Alright guys, so it’s taken me 10 long years to get to the point where I can finally say that I’m completely off the grid. We just had a solar system installed and today we have Sapir from the Solar Power Store who’s gonna break down all the technical aspects of the system so you know exactly what you can expect if you get a system installed like this. We’re gonna talk about the photovoltaics, the inverter, and of course the batteries. Now there’s plenty of different ways to wire in a system like this but we’re gonna show you how we did it and why we did it the way we did.

So without further ado, let’s get to it! Be sure to check out our last video where we walk you through the build out of our 20kW solar system. If you’re looking to have a system professionally installed, contact the Solar Power Store ASAP as installations are first come first serve for the spring of 2025. But they also offer a variety of DIY options. Use coupon code CanadianPrepper to get 6% off your entire order. Links will be in the description below. So right now guys, we’re putting on the finishing touches. We’re about to turn the unit on the inverter and the battery system.

We haven’t plugged in the solar yet because we got to get that all wired up but closing in on being completely off grid. Well, off grid in air quotes because you’re never really off grid, right? Big brother can always see you. This is a much more advanced system than what a lot of people do. I figure if we’re gonna do something, we might as well do it right. We have huge power demands with the geothermal so this should meet all those needs, no problem. To produce power to the house from the solar panels, the first thing that we need to do is to be able to convert the energy from the solar panels into a type of energy that we can use.

Because the electricity from this is different than electricity your house uses. So what we do is we’re gonna have cables connecting from your system into our, what’s called an inverter. It’s an inverter charger we call it. It’ll take energy from the solar panels, change it to something that’s called AC power which is what you’re used to in the house. Then convert it into a form where we can run our house on. When it sees that the batteries are low, it’ll direct power from either the generator or grid depending on what your backup system is. And it’ll use that to charge the batteries to a state where you’re happy with it.

Pretty much your batteries is like your water tank in your house, your inverters is your faucet. So when you turn it on, how much energy can come out is how big your inverters are. In this case we have two faucets, each one of them is 12 kilowatts and our water tank, which are the batteries, can hold 40 kilowatt hours. So at a time we can pull 24 kilowatts out of our 40. What these cables do is pretty much let the batteries talk to each other. So if one of them is cold then all of them will turn on the heater so there’s no misbalance of the charge.

Also the last orange cable goes to the inverters and tells the inverters what settings the batteries want plus what status they have and what charge it has. We have all the batteries on and the inverters are turned on and everything seems to be working fine. Yeah, so basically how the system is going to work is that it has an automatic switch because we are on grid power as well. So whenever the sun isn’t shining and the batteries still need to be topped off, it’s going to be getting power from the grid. During the day when the sun’s out we’re not going to be getting power from the grid and we’re going to try to fill up those batteries with mostly solar power.

And then all of this juice from this battery is going to power the house. This is cool because while the grid is working I can use the grid power. I just don’t have to use as much of it. So it’s a very cool system, very smart system. The system is made out of two inverters and they work together. By default once you turn them on they’ll decide which one randomly is the main. So any setting that will go here will automatically be transferred there. Pretty much just plugged everything in and we turned it on and it’s already set to be ready to be used.

It’s going to charge from the grid when the batteries fall below 40%. It’s going to primarily prioritize charging from the sun. So that way we’re utilizing as much power as we can from the solar panels because we want to get the most out of our investment. So in terms of actual connections here you have one, two, three sets of cables. You have your grid, your output and then your battery. Everything else is just communication cables that are from the batteries and the other inverter. We would leave it easy to set up even if you do it by yourself as long as you have some basic electrical knowledge.

Everything is watertight and waterproof. On this side here it’ll look scary. It’s just because we have a lot of connections and we overkill the cables. But this is where all the batteries get combined into our system. We have about an inch and a half of insulation, which again is overkill. And a lot of people are worried whether lithium can work outside. Lithium offers a 10-year warranty with a 20-year service life, meaning they’re pretty much going to last forever. In the cold, lithium cells can still work. That’s how your car works in the winter, your Teslas or any easy cars that you have.

With solar systems, we essentially maintain a temperature higher so that it gets that longevity. So it’s warming itself up, is what you’re saying. So even if it gets like minus 40, these are going to use a bit of their own electricity to warm themselves up. Correct, yeah. Is there a risk of overheating in the summer or is it regulating the same way? So lithium actually can operate with no issues up to 60 degrees, but at the preferred temperature for the batteries, because that’s what it’ll be tested under, it’ll be 40 degrees. No more than 40 degrees, which never happens here anyways.

In this part I don’t know, but even if it does, this is built like a cooler. So the temperature inside is very well regulated. So tell us a bit more about this mounting system that we got going on here. Yeah, so we’re using aluminum framing on a ground mount, and the reason we’re choosing ground mount specifically for this property is because you have a lot of space to work with. And when you can, you should be using ground mounts because you can point them perfectly to the south, which is where the panels prefer to be pointed, and you can also adjust your angle so that in the seasons you can get more power out of them if you’re seeing that you need any critical power if you don’t have as big of an array.

Another benefit of this, having it kind of lower to the ground, is if I have to clear snow, or if I have to clean them, you know, I can just get a squeegee. As soon as the sun comes up, you’re going to see that the aluminum frame plus as well as the ground mount is going to attract that heat. Very quickly you’ll see the snow just falls off and piled in front of it. That’s another benefit of the block specifically is we actually elevate our height a little bit. Right, because that snow is going to fall off and accumulate in the front there.

Exactly, yeah. Right now we’re just calibrated to more of a summer azimuth still, even though we’re… Yeah, we kept it at 40 degrees so it was easier to work with. 40 is kind of in the middle, so if you ever don’t want to change the angle, a lot of people do after winter season. That’s the whole season radio of angles. Yeah, 40, 45 in Canada is pretty much the average for getting both good production in winter and summer. If this was your main system, your winter is really when you want to get the most amount of advantage for your system.

Yeah. So you’re bringing down to 60 degrees because in the winter the sun does drop quite a bit. Once you get everything set up, you can manipulate it with only one person, with this system anyways. Alright, so we haven’t installed this yet, but what the hell is this? So that’s our PV combiner box, we call it. PV means photovoltaic solar panel combiner. PV stands for photovoltaic, which is a technical term for solar panels, for smart people. People like to sound smart, pretentious people. Yeah, yeah. So that’s what we got inside here. These are overcurrent protection, fairly used, but what that means is if there’s a lot of energy being piled up in one cable or too much water pressure in one of the pipes, this will potentially prevent it from piling up.

And then this is what protects you against lightning. So we have a metal structure out in the field. So if that ever happens, instead of it flowing down through a system, you have these discs. And what would happen is if any one of them ever pops, meaning let’s say this array got lightning, so this section for this array, these will turn red, meaning that they’re being used, and then you can just order a replacement disc. But it’s potentially like a sponge in there that absorbs all the extra energy and prevents your system from getting damaged.

Fully certified, because we know who’s going to come knocking. And Justin Trudeau is going to come, and I heard Nate got a solar system. Send the regulators. We’re protected. So now what everybody wants to talk about is the solar panels themselves. How does it work that this is called a bifacial panel? Yeah, so it’s a bifacial, meaning two faces. So there’s glass on the back, and there’s glass on the front. So that’s actually the back of the cells, themselves, that produce energy. It’s not as effective in the summer, but in the winter, when you have white space, the reflection from that surface would hit the back of the panel.

Neat. And in winter, the big benefit is the panels will be covered from the front in snow, so by having light beam bouncing off the back, you’re heating them up faster, and then dropping the snow off faster. A few things with this panel, one is we keep the frame all black just to give you a bit more aesthetics, blends in a bit more on the roof if you do go on a rooftop install, and it may be a better way to hide them if you are in places where we want to hide them.

I like what he just said, operational security. That’s the first thing I’ve heard you say about operational security. I knew you had it in you. Yeah, I’m learning one day at a time. We’re talking about partial shading or damaged panels. So what we’re seeing in these panels is called a split cell panel. You’ll see a line down the center. Okay, yeah. What that does pretty much is splits the one panel into two smaller panels, then even the way you’re standing and shading part of it. So right now it’s optimizing in a way that this section doesn’t interfere with the rest of the solar panel.

That’s a big step up because that was a big problem for these types of panels for the longest time. Yeah, you’ll see like a tree for half the day will take out a big portion of your array. But now when you go to a rooftop and you are worried about trees, you gain the most amount of advantage out of your panel. How durable are these things? We’ve seen when we were installing with them, we were pretty rough with them. They’re still glass or they’re tempered glass, similar to what’s on your phone. Okay. Except much thicker.

Yeah. And because of that, these panels can survive. They’ve been tested through hail storms, they’ve been tested through very heavy winds, a very, very high rating for how much pressure can go on the panel. That’s actually what you see more and more is because of the durability of these solar panels. A lot of farmers are starting to use them as building materials. So they’ll build fences out of them or they’ll replace the roof with them. That’s what we call building integrated PV. That’s where things are moving slowly. So the frame itself is so overbuilt that it just became a very strong board that you can work with that also produces power.

Bare-bones specifications, 540 watts each, I think we already… 570, yeah. 570. That’s a lot of power coming out of a very small space. What do these panels retail for right now at the solar power store? Really, the industry is sticking to an hour and 45 to 50 cents per watt. That’s kind of where the average is. The real money you’re spending then is more on the inverter and the batteries and all the mounts. Yeah. The panels are almost the cheapest part of the system. It’s actually not a big point. There’s a lot of people who rush to get more batteries.

Yeah. Where really you should be first trying to produce as much energy as you can rather than store it. Once you see that you’re overproducing energy, then you can expand your storage because it’s so much cheaper to add more panels. Especially if you’re running on a generator and you’re burning a lot of gas, if you add another row of panels and you can eliminate your generator in the winter. So we go by what, like dollars per watt that you’re buying. During COVID, it was almost up at $1 or $1.20 a watt. Now we’re averaging 45 to 50 cents a watt.

So you’re seeing grid becoming more and more unreliable. And people who do have batteries and backup systems and are independent from the grid, they’re not going to feel that change. And then we’re seeing a lot of people shifting towards it to get that independence. In terms of manufacturing, the way Canada stands, as if our borders do close, we’re not really good at manufacturing. Right. So we could see significant spike in prices. If they increase the tariffs and make it harder for us to bring panels from overseas. And these are made in Vietnam. So I know that relationship is still solid, but you never know.

It’s a good investment. And if you can find some financial incentives, then you might as well capitalize on that. But anyways, man, thanks for coming out. I greatly appreciate it. And if you guys want more information, check out the solar power store. And in the description below, you might see a discount code that can get you a slightly better deal. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Prepper Out. [tr:trw].

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