teach you how to do that. First, you want to mount it to a wooden board.
This is a wooden board and I painted it white and you have two screws on the very top. There are no mounting brackets on the bottom and that’s, one of the downsides of these units. But if you do not like that, you can put VHB tape on the bottom or put a strap across that shouldn’t, take more than a couple minutes, just screw it into a piece of wood.
Now what we want to do is take the screws out of the bottom cover and when you remove this cover, you will have battery terminals. There’s, a negative and a positive, and then we have the solar panel inputs negative and positive, and then on this side we have the AC input in the output.
So first take your negative wire and unscrew the terminal screw and then put it through the hole and then repeat the same process for the positive or the red water, and that said, our battery cables are now installed.
Now we want to focus our attention to the AC input terminals. We have the AC input on the top these three in the AC output or the inverter output down here, and so what we need to do is attach these extension cords with ICI wires to these EC input terminals and on the metal.
You will see a ground and L in an in and so on, our wire. We have a ground which is green L, which is black and then a white which is in so. What we want to do is shove these wires into these terminals after we strip them and then screw the terminal down with a screwdriver, and so for this part, you’re gonna need to buy a wire stripper, and if you buy an extension Cord you’re gonna have a male and a female, and the female will connect to the AC output and that’s on bottom.
So this one needs to connect on bottom to the EC output and we’re. Going to start with the ground wire now the neutral wire and then screw it down – and this looks really good. But we need to strengthen this joint because this wire or cable could be yanked out.
So what you want to use these little wire cable clips and mount it to the piece of wood? Now we need to add a male prong, AC extension cord to this AC input on top and look at that. That is so easy and just a quick safety reminder if you were to switch these, this could shock you, so you do not want to switch these plugs.
This one goes to the inverter or the AC output, and this one goes to the AC input very, very important. Now that we have the AC power cables and the battery cables. We’re, going to attach the battery first and because this is a battleborn, it has its own over current protection.
If this was a lead acid, you would have to add a fuse to the positive, but we don’t have to so. We’re gonna attach these bare wires directly to the positive and the negative terminals of the battery, because this is a battle born.
It comes with these half-inch studs and you have to use half-inch wrenches to tighten them. So super simple procedure. Just stick it in there and tighten it down and after you connect the battery just turn it on with the power switch.
Oh god, I hate that noise. They make the horse noises for the startup geez. If you look at the screen, it’s. Pretty self-explanatory, so we have input AC and that’s where your Shore power or grid power.
When it’s connected, it will show 120 volts, for example, on the output. This is what your inverter is producing with battery power. Now, if you want to see more system stats, you need to press the down arrow and so on this side you’ll, see 0 Hertz because we’re, still not connected to AC at the input.
If you press it again, it will say PV and that’s, how much volts your solar panels are producing if you press it down again, it’ll show the battery voltage, so my bow born right now is at 13 volts. If you press down again it’ll show you the Hertz at the output of your inverter and 60.
Hertz is what we want. If you press it again, it will show you the percent load. So if I am using only 50 % of the max rated capacity Watt wise of this inverter, it will show 50 % and if I am approaching 100 % – and they cannot power it, it will switch it over to the grid’s power and Then battery is how many amps it’s using right now, right now it’s just doing standby, so it’s only using one amp, the standby aisle consumption of this inverter is 14 point 4 watts.
So this is very consistent with those numbers and if you want to change any of the settings hold down the inter button and then press the down arrow and then at 0 1. You can change the setting by pressing enter and then this will flush, and this is solar or utility priority.
I absolutely recommend people reading the manual and figuring out what you need for your application. I will also have some example: settings that you guys can copy that. Will make most people happy on my website, so please check this out, but there are lots of settings in here.
You can do everything on this little tiny screen. Now that we have the basics, let’s. Add some solar panels to this system, but when you connect your own solar panels to these terminals, you need to ensure that the open circuit voltage is not exceeded.
So for this one it’s 145 volts. So if you have like 4 100 watt solar panels in series, you can connect those directly to here. It will have an open circuit of like 80 to 84 volts and that’s well within the safety range.
I would keep it under. Like 85 volts to be on the safe side, and as long as you do not exceed that max solar input voltage limit and you also do not use more than 500 watts of solar panels. You can connect whatever solar panels you want into here and so for me, I’m, going to use this xt60 connector that I fabricated to connect these two 100 watt panels in series, and then we’re, going to have a positive And a negative that we can connect to this input terminal, and now you can just push them down like this and it’s.
Also a smart idea to secure these solar panel wires. So it doesn’t, get yanked off and you will not damage these input terminals. Now that those wires connected, we can hook up some solar panels, and now we have some sunshine the next day and we have 35 volts coming from the solar panels.
So one amp coming in and that is 33 watts and at 12 volts that’s like 2 amps. So you can see a little solar panel depiction is charging up our battery and it’s powering our AC loads. And now we’re going to test if this inverter works so take the female plug and plug in an appliance and turn it on.
So you look at that now on the screen. It says that we’re using 48 watts. We can turn it up now. We’re using 655 watts and if you want to use grid power, just connect this to any wall outlet you just plug it in just make sure that you use a cable that’s long enough to reach your AC outlet.
I made this one really short is an example but yeah. I would make it a lot longer if I was building this for my home system. Now everything’s wired up and we can replace this faceplate. This is actually the hardest part.
This is so hard to hold it here and then find the little screw thing now we’re gonna do a cool test. We have grid power connected and if the AC input it says that we have 113 volts and 60 Hertz and we’re gonna connect a 1500 watt heat gun to this inverter.
This inverter can only handle 800 watts. So when this is overloaded in it senses that this is using too much power, it will switch this over to the grid power so check this out. We have it on the full heat setting.
We’re gonna turn it on to and right now we can power this, but if you turn it on full blast, it just switched over to grid power and you can see the AC wave sign and there’s a bypass On the screen to power our load, so now our loads are not powered off of solar or the battery is powered only with the grid, and you can also change the settings so that when this battery reaches a certain voltage because it’s low, It will switch everything over to the grid power.
It’s, a very useful setting. If you have this thing connected to grid and this system will not feed back into the grid, it’s, only a transfer switch, so it will only switch between one source or another.
It will not push power back into the grid. So you don’t have to worry about permits or anything else. How cool is this guys? We have a full solar power system if you want to make the battery bigger, add more batteries and connect them in parallel.
So that means add positive to a positive of another battery and negative to a negative of another battery, so just buy some battery cables and add as many batteries as you would like. Also, I’m gonna have some settings on my website because I wanted to show in this video how to do it.
But it would take like an hour for me to explain every single setting. So I’m gonna. Have some example settings and a manual on my website so check that out? If you want to learn more about doing that, if you want to build a bigger system there’s, also a 24 volt version, so you would take to battle borns connect them in series and then connect it to the 24 volt version that one Has a 2400 watt inverter and it’s actually right over here, so check it out.
This thing is huge. This thing is extremely powerful, but what’s, so cool? Is that you program it the same as you would this little tiny, 12-volt one, this one has a huge 80 amp MPPT and is a huge AC charger so check this out.
If you want to build a bigger system, it’s just as easy to mount and install as this one, but it can handle a lot more power and that’s, pretty much it guys. Please. Let me know if this video helped. You it was super fun building this, and I think this will make a lot of people happy so yeah I’ll.
Talk to you guys later fight
