Whole Home Battery Backup System – Sol-Ark/Storz Power Outage Demo

Hey I’m Adam with the Solar Truth here and I’m with Andy out in Temecula California, and we did a really cool uh battery backup system, not totally off-grid. You know it is grid tied, but it could go off-grid.

You know we got battery solar, SolArK inverters and a 10.5 kilowatt LG solar panel system um. You know so uh so Andy. If you want to uh just talk about why we, what your goal was here and and what we were trying to accomplish with your house yeah thanks Adam well, when I was looking for a solar system, I was really looking for a system that could take our House to be the on the critical circuit, so the whole house could be powered and um looking around at different systems and different companies.

I really couldn’t find a solution until I came to SunPro and I’m not being paid for this, but uh it’s for real. These guys know what they’re doing they do. Customized designs and you’ll see from the installation that uh it delivered exactly what they promised they would.

So it’s really great yeah and I know Andy’s uh, one of his big concerns was was off-grid. You know we’re out here. We’re actually just outside the fire zone, so we didn’t get like the really big battery rebate that is available in California for a little bit longer um.

But we got a pretty good uh uh size rebate, it’s about 6500 bucks yeah, just over 69 um, so which is the standard rebate but locked in at a tier that that kind of went away and it’s dwindling down um.

But we were able to reserve that a while ago and get that locked in what the concern was was a lot of production when we’re off grid, especially when uh in the winter like when the sun’s not out as much.

So. That’S why these these panels are actually at uh more tilted a little bit more than normal, so they’re at about they’re right about 30 degree angle at perfectly true magnetic south, and the reason for that is in the summer, with a little bit flatter array like 15 To 20 percent you’re getting more production because there’s more hours in the in the summer, the sun’s out longer, but in the winter you’re, not nearly as getting as much production when you don’t have as much sun.

So then you need more production to charge your batteries to get, you know that production too. So anyway, you get a little bit more uh winter production with this system and a little bit less summer production because of that, but overall the production isn’t much less cumulatively.

Um, so it’s you know going to provide more uh when you need it basically to get you through those winter nights and stuff, and then we did a pretty cool battery backup system here too, that we’ll show you in a second and you know able to provide um, you know pretty much all the power for his home here, so we got two solar, 12 kilowatt inverters here.

These are very popular with prepper scenarios. So in fact, a lot of people actually replace other battery systems like even Tesla powerwalls, for example, when they can’t provide enough power for backup cases.

So, there’s actually quite a few advantages with these, when you have off-grid one is, you can do dc connection to your solar. So if your battery totally drains a lot of battery systems, can’t even restart you have to like manually start them or charge the batteries, it can create a lot of problems, but with dc power.

As soon as that sun hits those panels, the batteries are charging and the system’s on. They also can do load shedding and reduce demand charges automatically like with commercial scenarios too so they’re just very universal and have they can auto start generators, there’s just a lot of capacity with these.

So if you know like here, we can add an auto start generator if you want now, you know if that ends up being needed, so we have uh. You know 12 kilowatts. What that does is one it can have a lot of solar connected to it.

You can have 12 to 16 kilowatts of solar actually connected to it, each one and then um they can do 50 amps of power each. So that means we got 100 amps of backup power, which you would need five Tesla Powerwalls to do that.

So we have one of those arrays out there connected to this one and then two of them connected to this one and then we’re charging our stores. Batteries that we have over here I’ll show those in a second and um yeah.

We’Ll do a live test also to shut the power off and and uh I’ll be out here, shutting it off and then we’ll video inside as it’s being shut off, and you know using you know whatever we want in the house, um with uh uh.

Basically, the power being awful okay, so we have a stores battery system here, uh. These have a lot of advantages versus a lot of batteries on the market. One is their lithium ion phosphate, which can’t catch fire explode.

It’s non-toxic lithium-ion technology, batteries like cell phones and cars, are lightweight, but they have those disadvantages to them. You know you shouldn’t put it on like a bedroom wall, for example, so these actually have 8000 life cycles, which will generally give you about 15 to 20 years of operating time.

Most battery systems are about 4000 life cycles and it’s a 15 year production warranty, uh they’re 5.12 kilowatt hours each. So the whole system is about 20.5 kilowatt hours, which will give you like one to two days run time uh when the when, when it’s raining and your solar is not working uh, it really depends on how many loads you have going and what you’re using off-grid Uh and when the power goes out, they’re also stackable up to 14 batteries.

So you could do a pretty large system you could add on later, so we can check out the inverter system now and show you the monitoring and and what you can all see from the system as it’s functioning. So the solar inverters, unlike a lot of other inverters out there, actually have a display screen on them and a mobile app.

So you can look at it. However, you want, you know you can come out here if uh something’s wrong with your phone and uh just tap on the screen there. Right now we have uh power comes from the solar, we have energy going to the grid.

We have energy going to the house and we have the battery state of charge so um on this one. We’Ve already had uh 48 kilowatt hours today and about half that, on the other one, with with a third of the arrays and uh, the battery is at 98 charge right now.

We have, you, know power going to the grid and to the home. So on your app um, you have uh everything you can see here too, and you can actually, you know, choose what you can see um and look at your production, the battery state of charge, uh the energy same.

You know same thing on there, except a little clearer and kind of all the options you want. Then you can adjust your settings on the inverters as well. Here. Our main panel here is actually a 400 amp panel um.

Our main disconnect is here, and then our solar inverters and the house is actually on this panel over here. So what I’m gonna do for this test is shut off our main panel and then we’re powering the backup panel and the solar and we’ll do a live feed into the house running stuff and show how that’s gonna work.

Okay, so we’re doing a live test. Now I’m gonna go ahead and shut off the main power to the house and we’re gonna run some equipment in the house. Here we go three two one all right: simulating uh, off-grid power shut off all right, everything’s still running.

There was just a slight little flicker and we’re boiling water right now on an induction cooktop and it’s on a boost setting the next thing we’re going to try is run the microwave. At the same time. Here we go we’re heating, a cup of water, with a microwave running at full blast, we’re boiling the water.

Now I’m going to turn on the oven. Okay, the oven is preheating and all our lights. Halogen lights are on indoors and not a hiccup everything’s running and now yeah over here we have, our solar inverter has uh, it shows the grids off, yellow and now all the power is coming from our solar system, as you can see there and the batteries as You can see here on both inverters, so that’s what our app will be, showing now too, that um the batteries are starting to discharge and uh there.

We got all our information there too, on the solar battery and everything pretty cool, all right cool. We have water boiling and the water’s boiling in here. You may recognize this because we were trying to do a different battery system before called Paladin, and it sounded amazing.

It kind of sounded too good to be true to be honest and uh that that’s what I believe it was kind of too good to be true, so you got to be really careful. You know SolArk has been around for a long time, so we ended up uh just having a lot of delays not able to get the battery.

We got the the container, and that was it just the cabinet. The batteries going, no inverters, no batteries or anything and uh. You know I didn’t want to. I didn’t trust that uh, that it was gonna happen.

So I ended up switching to SolArk, which just has a lot of advantages that are uh, reliable and they’ve been around for a long time. I think, like at least like 10 years and um uh they’re they’re, probably the most common battery in a proper situation.

They’Ve won awards for being the best thought out: uh off-grid battery system and uh generator uh available battery, so uh. This is a great way to go and it’s got a great monitoring system, just everything’s dialed in so it ends up being just an amazing solution.

If you need a lot of power off-grid all right, thanks for watching our video on Sol-ark, live test demonstration with our off-grid or grid tie, but can go off-grid battery backup system uh. That test we did was actually the first test we had done here and uh.

It was live and um, you know no edits and we just filmed it as it was and worked great worked perfectly so um that was pretty awesome and um. Uh yeah make sure you like and subscribe to the videos I’m gonna try to do a lot more of these videos of like pretty cool off-grid systems.

We’ve been doing a lot. I’ve been helping a lot of battery backup systems, mainly because of the fire rebate out in California, because it’s just such a good rebate. That’s uh, amazing and uh, sadly not going to be available for very much longer because it looks like they’re, not funding it.

Uh more so join us next time and thanks for watching

Source : Youtube

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