1000 Watt Solar Generator for under $500? - Cool Tool Tuesday

foreign s that I'm going to be working on at the cabin is the electrical system and because I'm off grid my only option to bring power into the cabinet is to use solar so uh I'm working with a company called Lee power and they have a product [Music] which is this this power box and you've seen a lot of the DIY power boxes on the internet and this is similar to that but this is the best one that I've seen anywhere in the market so uh let's pull this apart and we'll take a look at it all right so all right so bring this a little bit closer so we'll take off the top and we'll see exactly what's going on inside here all right so this is a top let me adjust this this has an integrated 1000 watt pure sine wave power inverter it also has an integrated mppt charge controller I'm trying to move that so you can see but you can see right there mppt and it also has the cables already integrated to connect up to any battery that you might have so that includes uh acid gel AGM or lithium lifepo 4. yeah on the front you've got your main power switch you've got two PD and Quick Charge USB port Banks here and here and then you've got your 12 volt cigarette lighter socket okay and then you've got your battery monitor here [Music] over here next to the power inverter you've got your AC adapter so you can run AC components and then you've got an input fan and on the back an output fan so it brings the airflow across the components so that's great Cooling and then on the side here with the built-in mppt controller you've got a black Anderson connector here and this one is dedicated to the mppt controller and it is limited to 10 amps so that's why this is black so there's no confusing that and then you've got three more 50 amp Anderson connectors and you've got one 175 amp Anderson connectors and all of these connectors are input output except for the mppt controller plug that one is input only okay I've already got a battery inside this is not the battery that I'm going to be using I actually bought a battery a lassiti battery that just hasn't arrived yet but that will be what I'm going to be using it's 100 amp hour battery and I'll probably go over some details of that in another video but let's go ahead and get this connected up and then we'll do a few tests okay one thing that I want to mention is that you should have your power switch in the off position before you uh connect your battery or work on any of these components all right first off you can see that I've got my posts this is positive red and black is negative so that is how I'm going to be connecting up my cables okay I'm just gonna decrease finger tight for now foreign okay that's it that's all there is to uh setting up this DIY uh battery box and you just want to route your cables yeah and uh the Box on one thing that I did want to mention is that the battery box does come with a belt strap that you can use to strap your battery in and keep it secure all right so what comes with the battery box you also get a bag full of accessories you can never get these things open [Applause] it comes with another strap got some power pole covers which I should have put on first before I connected the battery but I'll be putting those on once I get my CD battery you've got some mounting brackets that you can use to mount this to the floor [Applause] and you've got four of these screws that are used to connect the top and there's one in each corner okay in addition to that you get a couple of cables foreign so it comes with an Anderson to mc4 which is gonna be compatible with most solar systems out there and this Anderson connector is black to remind you which uh Anderson port to plug it into the one that has the mppt controller it also has some alligator clips to Anderson and this is handy so if you have something that you want to connect up but you don't have the proper cable this is kind of that all-in-one cable it'll help you connect up pretty much anything all right so let's go ahead and turn this uh main power switch on and right now I don't have anything displaying on my display that's because I don't have power to the display turned on that's what this power button is right here so we'll push that now we've got our display enabled and uh this is coming up this is the voltage the ac voltage that's coming off of the pure sine wave inverter I can scroll through here that is my load coming off of the inverter and right now I don't have anything plugged in so the load is at zero and this is the voltage that I've currently got across my battery 13.2 volts now there's two modes where I can go through and uh each one of the different items for display or I can press and hold this for a couple of seconds and then it will start scrolling through each of the different items so that would be called mode 2. and as soon as you get to what you want you can just push the button and it stops there so uh let's start plugging some stuff in and see uh see how it works all right there's only a couple of things that I'm going to be running at the cabin one of them is this uh it's a thousand watt microwave get these cables out of the way so let's go ahead and get that plugged in and we'll see if this thousand watt pure sine wave inverter will run my thousand watt microwave okay so you can see that it has come on I'm just gonna push uh the button here and just run it for 30 seconds [Music] all right it seems to be running just fine you can see that the voltage on uh over here closer you can see that the voltage is dropping let's look what the uh the load is 954 Watts so it's pulling just under a thousand Watts but uh that's cool I can actually run a microwave off of this and the other thing that I want to be able to run is a little DC refrigerator so let me go grab that and we'll see how that does all right I've got uh a DC refrigerator here and this will run on AC or DC but I want to run it off of DC so I'm not going through the inverter and it comes with you know with the cigarette lighter plug so I'm going to go ahead and get that hooked up all right so we can see that this is on the current temperature inside the refrigerator is 56 degrees um I've got it set to 34 degrees so that's what it'll get down to but uh that is running off of my DC output all right those are the two main items that I want to be able to run I also want to be able to run some DC lights in order to get that set up we need to move to my outdoor Laboratory all right I do want to mention also that this does come with some carrying straps which makes it really easy to move around all right so let me go grab my uh my cable connectors and then I've got a couple of solar panels that I want to hook up and we can test out those uh Anderson groups all right first I've got this renergy 100 watt solar panel and it's not getting direct sunlight so it's not going to be putting out a ton but we can measure what it is putting out how many amps foreign and I've just got the mc4 to Anderson cable that came with the Box and we'll plug that into the black Anderson Port which is for the mppt controller so let me go grab my uh my amp meter and we'll uh check out see how many amps we're getting the sun is directly overhead and it's uh behind a bunch of clouds so it's not going to be the best day for this but I've got the panel pointed a little bit better let's see if we can't get a better result okay now we're getting about 0.4 amps okay now I've seen a lot of people comment on whether or not you can connect up a different uh solar panel you know so you can have more than one Bank coming in on one of these other ports so uh let's check that out I've got a Harbor Freight 25 watt panel we'll connect that up to here through a charge controller and we'll see how that does okay so I've got the Thunderbolt charge controller that comes with the Harbor Freight solar panels and this is where these alligator clips come in handy because I don't have a cable that'll go from this charge controller to my box so I'm going to be using the alligator clips Okay so we've got that in try to isolate these a little bit and now I just need to plug the other end up to my Harbor Freight solar panel all right so we'll trace my cable back and here is a 25 watt Harbor Freight solar panel and it is getting you can see the blue light there so it is active okay according to the charge controller it is supplying 14.4 volts which is good I've got this connected here retrace it to these alligator clips which come up into here so you can have multiple um solar panel banks by using one of these other Anderson ports but just remember that you will have to use a charge controller all right so let's see how the Harbor Freight panel is doing okay I'm getting about a quarter of an amp from the harbor freight and that's pretty good because that's getting half as much as this 100 watt energy panel and it's only 25 watt yeah because I'm getting about half an amp with the renergy 100 watt and I'm getting a quarter of an amp with the Harbor Freight 25 watt and that's because the Harbor Freight it's an amorphous this is a monocrystalline the amorphous batteries do a lot better in low light than mono or polycrystalline does okay so now another thing the last thing that I want to be able to run in the cabin are some lights and the Harbor Freight kit comes with a couple of these lights and they plug right into the controller the controller has an output so it has three DC Barrel outputs so I can plug my light in there and then it also comes with an on and off switch that didn't work all right the uh charge controller does have a button you can see that I've got power coming from the solar panel to the battery but I don't have anything coming out so I need to turn on the light switch and now you can see that I've got power coming in and then power coming out and now when I turn the light switch on and off you can see it come on and off is going to give me the ability to run my entire cabin because I don't have a whole lot of needs I need to be able to turn on and off lights in the evening I need to run my refrigerator and it'd be nice to be able to run an appliance like a microwave you know every now and then and it won't be running it for a long 30 seconds a minute at a time and so it's going to put on a heavy drop but for a very short amount of time so this battery is going to be great another thing that you can do with these batteries because you've got these Anderson Imports as you can actually expand the capacity of your system and the way you would do that is you would get an Anderson to ring Cable cable and then you can connect up a secondary battery and then plug that into one of these ports because these ports are input and output and that will essentially be putting the second battery in parallel and um it doesn't give you the ability to go positive from One battery negative from the other but with Lithium-ion batteries that's not necessary you don't need to do that I mean if you do that it is optimal but in a configuration as small as 200 amp hours the benefit is really minimal and so it's not something that you have to do and a lot of people out there think that if you connect a couple of batteries in parallel like that and you charge them you know through one battery that it will you'll have to completely charge and discharge One battery and then charge and discharge the second battery after that that's not the case what does happen is when you're charging a battery Bank like that the battery that you're connected to is going to get a slightly higher voltage and current than the second battery so you it will charge faster than the second battery but you don't have to wait for this one to fully charge when this one does fully charge however 100 of the current will then automatically go to the second battery until it's topped off but they do both charge at the same time just the second battery is a little bit slower and the reason why you can get away with that with lithium batteries is because they have built-in BMS systems in every battery so there's no worry about over charging uh one of you know the first battery as you're charging the second one you cannot do that with lead acid batteries whether they're sealed or gel or AGM you cannot do it with those batteries but you can with lithium batteries and in fact a lot of you guys are probably familiar with Will prowse that's actually how he has his setup is in parallel but he charges through the first battery and I will link that video where he actually goes through all of that information talks about what you can and can't do and and the different efficiencies I'll link to that video and it'll prove everything that I'm saying right now all right that's going to do it um for this week's video I want to thank Lee power and the CD battery box and for being the sponsor of this video and uh this is going to be a great addition to the cabin it's going to allow me to easily run my entire cabin I can expand my battery system if I need to I can hook up multiple solar panel Banks uh because these other ports I can get up to 50 amps through each of them and the one with the end the integrated mppt controller is limited to 10 amps and that's why it's uh black but this is a great box does everything that I needed to do and I can't wait to get it installed at the cabin all right talk to you guys later