Taking your house, shed or garage 'off-the-grid' is a very exciting thing to do. On this channel, I share my experience and thoughts of taking my garage offline, disconnecting it from the power supply and run it solely from solar and batteries (for teaching and testing purposes). We will do a lot of testing here on the channel, batteries, cells, BMS, electronics, solar charge controllers and even panels.
I will explain how everything works in a beginner friendly way. We will also do smaller side projects to break things down and make it easy to understand. So no previous knowledge or experience necessary to build your own solar-battery system.
You can get more information on my website: off-grid-garage.com
DISCLAIMER
By watching these videos, you agree:
All electrical work must be carried out as per your local laws, rules and regulations. Installations and setups shown in my videos are for test and demonstration purposes only and may not satisfy regulatory requirements.
Off-Grid Garage
Something strange is going on with the battery system. The numbers it reports are not consistent, especially not when I have a larger load connected. I seems like the JK-BMS are completely out of their mind and showing weird values for power and current which cannot even be true. Is the longish RS-485 data bus and the many sockets already hunting me down?
This will be an interesting video when we all will go hunting and trying to find the problem...
1 week ago | [YT] | 160
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Off-Grid Garage
I've installed the RS485 data bus around the battery room, connecting all data points back to the Raspi. Now we can connect as many JK-BMS as we like...
Next step will be connecting a few battery connection points and turn on the big MCCB for the first time. Were almost there...
1 month ago | [YT] | 207
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Off-Grid Garage
Checking out the new JK Inverter BMS V22 (PB series).
Top shows the V19, middle is a V22 200A version and bottom is the new V22 100A BMS.
Battery case manufacturers will not like this!
2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 242
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Off-Grid Garage
The top part of the new battery wall has been finalised. All MCCBs are now connected to the Victron busbar, torqued, double checked and marked. I closed the lids of the cable ducts just to see how it looks like and am pretty happy with the result so far.
I have not turned on the big breaker yet as I wanted to do this on camera together with you. That'll be a huge milestone!💪
There is still lots of work to do, preparing the connection boxes for the batteries and cable everything. That will be another 128 crimps to do😩
We're getting more and more sunshine already and I can see the amps outside going up. Good timing to get all these batteries charged up in the near future🌞🔋
3 months ago | [YT] | 460
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Off-Grid Garage
We're now fully off-grid! Jason from Powermate was here yesterday and spent a whole day upgrading the switchboard inside the house from old MCBs and RCDs to RCBOs. At the same time, he also installed a transfer switch, so we can connect the house now either to the grid or the off-grid battery system.
This came all much earlier than initially planned, but I'm glad we got it done in time and are ready now for whatever comes in the future. My wife is now addicted to dashboard in HA where she can see the live power usage. She turns appliances on and off and watched the power consumption. Great, she is interested in this and develops a feeling and sense of what we can turn on at the same time and when it gets too much.
Of course, I already did the test yesterday and turned off the main switch to the grid. As expected, the lights inside the house stayed on and from now on, we won't feel anything if the power in our area goes out.
The video is coming soon!
3 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 410
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Off-Grid Garage
Happy (Winter) Solstice everyone! I had a pretty good and cloudy day down here and managed to charge over 19kWh into the battery. Not bad for the shortest day of the year.
What are your stats today and also let us know your location.
4 months ago | [YT] | 157
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Off-Grid Garage
I'm doing a full capacity test on the top shelf battery this weekend. I'm testing the pack- as well as single cell-capacity. It has been 4yrs and 2 months since the installation.
What is your prediction of degradation of these none-compressed cells?
5 months ago | [YT] | 456
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