I've spent the last several years remodeling my home into a techie's dream
with gaming PCs, 10 gig networking, and screens everywhere. And it's kind of
awesome. But there is one
one fatal flaw. Despite the solar panels
we installed on the roof providing some clean energy some of the time, the
system was designed to feed excess power back into the grid rather than into a
battery bank. So during the stormy season, we regularly lose the one thing
a techie house needs more than anything else. Come on. The power and these
outages seem to be happening more and more frequently. So it's time to solve
this once and for all with a proper home
power backup solution.
Jake. Jesus.
Jake, this is not what we talked about. What do you mean it's mint? I thought
you wanted something cheap. Well, yeah, of course I want something cheap, but I want something safe. Um, I've got
paperwork. Hold on. See, like, look,
that's not the paper. That's just our sponsor, War Thunder. If you're into
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free using the link in the description. Got him. You see, Lionus isn't the only
one who's tired of our crappy power grid. And when I heard him complaining
about it, it gave me a wonderful idea. Why spend my time building a
cost-effective battery backup system for my house when I can get paid to do it
instead? It's just that when I pitched doing a sort of DIY, build your own
battery toolinus, he was understandably
a bit sketched out. So, I told him, "Don't worry, we'll just buy a complete
solution and then all we've got to do is hook it up." Which is exactly what I
did. There's just uh maybe a little bit more assembly required than I think he
was expecting. Now, if you've been keeping up with the Lionus house
renovation project, you might have seen the Eaton UPS or uninterruptible power
supply units in his rack. Yes, the one that got water all over it. That box is
basically a fancy battery that sits in between his networking, smart home
control, everything in his server rack, and as the name implies, provides
uninterrupted power to it in the event of an outage. The problem is they're
just only really designed to run for like a couple minutes. Just enough time
to save your work and shut down or in a larger scale setup like a data center.
Enough time for a generator to start up and fill in for the grid. Not nearly
enough for a several hourong outage. And while we could extend it with extra
eaten battery packs, at a retail price of
$1,500 per piece, even $6,000 later,
we'd still only have a few hours. Now, other setups like the Jackaryi I kind of
hinted at earlier could power the whole house. But with 10 kwatt hours costing
$6,000 as well, DIY it is. Starting with
the batteries. Now, in a normal whole house setup, in this day and age, you
would usually go with LFP or lithium ion
phosphate batteries. They're much more affordable than the solutions I just mentioned per kilowatt hour. But more
importantly, they're less explosive and have longer usable life than the
batteries we're going to be using today. Specifically, these four battery modules
we picked up from a scrapped Tesla Model S battery. They were $250 a pack, and
that is really freaking cheap. And since I'm not exactly sure how Linus is going
to feel about all this, these were a solid way to start a bit smaller. Not to
mention that these packs have a built-in balance and sensor board, which helps
with the safety factor, and we'll talk a bit more about that later. Because the
400 odd cells in this pack are primarily wired in parallel, which adds capacity
rather in series, which adds up the voltage. Each pack is only around 24
volts, but we need 48. So, we're going to take each pair and wire them together
in series, which will give us the exact same 48 volts. So, why don't we start
with that? This specifically is 4 gauge. Now, the gauge of the wire, which is how
thick it is and how much power it can handle, is really important. Um, but
we're not going to get into that just yet. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But what is important is how you
terminate it. They're actually Molex brand. Yes, that Molex, but no, not that
connector. These connectors are much, much beefier. So much so that you can't
put this on this cable without a special tool. Because even if you had a big pair
of pliers, the odds that you're going to be able to put enough force on this to
actually get a good connection, very unlikely. So instead, we're going to use
this, which is a hydraulic crimper. We picked this up on Amazon for about 100
bucks. And if you look at it closely, as I pump the lever, once it gets tight,
it's exerting a ton of force on that connector.
See, that is not going
anywhere. So, if we grab our lovely Fluke 117 multimeter here and measure a
single pack, we've got 23.4 volts. And
then if I go to measure uh the whole pack from negative to positive, 46. You
can even see our meter is in DC mode. Batteries are DC. And that means
basically that one side is positive and one side is negative. and the
electricity flows one way. You can see if I flip these around and put the positive lead on the negative side and
vice versa, we get negative voltage. Now, the power in your house, however,
is completely different. It's AC or alternating current. And if you were
able to check, you know, negative versus positive on that, please don't try. You
would see that the hot wire actually switches between negative and positive
60 times a second. At least in North America, you you can't just like hook
one of these batteries straight up to the wall. Please, please do not try
that. Instead, you need something called an
inverter and a charger. Oh my gosh, this is heavier than I was expecting. An
inverter takes the DC charge from our batteries and gives us AC wall power.
And then it also does the opposite because this is a hybrid. So, it'll take
wall power and give us DC power to charge the batteries. So, it's an
inverter charger. And the one we're going to be using, this EG4 6000XP, is
specifically designed for 48volt battery systems, which is why we put the
batteries together earlier. And if we open it up, we can see all sorts of
connections in here. We've got the big old battery terminals. This thing can do
a lot of battery. We've got load, which is what you connect anything downstream
that you want battery backed up. We've got grid, which is the incoming power,
so we can charge the batteries with that. It can pass it through when we're
not on battery. We've got gen, which is for a generator, which Lionus doesn't
have, but all of the units kind of in this price point seem to have that. So,
bonus feature, ah, and then PV input.
This is meant for connecting solar panels directly to the inverter charger.
If you're doing like an off-grid installation, like at a cabin where you
don't even have a grid to connect to, this specific unit, because it's called
the 6000 XP, can handle 6,000 watts of
power. And in a normal home battery setup, you'd take what you would call a
critical load panel, which is just a separate electrical panel, and wire up
all of the things that you need to power in an outage, like say medical equipment
if you have something like that, or controls for like a gas heating system.
That way, you're not wasting battery powering the entire house when you don't
really need to. In the final installation, we're probably just going
to power the whole house. However, for now, we're just going to set this up as
a completely standalone system, just like a UPS. And in our case, our
critical load, which is the server rack, it's already separated onto two PDUs,
which are basically fancy power
bars. A lot has changed, as you can see,
and obviously there's a lot of pieces here that we haven't talked about at all yet. So, let's do it. Now, you can just
take our batteries over there and hook them right up to this. It would work,
but it's not exactly safe. Primarily, if there's any sort of issue with this, not
to say that there will be, but if there was, that caused the pack to draw too
much power, we don't want our cables to be able to melt or for instance, if
somehow one of them got caught and shorted itself out. We want that system
to automatically be safeguarded against that. And to do that, you use fuses,
which do exactly that. These are rated for 80 amps. And there is kind of like a
a table that shows you at what amperage and what amount of time they blow. But
the main thing is if our battery pack gets shorted out for some reason or is
drawing way too much power, this fuse will blow and break the path of
electricity. So it doesn't start a fire or at least in theory. And we have one
of these for each of our series pairs of batteries. and they'll just sit in this
little fuse holder thingy here, which conveniently has a bus bar on the other
side that'll connect our two sets of packs together to get all of our
capacity into the inverter charger right here. There's also another safety
measure right here, which is called a contactor. And it's basically an
electronically controlled light switch, just like an electronically controlled
the biggest light switch you could possibly imagine. This thing can handle
900 volts DC and I think like how many
amps? I don't know. It doesn't matter. a freaking lot of amps. Way more than you
could possibly need in this pack because this is actually pulled out of a car if
there's any sort of issue with the pack. Ideally, we're detecting that ahead of
time. And the conttor will shut off the power. And how do you know if there's
anything wrong with the batteries? Well, the Vero Electric BMS V2, this thing is
the brains of our operations, or at least of the battery side. This thing
allows us to talk directly to the Tesla module balance boards and read the
temperatures, the voltages, everything. But more importantly, it controls our
contacttor big switch thing. So, if there is any problem with the pack,
something doesn't seem right, it shuts the power off and makes sure that
nothing breaks. Oh, and I almost forgot. There's one of these little clampy boys.
It's called a CT. uh it just goes on the negative wire and feeds back information
into the BMS to tell it how much amperage is going through so we know how
much it's being charged or discharged at any time. Now, we need to talk about how
we're going to connect to the house to get our incoming juice and connect the
rack to power the rest of the devices, especially when a power outage happens.
So, in North America, we have a little bit of a complicated situation. You see,
this is a normal power plug. You've got one wire that comes into here that gives
you 120 volt AC and the other wire is neutral which is not technically a live
wire technically technically except that in an electrical panel you also have
line two. So there's two these two wires
line one and line two are separated by 240 volts AC and the neutral just sits
in the middle. And so if you connect neutral to line one you get 120 volts.
If you connect neutral to line two you get 120 volt. But you have to deal with
both of these if you want to be able to back up an entire house or in our case
in Linus' rack, we have 240 volt and 120
volt. So we need to be able to power both of those devices. Now our inverter
is built for this. We've got L1, we've got L2. That's fine. It's just that at
the house it becomes a little bit complicated because we need to get all
of this on one plug ideally. And it just so happens that there's a solution for
this. this fancy plug called an L1430. The 30 standing for 30 amps, the
14 standing for whatever the heck this is. Gives us L1, L2, and neutral. Of
course, also a ground. And that means we can pull 120 volt and 240 volt off of
this one plug. From here, we'll run a big wire that can handle that 30 amp
load. It'll wire into L1 and L2 on grid.
Then we'll have our neutral on the neutral and then our ground into PE for
protected earth. And that's pretty much it on the input side. From the output
side, it's kind of the same story except that instead of wiring directly to a
plug, we need two plugs. So, I've got an L630, which connects to the PDU and
gives us 240 volt only, not both. And
then we've just got a normal receptacle, which will be our normal 120 volt.
Huzzah. With a little movie magic, now we're in Lionus' basement. And we have
everything here a little bit more put together than the last time you saw it.
I've done a bunch of wiring. We've got our output side all put together how we
talked about before. We don't even have the Tesla batteries hooked up yet. I
don't even have the cables made. But the next step is getting this thing on the
wall. I guess it has to go right here. This is pretty much the only option. And
Lionus isn't home right now. He's in Asia on vacation, which means I get to
put it wherever the I want. Now, before we do anything funky like getting this
wired up to the house, I'm going to hook this up with a different battery than
our Tesla packs. specifically this one
also made by the company that makes the inverter EG4. Now, if you're looking for
a more oh my god offtheshelf solution,
this is something you can look for. It's basically a rack mount unit made with
LFP batteries, which we talked about earlier. They're a lot safer and it
includes all of the safety and battery management stuff in this unit. It is a
fair bit more expensive than rolling your own solution, but you press the
power button here. It boots up. It's ready to go. And it hooks right up with
some RJ45 for communication with the inverter and some power leads. Damn.
Hey. Yeah, that's good. That's not half bad. Perfect. Let's slide this in the
corner, measure some cables, and then we'll reuse them for our temporary
battery and save these for Linus. And when you're hooking up a
battery system like this, it's very important that you get wire that is
thick enough to handle the amperage or the amount of energy that you're passing
through it. And this 6,000ish watt inverter means at 48 volts peak
load 125 amps. That's a lot of freaking amps, man. And since we have two packs
kind of that are being put together, we divide that by two. That means an
individual pack could be pulling anywhere upwards of 62 amps. And if we
look at our handy ampacity chart, which tells us what wire gauge you need for a
given amperage, we'll say 62 amps. So we'll go 70 is 6 gauge. And this is 4
gauge. So, we're good to go. The 4 gauge should be able to handle up to 100 amps.
So, this is lots. About that much ran into our fuse. And we actually have a
fuse for each of our pairs of packs. That way, if all of the power for the
full 6,000 watts was going from one pack, this fuse will blow and shut the
whole system off. Oh. Oh, fresh. Oh.
because I just want to see this thing turn on. I'm going to do something mildly cursed and use both red cables as
the positive and the negative for our pre-made battery from EG4. Now, if
you're doing this properly, you should use a torque wrench. I'm just going with
tight. If we clip this
on, hey, it's on. Please do not ever do this
at home.
Hey, look at that. You seeing it? 120 volt AC, baby. Now, my plan was to use
this plug, an L630, which powers his main big UPS with 240 volt power. The
problem is, despite what the panel was labeled, this is only a two wire cable,
which means we have line one and line two with no neutral, and we need the
neutral. So, we walk into the electrical supply store, and the guy's like, "Yeah,
they they won't they won't do that. They won't cut it off the roll." I'm like, "What do you mean they won't cut it off
the roll?" Look at how many rolls you have. Look over there. There's even more
rolls. Well, we got it, though. He He magically cut it off the roll for us, I
guess. So, I did a bunch of electrical work in your house, added a new plug, and in theory,
it's really theory cuz I haven't tested this part.
Hey, and then this is just batteries out
of what? A Model S? Yes. What' we pay for them? very little. For the
uninitiated, this is 20,000 watts for an hour or 1,000 watts for 20 hours.
Assuming no losses and whatnot. We're just Yeah, perfect world. Anyways, and
it was 1,000 bucks Canadian, which what Americans is like 600 US, dude. That is
5 kW hours and is $2,000. For the big
deployment, we're probably not going to actually use these. We will we will use
LFP batteries, but we'll build our own pack. Basically, I don't know too much
about the battery packs in older Model S's. I know these are 18650s
and there's a freaking lot of them. I think there's 444 in each of these. And
then uh how many packs would be in a full car? Uh I believe there's 16
modules in a whole battery pack in a Model S. Notice how these are exactly
the same length. Yes. It's very important when you're building a battery
pack that you have equal lengths between all of your different cells because you
don't want to be charging them ever so slightly different. Is this off here for
a reason? It could just go anywhere on there, right? Just put them here. So, I could also just put it here. What
happened to the nut? What am I doing? I'm drunk. You are drunk. What? Look at
this. Oh my god. I put that one on backwards. You are so drunk. I mean, it would still work. Now, we plug in the
BMS. Yeah, that has a mount. Look how
mounted that is. Oh, man. We can see our batteries are 27° 46.7 volts at a 62%
state of charge. I actually hadn't tested this contactor yet. If we were to
go like this. Uh-huh. Do you hear that? Yeah. That was
the contact. What's one of these worth? I think this is about 2 grand Canadians.
It's about 1,500 bucks. That's not bad. Considering it can do six kil watts.
Yeah, I didn't. I was just I was just chilling there. That's confidence
inspiring. Look how mounted that is. Ah, mint. Presently, our BMS cannot talk to
the inverter over CAN and like have a nice communication and tell each other
what's going on. However, I did yell at both of the companies and they have been
for like the last 3 weeks working on getting them integrated. So, Oh, that's very cool. In a couple weeks, you
hopefully will be able to use an EG4 inverter with a VO BMS and they'll just
talk to each other and everything's good. Super cool. For now, we have to run it in lead acid mode. Lead acid mode
is basically you don't have a lithium battery that has a battery management it
can talk to. So, we could set the charge current to whatever we want if we wanted
to control temperatures or Yeah. 100%. So, actually in a Tesla, I mean, if you
look, there's there's coolant terminals on the outside. Yeah. And you can water
cool them. And realistically, if you're doing an EV conversion, you really would
want to water cool them, but we could hook it up to the pool. Yeah, you could.
We're pulling from the grid, charging 2900 watts, and then we are consuming
2,000 watts all at the same time. Let's just try it. Okay. Okay. So, we're just
going to unplug the wall. Okay. I heard a beep. Oh,
everything's bad. It's bad. Oh, come on.
46 amps. 48 45. She goes. That simple. Let's
go. In conclusion, this is kind of awesome. Not that crazy. Right now, all
we need to do is 10x it. Yeah, a 200 kWh
battery would be freaking sick. But where do we put it? I'm thinking this
goes. Yeah. And we basically just build
a giant battery wall. Like I could put this bench on wheels, put it over here
in front of all this stuff, and then if I ever need to access this, I just wheel it away. Yeah. Or I could just not do
this in here, and I could just use my garage like a normal person. Or this could just sit in front of the
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for free. If you guys enjoyed this video, uh maybe go check out the one
that we did on putting the solar panels on the roof. They're really cool panels.
It just turns out they're not quite compatible with this application cuz I told them not to have ones like that.
Yeah, making this work for the whole house and the solar is going to be
interesting.