okay this guy apparently just carries this freaking thing right up the ladder
okay um here you go i was expecting there to be like a
little crane truck or something whole room water cooling
that's old news this video is going to be about whole house water cooling but
maybe not really in the way that you'd expect isn't it water heating it's
complicated basically the contractors are here at the house right now
installing some of the trippiest solar panels that i have ever seen in my life
on the one side totally normal photovoltaic cells
on the other side fittings for water pipes that's right
ladies and gentlemen we are going to be using these combinations solar panels to
power my house and heat my pool and we're gonna explain why that actually
might not be as crazy an idea as it sounds like thanks to epic games for
sponsoring this video it's coming pc building simulator 2 is coming and you
can wish list it now at the epic game store stay tuned at the end of this
video to learn more
there are a lot of reasons i wanted solar at our new house it's infinitely
renewable zero emissions in bc we have
net billing which means that any excess power i generate can be sold at the same
rate that i buy it back to the grid and it's relatively low maintenance without
any moving parts at least a normal install without a pump would be but
here's the thing despite advancements in the field most solar panels are only
between 15 and 20 percent efficient with
these ones from dual sun landing at around the 20 mark for the uninitiated
then that means that the solar panel can only convert 20 percent of the incoming
solar energy into electricity which in optimal conditions would yield
375 watts per panel multiplied by the 24
panels we have for our installation that is a theoretical peak output of 9
000 watts holy sh point of clarification though we actually have two different
kinds of panels for the install and that was based on a recommendation from
well dual sun the installer and the distributor
yeah the distributor basically when you have multiple banks of them it can be
pretty hard to a bleed the system once you fill it b
drain it when you need to in the winter because it does go below zero here so on
one side of the house we're gonna have regular non-water cooled panels they're
called their flash model there you go and on the other side we're gonna have
their i shouldn't say water cooled panels because it's more like the panels
serve as a water heater but it's actually both and we'll give you a little bit more explanation of that once
we talk about the water ones in the meantime though i mean it's a solar panel what else can
we really say we definitely aren't experts on solar i know that you point
the sun at it or this at the sun and electricity comes out more sun more
better yeah more sun more better they use shingle cells i guess that's fancy
look this the solar installer over there is laughing at us he knows stuff that we
don't why don't we do them a favor and carry this over to where they're
actually dragging these things up the roof yeah let's do it
oh god wow they're actually heavier than i expected that guy was just raw dogging
this by himself i know right okay this guy apparently just carries this
freaking thing right up the ladder okay um here you go it's upside down well you
want to flip it that way oh yeah i think it's got it oh i see you take it from that side yeah yeah yeah so you wanna oh
you want it like that wow we had it as wrong as possible i think Jake what is
this i was expecting there to be like a
little crane truck or something and they've already taken like 15 of
them up so there's 12 on the other side of the house that are already installed
this is great our intention was to show you guys this stuff on the ground but i think this is even better so it's a
simple aluminum extrusion kind of frame i actually wouldn't really call it a
frame because it's just yeah it's just bars across and then you can see they're
bolted into ah there you go the roof presses below all right these are
enphase micro-inverters and the reason we need inverters is that solar power is
inherently dc so in order for it to be
used by any of the electronics that we have in our homes we're going to want to
convert it to ac so you can see these leads are going to go into our solar
panels and these guys out here you can see are wired from panel to panel to
panel and are all going to go back down to the ground to the main shut-off we
went with these micro-inverters from enphase for a few reasons one is the
efficiency so by having micro-inverters on each panel apparently it's better for
efficiency and it also means that in the event of an inverter failure the whole
system doesn't just get taken out two was that they came strongly recommended
by both our roofing company as well as a
commercial supplier that i got in touch with they wouldn't sell me anything
because i was an end user but they were happy to give me recommendations so
shout out for hespv thank you guys very much for the information and number
three end phases inverters apparently can communicate to home assistant now
i'm not sure what if anything i would do with that
information other than just monitoring the solar output of the array you know
you're never going to want to turn them off so there's not really a whole lot of
home automation you'd want to do but being able to at least monitor them is
cool there's one more thing that we want to look at here
it's the junction box or they call it a it's a sola deck they offer to open it
up but it's pretty straightforward basically you just take
all of the output of these banks of panels they go into here
and then they make their way oh actually you can see all the grounding is connected through here as well and then
they're gonna make their way down the house and we'll have a look at the shut off down there another fun one check
this out the beginning of this video i talked about whole house water cooling
that's what these tubes are for these are going straight to the mechanical
room which is also the server room and they're going to be used to cool the
entire server rack which is going to be the vast majority of the computing power
in the building make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that one
the reason i bring this up though is actually this
this right here is the armored power cable that is also going straight into
the mechanical room and this is wired up to our shutoff let's go have a look
actually we interrupt this look at the cutoff to bring you they are actually
installing the panels now so we're getting a good look at them hooking up
the dc side to the inverter and then they've actually got the water cooling
tubing up there as well stop calling it water cooling i don't have to stop
calling it water cooling because it's kind of both it serves two purposes one
is to heat up the water that presumably you will use somewhere whether it's for
hot water out of your tap or whether it's to dump into your pool or hydronic
heating but the cooling serves a purpose as well because cooling solar panels
actually increases their efficiency so when they rate solar panels typically
it's done when the cells are at 25 degrees celsius which is that's great
but your solar cells might reach degrees of like 70
i mean there's they're black and they're sitting out in the sun you do them like in la or something like that here maybe
not so much but they say that it can increase the efficiency of the panels by
five to fifteen percent or actually not the efficiency the electricity output so
it's not like it's 35 now it's like 5 to 15 on top of 20 right
combined with the solar energy they pull out through heat supposedly it's about a
2x increase of solar energy harness which is pretty insane yeah i'm excited
here we go i actually did a pretty nice job with the install here armored cable
running down from the junction box into this guy right here which presumably i
can open it wouldn't be powered yet there you go a couple of 20 amp breakers
so that would be the the two different banks are both coming through here and
then we're going to have a main shut off alright come on
look at that boy right there at the beginning of the video we showed
the front of the panels which is the same for both models now that we've got
it flipped around we can see what's different about the hybrid spring panels
so there's a couple of things here one is that the backs of them are actually
insulated because we don't want the heat
to be dumped out into the surrounding air we want the heat to go into the
water the second is we've got these tubing hookups here
this one's a hookup that one's not seems to be in there
this is kind of trippy is this just made out of like plastic poster board it kind
of looks like that it looks like it just like a corrugated
i wonder if there's like thermal pad in there it doesn't really look like it yeah maybe it's just like so much excess
energy that it doesn't really matter so basically it goes in here
spreads all out here comes across the panel and then this is blocked off and
it comes out this side and ah here we go
these guys right here which seem to be just protectors
just a cap yeah pre-lubed some o-rings in there lots of lots of lube on there
and these look like some serious
clicky hefty boys here i am not going to
click this all the way in because i don't know how easy that would be to remove but basically it clicks in a
little something like that and the whole thing hooks up to well your pool or your
in-floor heat or whatever the case may be i was actually a little bit worried
about putting pool water through this thing but it turns out that oh it's
meant for that chlorinated water is totally a-okay but that's one of the
reasons that we're going to have to winterize it so if we had water with
anti-freeze in and we were using a heat exchanger to
move the heat into whatever other system then we probably wouldn't have to drain
it for the winter especially here where it doesn't get but there's some efficiency loss doing that and you know
it is pretty heavy though 27 kilos so that's
just shy of 60 pounds about 60 pounds for our american friends
asking about the tubing he says it's a lot of stuff to fit behind the panel so
the cable and tubing management is a
bit challenging fortunately the tubing is really low profile and flexible
tastes like yeah sure when we ordered that did that whole tube thing come with the panels
like pre-measured it came with a big roll it wasn't cut or anything though oh
so you guys had to make and then like add the connectors on uh
yeah the plumbers did that and they definitely did it right right
i'm not a plumber i'm an electrician
it's been a couple days now and all of the panels are installed the wiring done
the breakers flipped on now they haven't quite finished the plumbing but they're
gonna do that over the next week or so but in the meantime they were able to
flip the switch on so we can actually see how much power we're making now
today is kind of gross it's totally overcast
so we're not expecting a lot but i guess we'll see i'm going to give
Linus a call once we go back inside back inside the house we can actually see the
breakers they've installed so we've got our 240 volt 40 amp and then we've got
the end face envoy connection so now this is the end phase envoy it's
basically like a little computer that monitors all the statistics of the micro
inverters it can check the individual panels since every panel has its own
inverter it monitors how much power is drawn by
the system or your whole house and also how much power is generated and you can
show your like grid independence now they just sent us an invite to the app
so hopefully i log in here we might actually be able to see how much power
we're making i see power let me call Linus
hey you're on speaker okay so they uh they set up the end phase system so i
can see how much power we're making wait we can get a readout already i got a
readout already it's it's only been up for like 20 minutes or something like
that so guess how much power it's complete overcast like yeah i don't know
so the absolute peak was 9000 watts and
i know that we had to reposition the panels
and they're not water cooled i'm gonna say like
1500 watts right now the latest measurement was 1.2 kilowatts and the
peak was 1.3 i think he said it updates about every five minutes
so far we've produced one and a half kilowatt hours of electricity and you've
consumed 1.2 and it says we've actually
sold 0.5 kilowatt hours to the grid
that's awesome so you've made like maybe five cents or something like that i'm
completely grid independent even on an overcast day yeah well i mean with
nothing not at night obviously nothing in the
house running but yes here it says 100 energy independence now in the app
there's actually like statistics so you can see your
how much power was consumed and produced you can see how much was imported which
is like electricity that's come in from the grid and how much you've sold man on
a sunny day when we're even when we're running the ac i bet it's gonna be sick
dude on a sunny day you're probably gonna be producing like four or five
kilowatts in the app there's also like uh they haven't set it up yet but
there's gonna be a grid view where you can see all the panels like how they're
arranged on the roof and then you can click on an individual panel and see how
much power it's making so like you can see one side of the house makes more
power than the other we'll be able to see if the ones that
are water cooled are like making more power it's pretty freaking
sick i love it so the system works
and so does our sponsor thanks again epic games for sponsoring today's video
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out the uh smart home power
monitoring one that we did yeah because that's kind of related that's gonna be relevant soon yeah we're gonna end up
using that to monitor usage home system has like a solar energy page now
so maybe the end phase will hook into that and then we'll use that for like power drive the time we've been working
on this project the technology has like caught up to our ambitions for it you
know aside from the thermostats