DIY Off Grid (Whole House) Solar System - Victron, Fimer, Pylontech 

Been on solely solar for just over a year now. That feeling of security is priceless. Also, not freaking out about having the air conditioning on 24/7 at this time of year is hilarious 😂

Since you have switched to a string inverter, all your solar panels are now operating as one solar panel. It's recommended that you now orient your solar panels in the same direction. This is because right now you are not getting the full potential out of the panels. Panels in a string are always all as efficient as the least efficient panel in the string.

I really appreciate how you two share the details of information for all your projects (equipment, materials, assembly, costs, sources, etc.). It is invaluable. Thank you again for a very informative episode.

Congratulstions. We live in Germany and we decided to avoid the burocracy to get the approval for a victron system.we run our house electric supply including the heating to 75% based on our island system. Only in Winter it will be supported by the grid.

And all that is why I will stay tuned to your channel until the day I die. We are just at the beginning of our reno/resto. The structure was built as a cottage in the late 1940s (Ontario-Quebec border, Canada). Even though our situations are vastly different, I learn so much from you two, and that just opens doors to finding out what we could/should do for our particular needs. You're also just plain fun too.

Just to confirm that solarshop is indeed a great provider. They were super helpful some years ago setting up my system...

I have great admiration for both of you! Your honesty and willingness to share pros and cons is refreshing. Thank you for taking your time and sharing with us. 🇺🇸

Thank you for your pioneering work with the energy system. I am in total agreement with you over dealing with large utility companies and especially the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.

well done guys. Talking about payback using my energy bills as a rough calculation it would take about 13 years. I have recently installed a 3.2 Kw system with a 3.2 battery and even more recently added another 3.2 battery so 6.4Kw. Cost was about £12,000 all in. Many of my friends and others kept saying you will never get the cost back, I'm 66, but I point out to them it's for my son who will inherit the house and in any case the money wasn't earning much interest in the bank. Looking forward to updates.

Currently have a MP2 5000va, 150/45, 100/20 MPPT's, 3.2kw solar, and 14.5kwh storage running a 3 bed semi off grid in the UK using 75/80kwh a week. Its my dream to move to Portugal and live offgrid! Love what you guys do!

Congratulations guys! Excellent video! You're doing a very important job giving quality information out for almost free helping a lot of people in the process. I am moving to a stone house in the middle of Portugal and your videos helped a lot! Thank you guys! Cheers!

Thankyou; absolutely fascinating. I am posting on your details to Dan at Escape to Rural France - who is currently renovating (or re building) a chateau single handedly and is looking to be off grid. Will certainly keep this episode tagged for future reference.

I think my last point (for now) is about safety. I don't want to sound alarmist because the fact is that battery systems are incredibly safe but there is always a chance that something could go wrong and a fire is started. If I understand the layout of the house then your equipment room is pretty close to where you plan to put the internal stairs and where the external stairs are now. My suggestion would just to be on the safe side, put a fire resistent layer on the ceiling and a fire resistent door on the room and a smoke/heat detector in the room (ideally linked to others in the house) so that in the extremely unlikely event of a fire starting in that room, you have plenty of time to use the stairs. We plan to install ours in our garage connected to the house and the garage was required to have fireproofing in case a car caught fire.

Looking at your system and thinking back . Here in Ireland have come from oil lamps and batteries to seeing you system in 60 odd years is fantastic.

Pretty excited always to get a new video from you both. Love what you are doing. I am living vicariously through both of you.

Well done on bringing the old home back to life!

Nothing but admiration for you both and the way you work together its fanatstic to see.

I really appreciate your picture schematic of your solar setups from original to present. 👍👍👍👍👍

Great idea keeping everything in one room with-in the house, all looks very neat and tidy!

Interesting video thank you. Your panelling and cables look very neat indeed xx

FYI: You probably know, but, none of this equipment lasts forever. I had to replace an inverter when it was about 10 years old, that was around or about 2015 and it cost me $1,100. I did no do any of the instllation. Panels were guarenteed for 15 yrs, but expected to last significantly longer. Just something to keep in mind as time passes. I can easily say, that gettin PV solar installed on my home in California was the best thing I ever did for the house. Second best was getting the walls and ceiling (built in 1920) insullated. Good work guys! Keep it going!

Thanks that was so clear. What a great project and I love the reasoning and thinking.

Great upgrade! SolarShop guys are the best! A warm welcome from Alvorge!

I think you have done a good job on your solar setup. Sounds well researched. I also like the cleanness of the setup. Makes it easer to maintain and troubleshoot too.

Thanks for the video - I wasn't aware of this new AC coupled system as an option, good to know!

I agree with you, Guy. I like a nice, neat system. The utility room looks great.

You guys are great at explaining all of that stuff. I guess you learn a lot as you go through it. Thank you for sharing the knowledge. ❤️🙏🏼🥰😎👋🏼🇨🇦

You two are awesome!

Thanks Guy, you make a technical, and potentially boring topic, interesting and easily understood.

Thank you for sharing this important information. You are correct, this platform that we all enjoy is a sharing and learning source, and that's what makes it so nice.

Very inspiring, you will convince quite a few people including me to go that way, thx

very welldone, super insightful, thanks guys

Hi there 🙂 You two are absolutely great in the way you think! You are practical and conscious about the critical points of Our"normal" western daily life style. Well I agree about all the reasons you mentioned here! I am trying to do the same (a bit scaled down) here in Italy while renovating my new home.. I am following your working progress since a while now and you are of a great inspiration for me! Thanks!

Great video. Eloquent explanation of your build philosophy.

Hi Guy & Kylie, another great video, really appreciate being able to share your journey (from the beginning). Your channel has long been a staple diet of mine, as an electrician i have so many questions about your solar experience, my main one is in what capacity did “solar shop” help. Id love to do what you have done(the whole project) but being an armchair enthusiast I’m still gathering together some “get off my arse and do it” and trying to commit to selling up and moving like you have done. it also looks so rewarding living and working in the sun. I am in awe of your commitment. I love watching your real life failures/minor cock ups and then success stories, Guy’s sense of humour and Kylie’s knowledge & never say die attitude wins me over every time. It’s so great to watch you both. Thank you.

I’m very much looking forward to the networking video, especially if you’ll be networking the entire property.

I love how you have had the foresight in designing your original system to be able to grow and adapt so very little equipment has to be tossed and replaced. So impressed with all the thought that went into this. Well done on the research end!

thanks for all you are sharing, i'm build a house in portugal near Coimbra, and i'm planing to go full out of the grid, and I appreciate all details you can share. keep the great work

Love this setup. I think i might move to Portugal....❤

Great video, thanks for sharing 👍

Nicely explained and justified

I think you are right too. That was such a great video, thank you.

Kudos to yr mechanical room and its development and installation. I am a fan of installing things that look good, and installing it the right way, this long term makes its pleasing and IF troubleshooting is needed, makes is easier. Labeling will help it even more. Also creating yr documentation is key to making things top notch overall. Again well done, looks amazing and you both make it look easy and work wonderfully as a team 😊. One last comment … in total agreement on big companies and the paperwork/time to get work done, costs and its impact on you. Going solar is 😊 the right direction, independence and scalability is in your control.

You always have very interesting vlogs, even when a lot don’t apply to me, but will to different degrees to many, cheers guys, thank you 🙏💋❣️ In other words a one stop shop for all your power, got it😉👏👍

I learn so much from you, you have a great system set up.

This is ingenious off grid solar vudeo I've ever seen

What an incredible set-up!!! This is a foreign language to me--but also something that I want to do with my small home in the country in Ontario, Canada. I would be the smallish cabin in the woods across from a lake. 🥰❤️😎 Well done, folks!!! 😎😎😎

Thanks for the video, very inspiring and positive

Great episode, great explanation and great reasons.

I resonate with your perspective and narrative in general. Liked and subscribed ;).

Thank you so much for this one Informative!!!

That seems quite a reasonable investment as it should pay back within 5-7 years for your entire system. Thank you for providing so much information.

Really interesting nice one. All very good reasons you were on about, sounds like got a brilliant overall project on there ✊

Muy buena información para mi casa de pueblo lo voy a tener en cuenta 😊❤

Excellent video guys, I love it that your informative and educational whilst being entertaining. Makes me want juice, seeing those oranges on the ground.😎👍👍🍊🍊🍊🍊💙

Great system , thank you

About 10 years ago I looked into a "DC-coupled" system with the night-time battery-producing 110VAC here in Northern VA. I estimated 60kWh max peak, but with my installation skills, payback was only 10 years. At the time my short-sighted electric utility "co-op" NOVA would have charged me a still-sizeable connection fee (with the provision to provide needed peak power on a series of weak-charging cloudy VA winter days!). 10 years on and I'm still living in the same house (but have replaced the "stupid shingle" roof) and my electricity bill averages $100/month. I wish I had done it. As an electronics engineer I'm not totally convinced that facing all the panels in the same direction and angle is absolutely necessary. Certainly peak output power would be reduced (and reduced peak power losses), but overall diurnal output power may be greater (over some threshold) by pointing some panels also towards mid-morning and mid-afternoon sun positions. I like the choice of the "AC-coupled" system for the "cooking shed" since you're probably sleeping inside the house during these (hot!) nights. I'd tie-ho on the Garage install. I'd imagine that fast electric car chargers are 400VAC 3-phase only and you may want quite a beefy 3-phase inverter to drive that. A small panel and standby battery could provide lighting in the dark there. I'd temporarily mount your (spare) panels on the fragile outhouse roofs to drive the house "DC-coupled" system for night-time comfort. Just my suggestions. Enjoying this channel (and the previous channel - yeah, thanks RU-vid).

Having just installed my own solar panels ( UK ) i found what you have done very interesting, you might find panel and battery cost have reduced since your system was install and panels have got better I have 12 Trina 410 watt panles a 3.8 Kw hybred inverter and 2x 4.5 kwh pylontech batteries my cost inclouding scaffoling cost was £8000 best thing i ever did. Keep up the good work guys.

This is excellent information .

Thank you for posting a very informative solar system, thumbs up and I subscribed cheers !

Very interesting to have this explained. I had my solar system installed some 13 years ago. At that time no batteries existed. I live in Belgium, so not really a sunny country. And the costs of that rather small installation were about the same as for your much bigger system now. But it was and is still worth it, even though in winter it does not produce enough for my needs. Thanks to some tax advantages at that time for solar, I recovered the costs in about 7 years. If I ever move to another place then I would certainly install solar again and consider also a heat pump.

You need a victron display screen 7"!! Great setup

Excellent video. May I suggest however, that you DO present more regarding your solar system (such as install, etc.). I discovered your videos some time ago ("the other channel") because you were taking about your first solar system. As a result, I have watched most (and yes, clicked on the like button) of your videos. Although renovating a house is very interesting to me and I learn a lot, one can not live without some type of energy source. I agree with your philosophy about not using oil-based products and big industries, so solar is a no brainer to me. As you further state in this video watching people do things is very valuable so again, I encourage you to consider showing more about solar and energy efficiencies. I may not be able to renovate a house in Portugal but certainly I (many of us) can adopt/adapt your approach to becoming energy efficient. Thanks!

13,500 euros is really reasonable. I thought you would say 30,000 euros. Thank you for sharing. You both are very inspiring people

It seems like you are going to have regular high usage. I would suggest that you use busbars for the batteries, rather than daisy chaining them. Those cables will get hot and loose power, as well as potentially draining and charging the batteries unevenly. Great looking system. 👌

You both did a great job of explaining, thank you. For many decades, the tobacco companies profited while denying their understanding of the destructive, often lethal effects of their product. The fossil fuel industry is no different. They knew fifty years ago. And while we are still all dependent on the almost miraculous energy density of their product, now we all know too. Must feel good to be able to break away.

Although less efficient due to the efficiency loss of the rectifiers (the proper name of the conversion from AC to DC to charge the batteries), the AC coupled has two advantages: you minimise the losses on the cables when transmitting on AC (or you save a fair bit in cable by having a smaller section) and you can power higher AC loads by not being as restricted by battery DC max output (despite having energy or not, instant power rating which can be limited, instead the limitation is on the sum of all the inverters output power connected to the same bus). Depending on the distances you would need to run the cables on a DC system, the earlier inversion to AC might compensate the loss of efficiency of the rectification (at most by keeping £ in the pocket on the cable price, allowing for an extra battery in the long run for instance). In case you have a lot of inductive loads (pumps, motors, etc) and you find yourself limited in batteries max instant output power, if your inverters allow, consider a string of lead acid (yes, old school) batteries just to help in the starting phase since lead acid will give as much power as demanded (although for a very short period of time compared with lifepo) which is just what you would need. Note: I'm an electrical engineer 😀

I can only watch and admire. My 7.3 kVp system makes in January whopping 160 kWh, where I need 1200 kWh. :( Perks living 1000 km south. Keep up great work.

Bravo!

Respect. Much respect.

Very very interesting. Greetings from Germany 🇩🇪

In addition to the benefits of going off-grid that you've mentioned is the reliability factor. Although you don't have the weather conditions that I frequently experience in New England that interrupt my power - the worst in a recent winter was four days - in a rural area such as yours, there could still be a prolonged breakdown in the power system, and you don't want to lose all your frozen garden produce! High-quality, properly installed electronics rarely fail if not abused, so you should have reliable electricity for years to come. I understand that solar panels may lose efficiency over time, but they can be replaced when necessary as part of your maintenance schedule.

Great video guys. We are living in the Netherlands and have had on grid solar where essentially the grid acts like a battery for many years (around 10) and it has really helped but it's time for us to move towards battery storage in house and both ourselves and a neighbour have both come to the conclusion independently that we want to go for Victron and rack mounted batteries so your video is so appropriate. I have a bunch of questions and observations but I think it best to split those out. Keep up the pioneering work.

Nice mate

Really hope you get One or Two Low-Wind Windtubines to complete your nice system! 🙏🙏🙏❤

Nice.

Brilliant. I love the information sharing as well as the Guinea Pig approach. I tend to agree with you in that it will pay off in the long run. I'm also surprised at how little it has cost...I honestly assumed it would be more. I think this is something very intelligent to do so that you have control.

Tnx for being the guinea pigs 😊

Many high end solar charge controllers handle overloading. That's great for you, or for whoever uses them, because solar panels are relatively cheap compared to almost everything else, so it makes sense to buy a lot of them.

Well invested money!

Thank you. I have been studying up on solar for quite a few years. I always like the fact it is so scalable. In my research I've stumbled on Micro Inverters, from Enphase. Liked what they are doing enough to buy stock in the company. Each panel having its own small inverter. A friend used them on his system. A problem or shading of a single panel doesn't affect the production of every panel in the chain. Their app also allows for real time monitoring of outputs by individual panel. The micro inverters would be ideal for the system I am looking into and I understand they are not ideal for every application. Our winters in Pennsylvania are not ideal for solar production, so grid tied systems are almost a must. Going off grid in our area would require a sizable panel farm to make it through a few weeks to a couple of months with crappy sun exposure. You will recoup your investment much quicker than you imagine. Calculating payback time never seems to include rate increases. Given the current state of fossil fuels...Rate increases may be quite hefty in the future. Have you considered a back up/portable generator (Small one) for emergencies?

Hmm Looking Good✅

Galvanized iron pillar structures can speed up the shed making and double up as building blocks for a shed if you keep their height long enough. They are fairly easy to assemble too! I have a structure if you'd like to see :)

We got a quote off Victron because we watch your channel ….we have a small farmhouse 100 square metres plus a small cottage 50 square metres and a bore pump €40,000 😹😹😹😹

Great to hear about your system but also the choices for why is just as useful, thank you. Are you going to be installing any solar thermal as well or will you be using the heat pump for all hot water?

Learned so much, as always, when watching your videos ! I’m wondering if you have to worry about lightning strikes on a solar panel system and any damage along the chain of devices connected to the panels?

I’m in the process of renovating a small ruin in Portugal and want to go for solar as really hate the idea of all the visual pollution which will absolutely litter our now clear and green view and surroundings with electricity poles and horrible night lights! But wow I’m feeling extremely overwhelmed as I know ZERO about it all and it looks so complicated! So videos like this help to teach me a little.. thank you xx

Same in Spain with the levels of supply kw’s. If you go over they trip you off.

Excellent impressive🇬🇧

Great work. Love your vids and I watch them every week. Was it difficult to pair the victron inverters?

The tier based system based on outlets did sound like a bit of a problem. When I was thinking of turning my garage into more of a workshop (it's in a block a few meters away from my house), I was thinking of wiring it up with small consumer unit, sockets, lights and switches and having a plug that I could take a 40m extension cable to and then plug the whole system into. So, the garage has no connection to the mains, but if you 'plug it in' all power going through a small breaker box, you have what would be exactly like a permanently mains wired system. If you're using the higher powered equipment, you're only likely to be using one device at once - it wouldn't be a challenge to the system. The typical extension cable would probably work ok for a small workshop. The alternatives do include having several electricity meters and billed electricity accounts for different areas of your property. In some ways it sounds like 3 phase would suit you but the high power equipment you want to be able to use but two 3.45kW metered systems may be more than enough but there are two standing charges. I don't know how much it would be an inconvenience to have one of you using mains powered equipment and the other using the solar on lower powered equipment - this is your dilemma....

I'm convinced that you can live off-grid in Portugal. Maybe your will have to upgrade the battery, but I guess it'll be possible.

Very informative video. I hope all your plans work out. Only question I have is, is it wise to have your water system (heat pump) in the same room as your electrical. What if a pipe were to burst and spray water in the room.

I currently have a Portuguese house that is off grid. My own experience even with 5.6kW of solar panels is that I still need to resort to using a generator to top up batteries at some times of the year. If I had the option of connecting to grid power for a backup at a reasonable cost I would do it at the drop of a hat.

I wish to see more the space

Oh! Dang , I thought you were going to talk about our earthly solar system 😂

That's what I'd do too! 👍

I hope you are considering a backup propane generator for your solar-powered system. Three of the off-grid homesteaders that I follow have these systems in place. Reason being the temperature requirements of solar batteries in case of an equipment failure of the chargers. Two of the three have had to use their backup systems at least one time each. Both are in areas where no grid power is available.

Very interesting and clear explanation! We are looking to expand our solar system in the coming year with more panels, another inverter and more batteries, so this is great food for thought. Our major hindrance is needing to hide everything, because of the proximity to a historic building... and the permissions from the local council. Very cool to be at the foot of a 10th century enclosure and we don't want to spoil the look of the site, but it does complicate things!

I have nothing to say really, but I appreciate your content, and wish to help with the yt-algorithms.