Solar DIY Backup Budget Build for Power Outage HQST MPPT Redodo battery WZRELB Inverter 24 Volt

good day boys and girls remember back in 2020 the lockdowns I built this bad boy right here nothing but the finest craftsmanship yeah no I just threw it together because of the the lockdowns I needed a radio so I built the uh model CV 2020 now we can't say names here the government they don't like they don't like us talking about that stuff so this is a solar video so I needed a battery you know this thing here only runs off of a cord I needed to build a battery system for it enter the CV 19 2023 my battery backup for my radio 5,000 KW now I'm just joking about that too listen built this we get ice storms here in Oklahoma and takes out our power for like 5 days so I wanted to keep the refrigerator and the freezer going without having to fire up my generator so I went on a quest to put together a system that would run our refrigerator our freezer and the uh fan for our our natural gas heater so that's all I got to get going to get heat in my house natural gas is still working I just need the fan enter this puppy right here all right let's go over the heart of this operation the batteries got the red Doo why do you redo do because you'd rather redo do than redo don't all right I did my research redoo red Odo however you want to pronounce pronounce it I pronounce it redo do because you want to do get these because uh the price was like 260 some dollars per battery and uh they're like 1280 wat hour batteries 100 amp 12 volt and uh see it says right there 12.8 100 aamp batteries they're ready to go great price Great Value and it's going to handle what I need for my uh power outages so there's the meat and potatoes of it and again you would rather redo do than redo don't you can get a cheaper battery maybe but you're not going to get the customer service that uh these rodu batteries can provide all right following up I bought these t tocus uh Breakers because you can literally just push the button disconnects everything put a 250 down here way Overkill but it's primarily being used for a little bit of safety and to cut the system off I like the lugs on the 200 amps and above of the ttus the ttus uh brand is a 3/8 in lug whenever you go to 200 amps and above I like that got these bus bars they were cheap got to do a little bit more uh research they're going to be fine for me they said 250 amps I thought that was great but come to find out these are just brass nickel plated brass so uh yeah I'm not going to be doing anything more than about maybe Max 120 amps Max whenever I'm drawing in the three things I was telling you about the uh refrigerator freezer and the fan for the things I'm not too concerned with this build it's going to do fine if I want a cup of coffee or something like that you know I'm not running them 24/7 so if they get a little hot then they'll cool back down but there was one of my mistakes right there should have looked a got all uh got all copper all right coming up two more touses a 200 Amper again with a 38 in lugs I like that going to my wzb pure sinewave inverter 3,000 Watts at 24 volts that's right I'm doing a tying uh two together in series two together in parallel so I got a 24volt system over here I got a ttus 80 amp breaker it's coming up to my HQ St solar controller charger controller whatever you want to call it and uh little bit about this hqst is yeah it's an offbrand name but if you look the great Folks at Roto have a 40 amp controller that looks just like this this is a 60 Amper and I got it for a little over $200 now if you get that you're not going to get the support that you did from uh sa do in fact hqst they sent me the wrong tracking number said it was going to Houston I don't live in Houston then it said it arrived in Houston I didn't arrive I kept on they wouldn't answer me back no customer service they answered me back whenever they said oh we showed that it showed up on your front porch today well that was like a couple days after it said it showed up down in Houston so yeah you're not going to get any customer support in my opinion in my experience so if you want to save some bucks go out with this uh yeah I'll have to show you the box it came into that's kind of funny you can this is a Rebrand of another company that bought it from another company and uh I think the company's Helios maybe Mak some I don't know but uh yeah do your own research on that again great review on it by there's a guy let me talk about that there's a guy reviewed this on uh the YouTubes as I like to call it you know he wears white gloves give double fisted punches powpow I don't know kind of you know sound he loved it but I'm sure they were giving him good customer support cuz they knew he was going to push it for him so yeah whatever he had a question they probably ask it you know answer his calls right away but uh gave it a good review so I'm thinking it's a solid product it weighs a ton this thing is built solid so uh I don't think if it works which it is I don't think I'm going to have an issue now that I don't need customer support anymore coming down to the inverter the wz lb brand very popular a lot of people get them 3,000 watt inverter nice big lugs I'm only going to be running about a th000 Watts through this bad boy though and uh come over here got a nice digital screen shows you the uh bolts coming in and the AC coming out uh let me unplug this you've got the 110 outlet say say you probably should only use about 15 amps down to that sucker and you can run more close to 30 amps off of the tie lines and I I marked them hot ground neutral there's no markings for it but I hit it with the meter made sure I'm looking really good but from what I did from my research everybody's really happy about these and they don't draw too much current just sit and idle they do I mean but not not any more than most other brands so pretty happy with that coming down to my wires got two gauge should handle up to oh 100 150 amps I believe is what it is with the two gauge crimped on some nice lugs which I'll get into that in a second but did that one of my mistakes everybody's going to call me out on it is I need to run this ground instead of coming down here need to run it over here the power's off of that one so these all charge more equally I kind of screwed that up so working on that all right on my solar input got this one uh with the box and everything it was about 30 bucks oh by the way these These are going to average around $30 this was like $32 $35 that's be safe and saying to get this uh breaker but it's nice I got it wired up into the controller the battery charger comes out like I said here it's a black cable but it's it's positive going down there I'll get some red tape I'll I'll tape that up too just so nobody gets confused put some heat shrink on it or something we'll work on that but uh yeah there's the uh there's the system all right a lot of people want to know you know what the heck that looks like a pretty heavy box and it is I ain't going to lie let's carry it me and my wife did but we don't want to do it every time so I'll probably take the batteries out next time take them individually but how this works and you know let's get this off of here put it down on the ground okay how this operates is I have it hinged all right so you take it you LIF lift it up all right then you drop the rod through these like that all right well uh you can run this you can run this either up or down uh it's the the wires are long enough right there to flex cover let's just show you again here how this works pull this out this is hard to do with the phone but here you go hinged down as you can see on this side plenty air flow I mean it's wide open so uh the heat sinks are up on that controller so the Heat's just going to rise and drift out of the box that way and there's plenty of Gap here from the top for air to you know flow in and out around that let's come over to the other side I see we got the controller here not the controller the uh inverter 3000 wat 24 volt 3000 wat inverter plenty of room and again nothing but tons of room you know you're safe from hitting any of the battery terminals and uh yeah you can get to all that real easy all righty you also want to get yourself one of these guys right here say you disconnect the breaker for the inverter it sits for a long time you're going to get a whale of a spark whenever you connect up these Terminals and it'll pit your stuff and it's it will re wreak hav on it so what you want to do is you want to just touch this resistor to there to there for about say 5 seconds then lock it in you're not going to get any spark to go and just hurt your uh insides of your of your breaker at all so you want to get that I also do the same with the uh site controller when whenever I first fire it up then latch that in now after I latch I I latch the main first then I'll charge this up latch that one charge that one up latch it and then you're good to go here you go here's uh here it is if you need the information and yeah you you don't want to run the system without one of those of course whenever you're doing any of this you want a good meter you want a meter that does the voltage Vol ages and amperage what you do is you clamp this around your uh batteries and it'll tell you how much amp is going through that wire there and uh this one does DC and you got to make sure they do DC and ac voltage cuz you know we're primarily using DC and a lot of them are just AC only so make sure this was like $37 which I did my research there's some other really good ones about 45 this was 37 it it got really good reviews it's the Astro AI Astro AI CM K cm4 k0r yeah it's well constructed really accurate it reads like two decimals out on the voltages so yeah I'm really pleased in that is it Astro yeah Astro a I here's the two uh panels that I'm using they're just 100 W panels so I got a 24volt system I got to get the voltage up a little bit more so two in series so that's you know the ca's coming over go to the positive this one then these two are hooked together then from the negative this one come on out and it goes goes back to my system and uh pretty soon I'm going to take this satellite dish off and I'm going to put uh some bracing on it so I can track so I'll Mount four of these on there and then I can turn it with the sun and also turn the elevation so it'll be kind of nice all right inside the garage I've got uh three of these 400 watt panels that I'll use if the power goes down for a lot by the way that's OT Elliot sadders windshield caught on fire while he's uh qualifying I believe at Talladega not sure but that's there uh yeah so I got three of those so I got 12200 Watts there and uh if if I'm just using them and not too intensively I just throw on the 400 watts of the smaller panels but you know I got 1,200 I can add an extra controller to it and uh actually get up to, 1600 Watts if I wanted to so yeah I got I got all three of those panels for $225 so that's like $75 a piece that's really good for 400 W panels all right I picked up this uh Roto 20 amp 12vt charger so I could uh charge each battery you want to charge the batteries to be even before you put them into your system what do you think doy yeah doy agrees you got to put this get every battery topped off balanced out before you put it in your system that's very very important heck you know you could probably get one cheaper than redo do but remember what I say go with REO do don't redo don't I figure if I get the one from the manufacturer it's going to be the right one to get they're not going to sell you something that's not good for their own batteries so I paid a little bit more got this uh so I can top off the batteries balce them out before I hook them all up very important uh get yourself one of these also well in conclusion of today's testing and like I said only threw 200 Watts on it I can do a lot more I can easily do 12200 watts of those other panels or 1,600 Watts if I parallel series those in line yada yada go watch some videos I make make a video of that so got to make sure the voltages and the amperages are just right to be able to mismatch panels but literally I'm only going to be doing 1200 watt probably the three 1200 the three 400 watt panels in there and uh yeah if anybody has any questions or uh I'll try to put a list of everything got here here's a a dog here keeping an eye on the system and everything uh yeah you're a good dog uh I played around the GE can't go wrong with the George Foreman that one was like 700 700 watt George Foreman testing it with that running it down charging it up I again I got to get the battery that negative B battery terminal so they're offset I'm and I'll do a I'll come back after I run this for a while and do a review on my system maybe show it this uh winter if we lose power do a video while I got everything in use but yeah so far everything's running great nothing's getting warm even with the uh 700 watt you know for the 3,000 watt inverter it's just tickling it the cables are all doing just great nothing nothing was getting hot whatsoever so I think I can run 1,000 Watts without even thinking about any of the uh cables getting hot or anything like that so tests are good uh if you have any questions you know hit me down in the comments down below uh like I say you want to R A do instead of R A don't do your own research they got you know people love them uh the prices are incredible and uh customer service answer my question right away so I want to thank redo do I'm going to say or red red Odo or rodo whatever it is it's red it's red R what am I trying to say redo redo do you want a redo do you don't want a Rau don't all right well again hopefully I learn a lot from my mistakes in putting this together hopefully you got a little bit of insight of what a system uh could be probably could get away with a 40 amp charger and just be fine but 60 amp I can grow a little bit I just Tickle Pink with how this all worked out oh one last thing here hold on these with a whole bunch of connectors were like $38 and these you just crimp you want to get a good crimper whenever you're doing them two gauge wires this will do all kind of gauges smaller gauges all the way up to I think zero zero gauge all the way to you know smaller stuff so get yourself they're not you know the greatest in the world but man you can't pull the connectors apart and everything's cool as can be so it's working good anything else uh oh along with your volt meter over there along with a good volt meter I got this thing it tells you how much you know AC you're draing out of it so I can monitor that and uh my refrigerator was only in 24 hours was 1,000 wat hours so I'm really pleased with that that means my I'll be able to charge during the day and keep everything running that I think I'll be using I think I'll be under 1,000 Watts total if everything's kicked in at the same time you know 100 on the freezer maybe like 200 something on the refrigerator and uh the fan kicking on every now and then to run the gas heat is like 500 watts 400 500 somewhere in there so yeah nothing's going to be sometimes they'll all be right running but they're all turning off it's going to be colder so the fridge is out in the garage so it it'll be it won't be kicking on too much and the refrigerator it you know you know how they are they kick on kick off uh I should be able to make it throughout the night on this I've got some uh Jackies with a lithium ion uh batteries don't I've got 200 watt panels for those so I can throw those in there too they're they're the older batter uh lithium technology so takes about 5 hours for them to charge back up so I can charge them during the day use them at night also I think I easily can make it through the uh the night time and then back into the day and you know be pulling in enough sun to charge I have less than 20 since this a 60 amp charger I got four batteries that's Le that's like 15 amps uh char so I'm not hitting the batteries hard that's why I went with four also more capacity and also uh less you know only 14 amps going into each uh battery they recommend 20 amps you know to charge them so I'm underneath the recommendation of uh 20 amps so I'm not going to be hitting them hard probably keeping the batteries lasting long that's it guys uh you know I'll I'll follow up on this again in battery terminals make sure they're all uh copper make sure everything your wires 100% copper good stuff I'll put in the description not the description yeah the in the description I will put where I got all this that's going to take me an hour because but I bought some other stuff too and uh yeah I found out that I probably shouldn't have gone with that stuff so I got some leftover equipment uh learn from my mistakes I'll throw everything I got in here uh and I'll let you know how it all works out do some more testing and uh yeah if I'll do a video if I use it this winter when the power's out well Knuckleheads back to you and have a great day and uh good luck with your solar projects