Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here If you want to learn about Solar...
Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here
If you want to learn about Solar Panels, to advise you before buying or to build your own Solar Panel: Click Here
hey guys welcome back to the channel i'm courtney and i'm riley and we are on our 20-acre off-grid homestead in north idaho it's been a few months since we installed this off-grid system and we want to take the opportunity to talk to you guys about all of your most asked questions today we're going to cover why we did what we did how much it cost and would we do it again our system is about 60 kw of lithium batteries 10 kw of solar and 20 kw of total inverter output so i think we're just going to walk through the system in the order that we did the install and that means that we are going to start with our shipping container i did not choose the right shoes for this coming down over here the first question that we've gotten a lot is why did we choose to use a shipping container and so for us the building season up here in north idaho is so short there are so many projects that we wanted to get done this summer and we didn't want to dedicate a whole month into building a shed or a structure to house everything so by using the shipping container it meant that in one day we could have it delivered and another day we could do the excavation and by the third day it was in place the second question we got was why did we bury it honestly i think it was kind of just an idea that snowballed one night when we were talking about it but we liked the idea that maybe we could get some geothermal properties from the hillside by doing that so we're hoping that by burying our container into the hillside in winter the warmth from the ground will keep the container warmer and hopefully by keeping the container a little bit warmer and insulating it it will prevent our batteries from getting too cold because if they get too cold in winter they won't charge we don't know if this is going to work it seemed like a good idea but we'll make sure to let you know how it actually works out we also like that it kind of hides it and sinks it down in makes it a little bit lower profile so that it's not this giant thing on the hill and also we just thought it would be fun so to save some money we did purchase a used shipping container so we spent 3 900 for a 20-foot shipping container delivered to our property well kind of delivered but he decided he doesn't want to bring the trailer any further so i think we're going to unload our shipping container in the middle of the road we also spent 130 on paint 42 on our waterproofing membrane that we painted on this back wall and 38 on a perforated drain pipe we also chose to build out the inside of the container to house all of our systems and so that cost for framing insulation and studs was six hundred and fifty dollars so that means that the total cost for our basically our shell that houses our system is four thousand seven hundred and sixty four dollars so with the container installed it was time to figure out the racking for the panels i did a ton of research on some of the commercially available racking solutions and they were really expensive and had a long lead time so we decided to take the project on ourselves and make our own racking another bonus of making our own racking system was that we could make it however we wanted and i wanted to make a tilting array system that could maximize the solar panels we have a summer tilt and a winter tilt one of the big benefits of the winter tilt is it should allow these panels to shed snow more easily building the racking system on top of the container allowed us to use the container as the foundation system for the racking and eliminate some cost and some steps where we live is beautiful and of course covering up this entire hillside with solar equipment would kind of destroy the beauty building the solar racking system on top of the container allowed us to minimize the the footprint of the entire system so that it wouldn't take up this entire hill it also allowed us to take advantage of the structure of the container as the foundation system for the racking and minimize some of the costs there a bonus that i didn't even really think about is that the solar panels shade the container and help keep it cooler during the summer time we've had a lot of questions about concerns with wind loading on this array and the way we installed this container and i've had the same concerns i've run some wind calcs and i'm not worried at all about wind from the south but with a big enough wind storm from the north we could have some damage i think our plan is to add some heavy guy wires that anchor the container back into the hillside to keep it from being able to get blown off the hill we spent 1 901 on the structural steel items for the racking 593 dollars on the cross rails 58 bucks on some hinges and hardware and finally 32 dollars on the winch that makes the whole assembly tilt which makes the grand total for the racking that holds our solar panels 2829 dollars we installed 24 of these solar panels from san tan solar they are 445 watt bifacial solar panels which means that they actually capture light from the front and the back we're really hoping that in winter this helps absorb some heat and melt the snow off of the panels the other thing that should really help shed the snow is our tilting array because we'll be able to get them in that really steep winter angle to again get the snow to hopefully slide off of them because i don't really want to have to climb them up here to sweep them this may seem like a huge solar array and for summer it is it's not even noon and our batteries are almost at 100 but living as far north as we do we really needed to think about our system in winter because we have such limited daylight so we're really hoping by having this large of an array in winter even with our limited daylight and cloud cover we're still able to capture enough energy to minimize the amount of time that we need to run a generator santan solar is a solar wholesaler we loved this because these panels are a killer deal right now at 230 dollars each the total cost for 24 of these panels was 5 520 now it's time to go check out the brains of the operation all right so here's the basic rundown of this system we have 12 of these 5 kilowatt hour lithium batteries which gets us a total usable battery storage capacity of 60 kilowatt hours we have two 10 000 watt inverters that combine to get us a 240 volt split phase output we also have two of these 100 amp charge controllers for the solar panels so why do we have this giant system so this system actually powers both our apartment and our future workshop coordinates passion is in building stuff we have lots of equipment welders power tools and we wanted a system that was going to be big enough to not limit our ability to make stuff this system can not only power our full apartment including air conditioning but it can also power all of our welders and air compressors all at the same time there are a lot of battery options out there and ultimately we decided to go with these sok batteries from current connected they're a great value they're compact they're serviceable and current connected provides great customer service one of the really cool things about these batteries and this victron equipment is that it's all really scalable we could have started with just one rack of batteries one inverter and one charge controller and then easily added more on in the future and the same thing goes if we find that this equipment isn't enough for our needs we can continue adding more batteries more inverters and more charge controllers until we end up where we need to be one of the most asked questions in the comments about this system was what we expect the lifespan to be all of this stuff comes with a 10-year warranty but we expect it to last at least 20 years if not closer to 30. these batteries have a 4 000 cycle to 80 capacity which means that if we drained them completely dead every single day for the next 10 years they'd still have 80 percent of their usable capacity left on a daily basis we've only been using about 20 of these batteries capacity during the summer time which means that we should expect to see 8 000 charge cycles before they got to that 80 capacity these batteries should easily last us more than 20 years so now it's time to talk about how much this all cost the backbone of this entire system is the batteries so the batteries including the racking and all the cabling required to hook them up cost 22 175 the two inverters cost eight thousand four hundred and forty five dollars the solar charge controllers cost two thousand five hundred ninety two dollars and finally the victron link system the servo communication system and all the cables we needed to make this all work right cost one thousand eight hundred and fifteen dollars and that brings us to the total for all of these components which was thirty five thousand eight hundred forty five dollars so with all that the total cost of our off-grid solar system installed drumroll 50 000 that may seem like a lot of money because it is a lot of money but there were a few factors that we took in consideration that made it the right choice for us when we purchased this property we knew that power was really far away it's actually one of the reasons that we were able to afford to buy this property in the first place so it felt like we were getting a good deal on the property but what it really meant is that we weren't paying for power up front so after about the property we started getting pricing on what it would cost to bring power here and the price that we got just to bring power onto our property was sixty thousand dollars that's a lot of money and so that's when we started looking into what alternative solutions could we do so not only was going off grid cheaper for us it also made us more self-reliant and we don't have a monthly power bill i actually really like the idea of making our own power we're not reliant on the utility we don't have such a thing as power outages you know unless of course i cause them and we get to make all of our own power right here on the property it's not a way of life that i ever thought we would have lived but now that we're living it i don't know that i would want to go back to being reliant on the grid i think that we're going to wrap up this video with the most asked question that we have gotten which is how can we afford this system and i think that that answer is a pretty unique answer for us and it's because of you guys all of this is possible because of your views your likes your comments purchasing things through our affiliate links and i hope that you know that we couldn't do any of this without you so thank you so much for making this happen thanks for watching this video and we'll see you next time we've actually put together a spreadsheet detailing all of the costs of all the components of this system and put it up on our website so if you'd like to download that spreadsheet head 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