From $600 Power Bills to Self-Sufficient POWER - My MEGA Solar & Battery System!

Yep. I was paying over $600 a month for electricity and the power still kept going out. Storms, outages, even planned shutdowns. I'd had enough. So I went all in on a mega solar and battery system to see if I could become self-sufficient in electricity. Let's power into it. G'day, I'm Mark from Self-Sufficient Me. And in this video, I'm going to give you my reasons for getting a mega solar system, show you the installation process of the solar panels and battery, show you the savings on our first quarterly bill since the install, and let you know if we are indeed self-sufficient in electricity. Now, I know some of you will be thinking, Mark, $600 a month on electricity is extreme. What are you using it on? Well, firstly, we shouldn't be blaming the user. But anyway, we have a big house, four adults living here. Our climate is hot and humid. So we use a lot of air conditioning. We all work from home and we live a modern lifestyle that's, shall we say, heavy on the juice. And I do have to say that $600 a month included all the free energy we were getting from our old 28 panel system that was on the roof of our shed, which was generating about 15 kilowatts a day. When we first installed our old solar system in 2011, our bill was like $50 a month. But over time, with electricity prices rising and the rebate for feeding back into the grid dropping, plus now running a business from home, we needed something bigger. However, it wasn't just the cost of electricity. It was the volatility of the grid supply that stressed me out even more. When you work from home or store a lot of food in fridges and freezers like we do, or need to power important equipment like medical gear, a blackout is more than just an inconvenience. Last year I made a video about Cyclone Alfred and how we were preparing for the worst. One thing I did a few years ago was have an external power plug installed at our meter box so that we could power some of our appliances and lights in our home in case of an outage through the use of generators. So as Cyclone Alfred loomed down on our home, I got the generators out of the shed, filled them full of petrol, tried to start them, and guess what? I couldn't get them going. That was very frustrating. And in that video, I lamented that for being self-sufficient in power or electricity, I had certainly failed. And I wished that I had a battery that could match our solar system so we wouldn't have to go through this problem again. Anyway, as luck would have it, Resync Solar saw my Cyclone Alfred video, and besides having a good laugh, they contacted me with a proposal to conduct a free assessment to assess the viability of adding a battery to match our solar system. Naturally, I was interested, so I did a bit of research on Resync Solar, and they happened to be one of the most awarded and trusted companies in Australia. Long story short, I sent them our electricity bill history and the details of our solar system and power setup, and they came back with a comprehensive assessment custom-matched to a solar system and for our situation. And that was a monster 62-panel system with a big 25-kilowatt inverter feeding a large 50-kilowatt battery in two stacks of 25. Now, I want to let you know that this video is sponsored by Resync Solar, but I just don't collaborate with anyone. And I can tell you that from my workings with the Resync team that they are a company electrified full of good, professional and genuine people who care the utmost for their customer. Part of my collaboration deal with them is that Resync will design and fit a new solar system for a charity that I'm currently aligned with for free. And I'll be bringing you that video further down the track. Resync dedicates a portion of its profits to giving back to the community through programs such as the Vulnerable Veterans Solar Program, being a veteran myself, that's something close to my heart, supporting surf life-saving clubs and Indigenous communities, upcycling decommissioned solar panels and delivering them to communities in need across Africa, and supporting numerous charities across Australia. So just quickly before we get into my solar system installation, I want to let you know about this Self-Sufficient Me Resync Solar exclusive offer. If you are sick of high power bills and blackouts and are considering getting a solar system, follow my link in the description and comment section below to a no obligation inquiry page and Resync will provide you with a free custom proposal and energy savings assessment for your home or business. This is a one-on-one design session and it includes the federal government battery rebate scheme for as long as that lasts, whenever that is, plus other exclusive offers just by following my link below. Okay let's get into the installation. Overall it took two solid days to get the whole thing done. It's the calm before the storm. You can see the house behind us, it's got all that scaffolding around it, well we're not redoing the roof because we've only just got the place renovated a few years ago. But what we are going to do is get a whole brand new mega solar system installed this morning from Resync Solar. It wasn't a simple operation because there are a lot of solar panels to install in two different locations, our home and our shed. The original solar system needed to be decommissioned and Resync took the panels away for recycling or repurposing. What's interesting is the 28 solar panels that were on our shed were replaced with only 14, yet the power output is now 20% higher. Solar panel technology is just getting better and better. The other problem we had to solve was where to position the batteries. Usually the battery and inverter are installed within near proximity to the power box, but because of the big ducted air conditioning and other air con units here it wasn't possible to do that and we didn't want to put them on this wall here either because that northern sun just beats down heavily on it and that wouldn't be ideal. In the end we decided that this spot here would be the perfect position for a battery stack, out of the way, out of direct sunlight and protected from the elements. The only thing we had to do was move the existing air con unit. So you've moved the air con already or it's been moved? Yeah decommissioned already. And so where is the battery going? Yeah going in the corner here. Oh perfect. Yeah it's great that the battery can live either inside or outside gives us more options. The north side was going to be really really really exposed so we would have had to build a pretty significant shade cover and even then it's still a hot area. The 25 kilowatt inverter was positioned centrally between the batteries and the power box. Our home has three phase power which means it has a larger more balanced electricity supply with three phases instead of one. With three phases the system can deliver 25 kilowatts more smoothly and across the whole house. That means we can run big loads like ducted air conditioning, induction stoves, workshop gear and pumps without tripping the system. We also installed a five kilowatt inverter here in the shed so that we complied with Queensland law and because the shed is its own building with a sub board and it's about 30 meters away from the main power box it was simpler and more efficient to have a small inverter out here. That way the panels convert to AC power at the shed then it feeds back through the property wiring instead of running long DC solar cabling back to the house. Both the inverters and the battery are from Sungrow and the solar panels are 475 watt Longy. Both Sungrow and Longy are known for quality products but I just let Resync choose what brand of panels and batteries and inverter that they thought was appropriate for our place. I trusted them totally to do everything. I suppose we should explain why we're not going to put an extra like fill this whole shed up with panels because it's basically not worth it. Not worth it and not necessarily we need to abide by new regulations. So the secondary inverter that's going to sit here will provide power over to your home and the wires that run from that inverter to the home whereas previously it was compliant to have them feeding all that power across. We now do our voltage rise calculations and this system will be throttled back so that it's only sending a certain amount of power from the shed to the home. So if we did put up another 14 panels a full 28 and doubled again that would be trying to send too much power from the shed to the home. So it's all about compliance and safety and making sure the system's designed for the site as it's laid out. Apparently these new Longy panels are hail proof up to the size of a tennis ball. It's true. They've got a warranty for it. Don't hurt my pumpkin plants. Good girl. Bring them back to daddy. Yes. And there are six optimizers strategically placed around the roof that have built-in technology to mitigate the effects of partial shade on the panels. So this is an optimizer this here and it optimizes the panel. That's it. So these specific panels we've put the optimizers on so that as some spotty shade from a few of your trees are hitting those panels they don't bring down the voltage of the entire string that they're part of. Yep. And they help to mitigate the impact of shade. They can't eliminate the impact. Yeah. On your shed for example. Shade's going to come in the afternoon. Yeah. And that whole section will be impacted. So we've chosen not to put optimizers on each of those panels. It would sort of be a fruitless exercise. Yeah. In the sense that they're almost all going to be shaded. Yeah. More or less at the same time. Whereas these ones would be shaded more at random by a few of the trees. And this is what you've shown through your software and all that. Certain spots on the roof and it might not be just specific to one side. It could be anywhere. And so there's about six of these with the optimizers. Here we've got five. About five with the optimizers. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. All part of the custom design process. Yeah. Yeah. Great. The battery is modular and it comes in five kilowatt hour segments. So if later down the track we want to add more power to this unit for more storage we can do so without too much hassle. See ya. Thank you. Wow. What a great bunch of blokes. I can't wait for the sun to come up and those solar panels starting to charge those batteries. You know I couldn't have been happier with the whole installation. It was a big job and a very technical one too. The re-sync and store team were amazing. They reminded me of my army days when I was a soldier running a section. You know work hard, be professional, play hard, get the job done. Yeah. I'm really impressed. The overall system comes with a 25 year warranty. This covers things like hail damage, faults, if it doesn't perform or give you the savings as expected. Plus I know that re-sync has been around for over 15 years and they'll likely be here for another 15. So if anything goes wrong I can just contact them. All that is well and good but in real life how has the system worked? Well here we are today four months after our self-sufficient power system went live. So what are the results? Our quarterly power bill for November, December and January is $541.80. That works out to be $180.60 per month which is amazing for this time of year when typically our bill for this quarter is the highest consistently over $2,000 or around $650 per month. And even though we're getting a measly three cents per kilowatt hour feeding that back into the grid we still got $116.62 off our bill for those exports which is heaps better than what we were getting. And if we look at our usage over the past 12 months and for the same time last year we've decreased our grid usage by a whopping 81.7%. That's fantastic. The thing is there are other ways to save even more money that we haven't implemented yet. Firstly we're still on our old electricity plan and even our provider is saying that if we switch to a variable plan we can save several hundred dollars, let alone joining a VPP, a virtual power plant. I believe some people on those plans are making coin big time. Secondly I've been strategic when it comes to using our battery, not necessarily money saving focused. And what I mean by that is during the storm season over the past three months of summer it's not unusual for the power to go out. Blackouts. Along with this amazing system you also get this app. And apart from telling you everything that's going on with your solar and battery setup there's a feature that allows you to pull power from the grid to top up your battery whenever you want to. Such as a storm or cyclone is approaching that night and your battery is at 50% with a push of a button you can fill it up on super fast mode. Therefore if a storm hits and the grid goes down you still have a full battery that you can use to get through the night and a couple of rainy days or so. As we are now coming into winter and the end of the stormy season I'll be using the top up feature less. So this will save us even more. Plus we won't be using the air cons as much especially the ducted that's a real killer. So that will mean the cooler days, still plenty of sun, less storms. I predict that we will likely be feeding a heap more back into the grid over the coming period and probably going negative on our bills. We've had about four power outages since getting our new solar system. The first blackout we had was about two weeks after our system was installed and it was weird because we were the only house in the street with our lights on and you had people and neighbors walking past gathering outside looking in at our place lit up like a Christmas tree wondering what's going on. So not to gloat too much but maybe a bit But I'm just walking up my driveway. We had a big storm a couple hours ago. Power's been out for a few hours now and this is what our street looks like That's our street. There's a house across the way. See anything? Like there's houses all down our street You can't see much can you? No. But we turn back to our place. Oh hello what's going on here? Fully lit up. We've actually got the aircon on. It's not not pumping we just got the aircon on just to take the edge off the heat because we've got plenty of battery left still about 90 percent And we're running off grid on battery at the moment. We've got all our fridges all our freezers we had an oven meal we had our induction cooker going all the PCs are working the boys are gaming I'm working downstairs trying to get a video out. Essentially the whole house is doing fine and it's all because of these two here. These two battery banks making a 50 kilowatt altogether. Let me just show you this. We can have our system on battery like it is now or on grid mode. If you have it on battery mode when the grid goes down you probably won't even notice it. Well we don't and several times we haven't known and so what happens is your power just draws from the battery and it just stays like that. Some people actually prefer to have it down on grid mode so that if the power does go out or the grid goes down their house goes off and then they come down to the power box and manually switch it to their battery power. For us it makes sense to leave our system on battery because in the event of a blackout our electrical equipment like our computers is safe from an abrupt shutdown or losing work like if I'm halfway through editing a video and the power goes off and I lose it all that used to really depress me. Not anymore. The other day my wife was looking at social media which is unusual but she says to me hey Mark did you notice that we had a blackout yesterday? The whole area was out for about six hours and I had no idea. So is this size system easily able to run our home without the use of the grid? In other words are we totally self-sufficient in power? Not exactly. Over the past three months if we ran our ducted aircon unit all night pulling three to five kilowatts per hour our battery would be drawn down to about five percent by around 4am in the morning. Then our system automatically switches over to the grid until the sun comes up and then the solar system takes over again and we're back on battery. From the numbers I'm seeing I think we have plenty of stored energy to avoid needing grid power for about six months from mid-autumn to mid-spring when we don't need to run our air conditioning. Typically our battery is 100% full by 11am each day give or take a few hours depending on the weather. On a fully cloudy day or even in the rain our system can still pull in enough energy to power our home and keep the battery topped up throughout the day. Honestly we might not be totally self-sufficient in power but we are very close to it. Even if the cost of our system turned out to be equal to no system and just paying our bills I would prefer to be generating my own power than paying a stinking corporate utility over inflated prices for electricity. For many Australian homes solar alone can pay for itself in around three to six years. Adding a battery usually extends that payback but it also gives you blackout protection and greater energy independence. I now look forward to seeing my electricity bill and that's a weird but good experience I can tell you. Talking about overall cost for this mega system. I know people would love to know the full cost but it wouldn't be helpful to give you those numbers because prices are always changing, every installation is custom and comparing our system to a hypothetical situation won't work. I'm sure some of you will write your estimates in the comments section below of what you think this whole system would cost and I look forward to reading them. But the real thing I would like you to do is get a free assessment to see whether the return on investment for your situation is worth it and you can do that by following my link below to Resync Solar and getting that free assessment done so that you know where you stand and whether it's worth it or not to get a solar system and you can get that done completely for free. I will be doing more solar and battery videos in the future to give you regular updates on how our system goes throughout different times of the year and in different situations and also on new solar technologies in general because I find it interesting and this type of technology is changing fast and always getting better and so perhaps you might be interested in those updates as well. Well I hope you found this video interesting, if you did make sure you give it a big self-sufficient, powerful thumbs up, share the video around because that always helps and subscribe if you haven't already. Thanks a lot for watching, bye for now, cheers.