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
in today's video I'm going to show you this 2000 watt solar install I recently did on my RV and also show you how it's powered this new design 200 watt flexible solar panel was recently released a few months ago from renegi this is a newer design from their 175 watt panel it's been very popular the new one now uses half cut cells and nine bus bars which this is pretty much the same technology that you'll see in the same residential panels that we have in our shop that is installed on homes and businesses and more the older 175 watt panel had plastic beads that helped absorb light the new panel does have the same plastic beads in it but not quite as prominent as the older one the new panel comes in at three times the thickness which does make it a little bit more rigid and should make it more durable now before installing any of these solar panels I pulled out all 10 to make sure that none of them were damaged to make sure that the cords and connectors were good and to make sure that the open circuit voltage was relatively close between all 10 of these solar panels now after doing an alcohol prep I used 3M VHB double sticky tape this allowed me to Mount the solar panels to the roof of my RV very easy I also did each one a little bit differently depending on the slope of the roof this would allow any drainage of water that collected and also air to be able to get underneath the panel and I will have a link of this down in the description below now before I mounted the solar panels I washed the whole roof of my RV and then I brought up one solar panel and made marks along the roof with a pencil to get an idea of where I was going to mount these I also did another prep with alcohol on the roof to get off any last residue that way the 3M double-sided tape could have a good chance to adhere to the roof properly and to make sure that these aren't going to fly off when driving down the road now honestly one of the hardest parts about this was removing the red backing from the double-sided tape sometimes it was hard to get it started to peel off but once you got a little corner started then it would peel off easily but try not to touch the exposed tape this way you don't get any oil residues on it and that way you make sure you get good adhesion and it stays properly mounted on the roof now take your time during this because once you get it mounted it's pretty much not going to come back up I would butt it up against the next panel and then pull it back maybe a quarter inch to leave just a little bit of a gap this would hopefully allow water to run off quickly and not kind of stay pulled between the two panels now when pressing down on these panels just a medium pressure is all you need no pinpoint pressure and do not walk on these this could damage the solar panels causing arcing and causing you major problems down the road so make sure you inspect these every once in a while and do not walk on on my repeat do not walk on solar panels even rigid panels can be damaged okay well wiring right now so now you can see all the panels are down these five right here so we get our one two three and four or five right there those are going to be in series should give me 100 volts roughly at about 20 amps and then we'll have to kind of maneuver this way and then these five right here so there's your one two three four and this five right here I can't add another one there don't have enough room I can add one up there and one in the front maybe I'll do that later I don't know and then this one would join this crew down here for six and then six but again these ones will be in series same voltage and then they parallel in so just got to get everything wired up I'm kind of pre-wiring just to kind of see and plus when you guys are doing this you want to make sure you test your voltages too don't um just assume that everything is still good I've checked them already twice I'll be checking them again but uh because you know you get a bad connector maybe a bad extension that can save you some diagnosing later that way everything's putting out the same when you do both sides and everything's equal and even so I'll do some more wiring and I'll show you here in a minute what it looks like when we're done all right and this is about the finished product now this is about 95 done with any solar system that you put on an RV you sometimes start thinking about things that you would have done differently just because every layout is a little bit different but holding down just most of the solar cords is just going to be your your return of bond type tape and I did try to make it to where everything is still serviceable because you know when you get too much solar in the way servicing anything whether it be roof vents or your AC system and more it can be very difficult with all this in the way so I tried to make it as user friendly as possible so now being only about like I said 95 percent done I still have to change a couple things because I don't like this where my roof Inlet is I'm going to be taking that one off I'm going to turn it sideways because with your parallel connectors because I do have this running in two different series um I couldn't run through the actual roof mount so I ended up coming out here I still got to add my fuse real quick this was kind of like a a quick setup but I do have also a breaker downstairs as well with them being paralleled in again with those connectors it's a little bit of a pain in the butt but I'm also going to be adding another roof Inlet for one panel that'll go here because or it could go there but more likely here because this is going to be for the stock a system that's already on board this stock system from gopower was a pull Swift modulation so this is kind of older technology and this can't handle very much solar but this is what charged the house batteries so I am going to be adding one panel to this I'll bring this back online because as the solar wires came through they came in and then came out so I had to butt splice The Originals together get them to pass through and continue on but I'll add another one bring this back online to charge the house batteries and then those solar panels up there are doing something different now the wires come in right up there they go into my 30 amp disconnect that way you have a service disconnect so you can obviously service everything this was kind of a trial run that I was doing and I'll show you guys here kind of more of the results after I get some full sunlight but this is coming in to run a power station set up like this Delta Pro and you can also add extra batteries which I'm playing with this right now but what's cool is that this is a plug and play feature so this makes it really easy for other people to just do an off-grid system you can hook up a lot of solar panels plug it into this then I have my generator Inlet cord which is plugged in right here and then that's the extra but it's Plug and Play you don't have to do a lot of crazy wiring which you kind of see here this is pretty excessive and can get real expensive very complicated and confusing versus once you go with like a Delta Pro or other types of battery stations that are coming out power stations anyway it makes it so much simpler to do these off-grids but I'll show you guys some numbers here now so far the installation has been great and nothing has moved I have about 600 miles already on this solar system and I've driven out up to speeds of 70. now depending on how you park is going to affect the amount of input you get as you see the shading there from the AC unit would only allow me sometimes certain Peak numbers most of the time I would see 1350 to 1400 depending and a peak of about 1550 because of the power station only allows so much but it did allow me to charge the ecoflow Delta Pro and just a little bit over two and a half hours and I was able to charge up the extra battery as well run my front AC unit continuously and also with extra battery power and more I didn't even use my generator except for once just to turn it on I ended up using the Wave 2 during the evening this is a new heater in AC unit from ecoflue as well and it actually worked remarkably well because it is very efficient the temperature right now with this little one is over 82 degrees because it's right next to the sun on the wall but if you look down here about where your head is it's only 73 which is actually a nice temperature the other side of the wall was about 79 degrees but I was able to cool the front bedroom down into the 60s I ran the refrigerator on AC during the day and just before bed I would turn it on the gas and then use the wave two to keep cool at night now I did experiment with my main AC unit as you can see by the Numbers here I had my refrigerator running on AC I also had the converter on as well and so that would draw 500 watts of power right there now I don't recommend utilizing your converter that just draws a lot of power but once you see the AC unit come on in the main room which this one is not efficient at all and draws about 1600 Watts you can see I'm using too much power for the solar to keep up now if I turned off the converter and turned off the AC on the refrigerator this would allow me to pretty much break even at least on this unit as the AC that I have on mine is a 15K unit and it's not actually as efficient as some of the other RVs that have had that would only use about 1400 or so of power depending on the unit okay so I wanted to show you guys the numbers here so if you take a look at my phone right now so you can see this is pulling in about 1350 1400 Watts the most I've seen is 15.50 and that will depend on how much the ecoflow Delta Pro will allow because it's limited to 1500 watts and 15 amps but the way I have my solar wiring um you know coming from here and Up on the Roof we're at about a little over 100 volts is registering about 105 107 sometimes and 20 amps well it's about 17 or so once it's loaded and the most I ever get out of this so far that I've seen is is about 1550 because that's all that'll allow to pump in really but right now you can see the AC in my RV is is going right now so with the EC on using about 1600 Watts I'm only pulling in less than 1400 that's the main AC unit now if I was using my front AC unit it only Burns about maybe 1100 or a little bit less uh so but depending on how you are angled to the Sun and everything um you know that's about as much as I'll get if I had something that could hold more power technically after measuring this I should be getting like 1750 ish uh but that's about all that will allow so uh and if we take a look up here I was using this for a test uh just with the batteries and stuff that that's a really nice unit there if you I like victron stuff a lot there's no denying they make really good stuff but again I didn't want to go through all the wiring and everything when ecoflow has this there's a lot of other units that are coming out I'm also probably going to be doing something different here in the future that you guys will see but um so I have eight gauge wire that just comes in there it goes into the 10 gauge there which I had to make a connector there and I can't use eight gauge because that connector just kind of won't allow it so I had to make my own and trying to fit an 8 gauge wire just doesn't really work too well so and then I have some more cleaning up up here I gotta do and a few other things I got to change I also added a fan up there which I plan to change that one out that's an old boat fan it's just you know basically for the bilge area when you exhaust the fumes out right so that's a leftover from a project that I had um or I was working on a customer's boat or something at the time and it's just been kind of sitting in a box so I use that which goes down there to a remote switch oh [Music] and so then I can exhaust the fumes out or I mean not the fumes thinking about boots again but I can exhaust the hot air out that'll come in fresh air from there or fresh air from over there and then you can see the hose it pumps it down and out which it'll come out from underneath the trailer and it kept the um the whole unit relatively at a good temperature I think it stated 97 98 the whole time so never really got that hot at all when I had the extra battery out there as well so that's kind of what this looks like and again if I had something that could accept a higher wattage in then that's when you would see probably the 1750 Peak ish give or take and also with a having 2 000 Watts up there at least you know I'm able to maintain higher numbers like right now I'm at 13 you know 1370 roughly but I can stay there the whole time it doesn't really drop much so um or it'll pump in more so overall the system is doing really well at least for what I needed to do and whenever you have solar it's it's better to have more than not enough because when you run into shadier conditions that's when having more solar is definitely better okay now overall the installation on this was really easy that's one thing that's nice about flexible solar panels is that it took me just a little bit over four hours to lay down the panels stick them on and even doing almost all of the wiring was about four to four and a half hours give or take and I did do some prep because of the washing of the roof and then of course you know a little bit of alcohol but once the panels started going on that's what's nice about flexible panels is that it's quick and easy now why did I go with flexible solar panels just like you guys you're probably wondering how come I didn't go with something more rigid like a 200 watt panel or maybe a larger residential panel that's maybe 300 to 400 watts well like other people out there I do not like drilling holes in my RV roof if I don't have to and I don't like adding a maintenance item so I didn't want to add any more maintenance to my roof like drilling holes into it and then adding sealants and having to check on the ceilings and the possibility ability of the panels coming loose the original stock panel the screws weren't even tight and so I didn't actually like that but there's a lot of different rigid panels you can get out there whether it's a 200 watt from renergy they have a new one as well and they also have a lot of residential panels that you can buy and pick up in certain places and I have access to a lot of those all over the place but I didn't have enough room to throw up the residential panels that I have here these are 335 watts and they're LG panels they're really nice but I could only get three of them up on my roof and so then I'd only be limited to about a little over a thousand watts versus with a smaller panel like these flexible ones you can put them all over the place and more now what about as far as you know some of the rumors or things that you've seen as far as the flexible panels burning up well I did a lot of research on this for over a year on whether I wanted to go with flexible panels and I have seen just as many rigid panels burn up whether it's from a known brand or not just the same thing with some of those flexible panels that you've also seen burn up as well those are from not the renegie 175 watt panels that I could find anywhere and since these new 200 watt panels are they've only been out for a few months there's not really any data on them yet so that's what we're hopefully going to collect over six months and then one year and see how well they hold up now one thing I did do is that I added a little bit of protection to my roof and to the panels as well I've been using this product for years on everything and I've always had good luck with it whenever I buy and sell like whether it was my boat or if I was buying and selling my old trailer I put 303 on almost everything it's a great product it helps prevent UV damage and more so that's why I continue to use this and I'm hoping this will extend the life of not only the cables up there from getting you know UV damaged and also the panels as well but it also protects your roof and is something you should probably do at least twice a year now when it came to wiring up the solar system it was actually super simple I was able to get these extension kits from renegies so they help Supply the project um so these are 40 foot and what's nice about getting the longer ones is that instead of buying a whole bunch of different lengths if you buy maybe just a couple of the long ones then you can custom cut and splice in to get more of exact size you need that way you don't have tons of excess cable and then you can use the excess length of these ones and build your own custom link to everything that you need and so then you would just take a solar kit like this I think renergy has them but this one from bourge RV is actually it's a easy kit it's super simple it's thirty dollars it already has a whole bunch of connectors that will be in it I've already used all mine up but I'll have a link down below that way you guys can check this out along with everything else in the video I'll make sure I put links down down there that way you guys can check it out to see if any of this stuff is stuff you want to use um but it makes it a lot easier just having I think custom cable links that we don't have a lot of excess slack everywhere kind of makes it look messy but they also have fuses you can buy at renergy they also have all the parallel adapters as well and other things and again I'll have lists and links down below of all this stuff but so far I've been super impressed with this because of the ease of installation it's working really good I need to get a bigger um Power Station that can handle more solar input because right now again I am limited but so again if you're wondering about the rigid versus flexible panel as well that really comes up to you whether what you want to do I guess as far as the build that you're doing because everybody's RV needs are going to be different everybody's RV build is going to be different and this allows me to have a little bit more versatility on what I want to do by utilizing almost two systems by using the big system for power stations testing other things and to bring you guys some more videos on other off-grid situations that might work for you better because there are some other power stations and kits that I'm going to be testing here pretty soon so that's why I kind of went this route because it allows me to have more flexibility in what I want to do but let me know what you guys think down in the comments if this is something you would do or you in the flexible panels or absolutely not I'm definitely curious to know and I hope you guys like the video make sure to subscribe and I hope to see you guys next time ...
No hay comentarios