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
so you want to DIY your own solar system for your home like we have well today we're going to talk about what you need to get started and how to begin let's get going [Music] so we're going to break this video down into five categories the first one is basic knowledge and research for putting in a solar system the second is making a plan and we're going to break that down into three subcategories the third is your system design and where and how to purchase your equipment the fourth is the actual steps to put your system together and how to do that and then the last category we're going to save for the end so stay tuned okay first things first if you want to do something like this you need to gain some basic knowledge about how a system works and also about working with electricity and along with that and most importantly comes safety but don't be afraid of it because if you use some basic safety and you're careful then doing something like this is not a problem but I will say this throughout the video if you feel you need to hire an electrician to do some of this please do so and along with your research on how to do this you need to understand in your area if you can do it legally so if you live in certain places they may not allow you to put in your own system but it might depend on the type of system too so contained within that research that you are doing you are going to need to understand how much solar that you are going to need and to do that you need to understand how much electricity your house uses now and that includes understanding every single Appliance in your house like this water heater and how much power it uses and that is usually indicated on the appliance itself so you can see our electric dryer here has this tag just on the inside of the door telling us how much it uses if your Appliance doesn't tell you how many watts that it draws it will usually tell you the amperage and the volts so the basic math is amps times volts equals watts and you are going to have to use that formula a lot throughout the entire construction of your solar system and that's really important because when you're connecting your panels together in their strings outside that's the number of panels together you need to understand how how many volts each one of those has so that we can connect them to our inverters because our inverters will only accept a certain amount of voltage from the panels and if you get your voltage too high you're going to damage your inverters and you don't want to do that so our next category is making a plan what type of system do you want to put in your house there are basically three types of systems an off-grid system a hybrid system or a grid tied system in my opinion I wouldn't do a grid tied system because it relies on your current electrical grid and if the grid is out then you don't have any solar in your house either but you can get past that by putting in a hybrid system so when the electrical grid is down you are still up and running because you have battery backup but the one I recommend for all diy-ers is an off-grid system like ours and specifically ours works like a generator so as you can see I still have light it's on we are connected to the grid but I turn the grid off almost all the time and just run the solar system with the flip of a switch second part of making a plan is understanding where your house is located first thing is what latitude are you at because that will determine the angle or the optimum angle of your panels if you don't put in a system that automatically tracks the sun which is really expensive and not a lot of people do it and then the next piece is where is your home physically located on your property if you're going to put your panels on your roof is that roof located in a southerly direction if you live in the Northern Hemisphere if your house is oriented in a way that doesn't have a lot of roof space to the south then it might not be a good idea to put those panels on the roof the last portion of making your plan is your budget when you're figuring out your budget you've already figured out how much electricity your house is using and that's going to determine the size of your solar system and the components that you need but remember with systems like this you can start off smaller and add to them over time the components are scalable which is really nice and that helps a lot with the budget now additionally when planning out your system we need to understand where it needs to go in the house our electrical panel is in an odd place in our house so we couldn't put our solar next to that we constructed this room on the back of our house not only for the solar but for a few other things we needed the extra space to be able to accommodate something like this now don't think you will have to do that but you need to place the equipment in a space in your house that is conditioned these things do run hot and I see a lot of them being put in garages and I'm hoping those garages are conditioned spaces because the operating temperatures of these are very specific as well as the operating temperatures of the batteries so that's something you have to keep in mind when planning out your system and where the actual equipment is going to be so the next section is design and purchase of your actual materials figuring this out and designing it is going to go hand in hand with budgeting a little bit so we have a very basic system and I'm going to go through all the parts and pieces that we have obviously a major component of your solar system are your solar panels so it's capturing the sun's energy there are several different types of panels out there but the best bang for your buck is going to be a monocrystalline panel like we have behind us now you're obviously going to need something to put your panels on and this is our racking system for us we have a ground Mount rack because our house is positioned in a way that won't really allow for solar panels to be useful on it when we bought this racking system lumber prices were out of control they have come down since then so the price is going to be different but you're going to have to do your research on what best fits you and when we're talking about wiring you are going to need some PV wire this wire is rated to be outside and it can actually be buried it is 10 gauge and it comes with these mc4 connectors which is how all of them connect together you'll also need some sort of Splitters depending on how you're setting up your system and in some cases you're going to need what's called a combiner box to combine your strings together and depending on how your system is set up you're going to need some small extension cables for your PV wire now if you have a smaller system you can use something like this we are using this to expand our system but if you just have a few panels at your home this one happens to hold about four to five panels then this might be the option for you I will have a full list of all the parts and pieces in the description below so go check out those links you will need a lot of electrical conduit for your project whether that is the EMT which is the metal conduit or this PVC conduit like we have and the length of the price is going to be completely dependent on where your solar is set up on your home if you have a ground Mount or if it's on the roof it's all going to be for us here we had a run of about 120 feet from our panels and then another 55 feet back to our main panel in our house so behind us are our all-in-one inverters and in addition to the panels they're the most important pieces in the system these are off-grid inverters and they contain within them the inverter and the charger and the mppt now you can buy systems that have the individual components but honestly these are easier and safer to put together because you don't have a lot more exposed wiring and things like that all over the place between the different parts they just have simple connections into the bottom here for your PV which is your photovolta panels the solar panels and your battery and then the line coming out to power your house most also have the ability to take electricity in from the grid to charge your batteries and power your house that way but we don't have that connected some of these all-in-one inverters are called single phase which these are these only produce 120 volts each so if I want to power big loads in my house like the water heater or the stove or the dryer I need 240 volts so I need two of them and the nice thing about these is you can do what's called paralleling so both of those are paralleled together in out of phase from one another and that gives the ability for that 240 volts to be sent to the house and that's called split phase you can buy bigger all-in-one inverters that are split phase and that's just another option for you out there and then of course we have our batteries which power our home when the sun is not out and in my opinion it's important to have a good battery rack like this to hold all of these batteries instead of trying to arrange them on the floor and they are quite heavy as well they're about 100 pounds apiece so having them organized like this is important and in my opinion safer now that we've talked about all the large components we're going to talk about all the smaller stuff that's really important for the the system safety is really important in the system this right here is a PV disconnect switch or a PV isolator and this disconnects our PV lines from our solar panels to our inverters and it's really important to have one or two of these depending on how many strings you have coming in from your panels additionally we have breaker switches that are between our batteries and our inverters that's important when working on the system you always want to isolate different parts and pieces of the system for safety so both of our inverters run into a sub panel with a breaker both panels come into this breaker and then go out to our main panel and yes these should be covered up and they will be shortly when it comes to the wire you are going to need to purchase wire that is appropriate for the size of your inverter so this is two out gauge battery cable positive or negative and positive and they come over to what's called a bus bar so these bus bars combine from my two different battery banks that battery bank and that battery bank and going to the large battery Bank we have some 4 ought cable of course we talked about our PV wires before and those come from our panels outside this is communication wire that comes with the inverter so you don't need to worry about buying that and then you'll need wire for grounding certain parts of your system as well like the case here for the batteries so finding the wire and Breakers can sometimes be a big challenge I've got links to them in the description below that battery cable there is used for welding mostly and that's the best thing that you are going to find to hook your batteries up to your inverters so besides the regular tools like the screwdrivers and the drills that you will need to put a system like this together it is really important to have this this is a clamp meter and this is going to tell you if there is electricity running through certain parts of your system you cannot do this project without this you have to have one and everybody should have one anyway and you want to be constantly testing to see if there's any electricity in the system anywhere especially when you're putting it together and working on it in addition to that some specialty tools are going to be necessary a big pair of wire cutters these work really well for cutting huge battery cable like that and they have been invaluable in this process then a small wire cutter and stripper like this I love this thing some electricians hate it but I really really like it it's very fast and it works really well and then for those big battery cables you're going to need a specialty stripper like this so when you're connecting all this wiring together you're going to need something called a lug or a ring terminal or also a ferrule those parts are going to go on the ends of the wires as they connect the other parts and pieces like the bus bars or into the inverters some of them require tools like this crimping tool so this is a ferrule and it goes on the end of the wire and it actually does require its own specialty tool and then this is what's called a ring terminal or lug and that crimper works with these sometimes you do need a bigger crimper depending on the size of your wire now as you can see behind me this wall surface is different than the rest of the room this is concrete backer board and you are going to need this to mount your equipment to it is fire resistant and it is necessary for this type of equipment so now you've done your research you know what you need for your solar system where are you going to get it for us at the time we purchased our original system it was important for us to save money so I searched out a local supply house and that company signature solar is about an hour and a half give or take from my house so when I needed to pick up the equipment I could drive up there and get it myself and unbeknownst to me signature solar ended up being more than just a supply house they had their own in-house design team so they can help you with any questions that you have about what you need for your system and when I went there originally just to pick up my panels I was armed with a list of 20 questions for them about the design of my system and they helped me out with every single one of them I will leave a link to their company in the description below as well as the links to the individual components that I got from them so the second to last category is assembling your system now that's going to be completely dependent on the type of system that you have designed for yourself but the very first thing you should do is set up your racking now you want that racking to aim in a southerly or southwesterly direction for us ours is 15 degrees off South toward the west which is 105 degrees and then our rack gave us the ability to set it between 20 and 30 degrees so we set it at 30 because that is the closest to our latitude in our area which is 32. and setting them at the right angle per year latitude will help you maximize the amount of Sun hitting those panels once you've got your racking set up it's important to run your conduit for wherever you are going to run it if your panels are on your roof you need to run it properly per the NEC code around your roof through your attic and down to where your main panel is or your solar equipment in your house and again if this is something you're not comfortable with please consult with an electrician once you have the conduit run into your house and you've got your panels and racking set up now it's time to get this equipment mounted on the wall each inverter brand will have different specifications about the distance they need to be from one another from the floor and from the c-line so you will need to pay attention in the manual for the equipment that you buy on how to mount these earlier when we were discussing Parts I did forget to mention mounting hardware for things like this we found some pretty cool stuff at Home Depot that will handle the weight that these are these are only 26 pounds a piece so it's always important to buy a little bit extra wire because the relation to where you put these little parts and pieces on the wall can vary so as you can see with my battery cables I actually have extra cable just in case something happens and I need to move things around I've got the extra cable to play with I would recommend probably buying about 20 percent extra when it comes to all of your wiring just to be safe the very last thing to do is to start to run your PV lines through your conduit into into your house and start to wire all of your components together we are not going to get into the specifics of that today if you want to see how I wired this system together click on the videos at the top of the screen I've also done videos on how to wire together a system that's a little bit different than this that older system I'm going to move to our barn and I've started a series also on the channel on how we're going to do that all those videos contain the specifics about how I connected everything so the very last category I'm going to talk talk about is enjoying your freedom especially if you are off grid you are now free from that electrical grid and it feels great so on a personal note I want to encourage all of you that you can do it two years ago I did not know anything about electricity I spent the time I gained the knowledge I talked to solar companies I talked to friends who are electricians and I talk to other friends who have solar systems in their house and then when I was ready I pulled the trigger and I did it and you can too if you have any questions please leave a comment for me in the comment section below now go click on this series of videos right here which is our entire playlist on how we built both of our solar systems on our property have a beautiful blessed day see you next time bye thank you ...
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