Dos anys amb una casa solar: per què canvia un generador de 28.000 $ per un de portàtil

We've hit two years live in off grid here in Southern Utah, powered by this 20KW power plant, and today I want to share with you what I've learned over those two years, how my thinking on usage has evolved, and how we're planning to bolster the system for those times when we have really bad stormy weather and we're not getting sufficient power to charge up our batteries. Let's get into it. The year ago I posted a video asking whether going off grid was worth it or not. That was the one year anniversary video. I'll post that up here as well as in the description. But now, after the honeymoon phase, where at the two-year mark, I've got enough data, both from the SoulArch app and from my utility company, to tell you a little bit more of a complete picture. I also want to talk about how my thoughts have evolved on backing up our batteries when we don't have enough sun to power this array. Before we jump in, just as a reminder, I'm not sponsored by any of the manufacturers that you'll see in this video or any video on my channel for that matter. I pay with my own money. So I just want to go over the componentry of our solar power plant really quickly so that you have a better picture, especially if you're new here. Outside we have a sinclair ground mount, seasonally adjustable array that I can hand crank to varying angles throughout the year. And on that rack I have 44 KB by facial 451 solar panels. We did all of the trenching underground ourselves and if you want to learn more about the whole process of building this system, I'll link that in the description as well. Inside the barn here, which is adjacent to our solar array, we've got two 15K solar converters, EMP hardened. They run down into this wiring trough across to this switch, and I'll explain more about how we're connected to the grid and why here in just a second. In an underneath here, there's a little power box that's right now as empty, and that's designed for the, for the backup generator that is going to sit outside behind the barn here, when needed and I'm going to update you on how I'm thinking about that backup generator because my thoughts have changed quite a bit on that. So we're going to cover that coming up. And then over here we have our 18 Rubik's giga stack lithium phosphate batteries with little LED screens that light up to tell me where I'm at in my total state of charge. Right now this says 81%. So it is kind of early in the morning. I can hear the inverters humming over here. We are powering up. We'll probably hit 100% by or before noon today, which is pretty typical. And then all of these little screens light up, I will say that some of these screens are a little bit glitchy. But it doesn't affect the performance of the battery. It doesn't really affect anything. So I have not tried to get a warranty claim and switch out the screens. It's just really not worth it. Because it's just got this weird little pattern here at the top of these, but other than that, they're perfect. I've been really happy with this system. I've not had any maintenance, no downtime, no real service issues to speak of at all.

We are connected to the internet through a dongle on the side of the inverters. And that goes to a Wi-Fi extender that I have on the side of the house outside. And that brings it into the house, connects to my starlink, so that I can see the performance of my system on my phone or on my computer, really anywhere I'm at the world. In fact, quite often, if I'm traveling, I like to just pull up my solar cap and just see how the system is doing. See if it's fully charged up. How low the state of charge went overnight based on the weather patterns. And I can do that for many where in the world, which is a really cool feature. I like that a lot. That's built in and comes standard with these solar converters. But these batteries have been great. This is 95KWH of battery storage. As I've mentioned in earlier videos, we have a luxury home stand. We have all sorts of appliances. We run our laundry hours of the night and day. We don't really pay any attention to counting kilowatt hours in the house. We just live as if we were on grid. But we've noticed over this two-year period of time that we do get into some times of the year when we've got really stormy weather for multiple days, maybe snow building up on the array, which I can walk out and clean off easily because it's a ground mountain ray. But it's still, even if you clean off the snow, you've still got cloudy weather, you're going to have really diminished solar absorption into your array. So we've noticed that we do get to a point where we start to worry a little bit about our battery capacity because right now the only backup we have is the grid. And if you're not familiar with the channel, when we first built this house we did it in phases, we bought the land, phase one, we built the house in phase two, phase three it was five long years later that we excavated for the barn and used the dirt to build the flat solar array because we're on the side of a mountain here. And then so we built the barn, we also needed a place to keep all of our equipment. So all that tied together in a phase three. So there was quite a while when we first moved here that we were on grid. And we didn't really see any reason to disconnect from the grid. We just have this absolute drop into pretty much almost zero usage,

but we have a $15 a month connectivity fee from the power plant, from the power company. Here's a graph from our utility company. This is two years of data. And you can see that when we went off grid, it just dropped down to zero usage. And it pretty much stays almost zero kilowatt hours until we get into those winter months. When we start getting down below 50% state of charge due to our lifestyle, number one, how much we're using in the house, as well as the weather conditions at the time. And we have it set for the grid to kick on and recharge the batteries, when we get down to 50% state of charge. Now why would we do that? Because if for some reason, the grid went down and we were in strongmue weather, And we were down below 50%, we would have very little room to maneuver and very little stored energy at that point. And that would be a really scary situation. And it's actually kind of likely that that could happen because when it's really stormy, that's when you're most likely to use the grid. And that's also when you're most likely to deplete your batteries. So in the absence of having a backup generator, we use the grid as our way to replenish our batteries. can see we're right now at 81% state of charge. It's only 10, 30 in the morning, so by noon this will be at 100%. And that's the way it is on most days. We're at the end of May here in Southern Utah, so when I get to 100% state of charge, that doesn't start to go down until almost nine o'clock, maybe when the sun completely goes down, and it's not on the array anymore. And we're doing laundry, and we might do a jacuzzi or a sauna in the house and we're running all of the lights in the electronics. We'll start to see that going down. Plus we've got air condition. We have upstairs and downstairs air conditioner.

They're running all the time. We like it nice and cold at night. So we have one in particular in our the bedroom level of the house that's running all night long. That does start to pull the batteries down, but we're nowhere near getting down to 50% depletion. So the grid never kicks on during the summer in that pattern of daylight. When we do see that go down and pull down to 50% the grid kick on is in the winter months or maybe monsoon season. We start getting these multi-day storms. Let's take a quick look at the solar cap and you can see our usage and I'll walk you through this so that you can see what this system is doing throughout the average day, month and year. This is the live view of our system right now. I'm just pulling this from the solar cap. Again, this is connected via Wi-Fi from the Dongle on the side of the inverter. We're We're pulling 1,086 watts off of the array right now. That's reflected here as well. You can see that this is our battery bank. It's at 100% state of charge right now. So we're topped off. It is in float at the moment. Here is the grid, a net-logible amount coming off the grid for whatever reason is 29 watts coming off the grid. We're not unnet-metering by the way, so I cannot sell anything back to the power company. So again, the only reason why we have a connectivity to the grid at all is just that redundant backup. option. And here is our usage right now, the load in the house, which is very, very low at the moment. It's midday, everyone's out doing something that's no one here, just me, on the computer with some lights on. As a scroll down here, you'll see that this is sort of a time line of the day. All of this through the middle of the night is the air conditioner, by the way, just keeps coming on and cooling, coming on and cooling. And you can see that the state of charge right here, this blue line, is also reflected at the little box area. you can see that in the middle of the night we only got down to here at 7 a.m. before the sun came up we were still at 72% state of charge. okay then we start pulling in from the p.v. right here and you can see that that sun is coming up It's hitting the array and then it arcs up very very sharply until we get here and then it drops off a cliff because we hit 100% state of charge now we're going into float. Down here the purple area is the battery so it's the inverse of the income power into the array, it's charging the batteries. And this sort of orange layer here is the use, are the load. Then the little yellow line right along the bottom there, which is basically zero is just what's coming from the grid, which is it's always just trickling like 50, 28 watts, 30, 3 watts. For whatever reason, it just pulls a little bit off the grid. So you can see that if I go turn to grid off, we're not going to feel it. It doesn't matter to our system at all. The only time the grid matters is when we get into a multi-day storm and our battery bank starts to get

low. And we're pretty stubborn. We don't really change our lifestyle until we see that, oh man, looks like the storm's going to last for a couple more days. We'll start turning off some lights and being a little bit mindful of our, you know, each kilowatt we're using. Other than that, we live as if we're on grid. So, you know, our system is sized correctly. It is sized for even dark winter spans of time, but it's still not enough to endure complete, you know, luxury lifestyle, living and just running everything, all the appliances, jacuzzi, and laundry, without charging. It's going to run the battery bank down with usage like that. So what we've learned over two years is we do need to be mindful of our usage when we get into wintery type weather, or monsoon season and we are learning that and we were adapting to that and so most of the time we live a luxury lifestyle as if we're on grid but a few months of the year and a few little time periods a few storms will be a little bit more mindful. Here's a monthly view for the last two years you can see month one and along the bottom here there's a color code that tells you what you're looking at. The orange or pink whatever that is is the load. The green is the PV. The yellow is the export. We're not exporting any so there is no yellow. Import is at little tiny orange dot all on the bottom there. That's just whatever we just take a few hundred watts a day from the grid. Even though we don't need it it's not charging the batteries. I don't even know why it trickles in because we don't need it at all. And then the charge is the light blue and then the discharge is the usage or the discharge from the batteries. So this timeline view as you slide here it kind of goes along to the full. There's the 23rd month over here on the far right and you can just see all your different usage incoming sun. When we had the most sun when we had the least sun and the varying loads. When I switch over to the year, this isn't each year. This is each month of this year. We've only had this for two years now. So this is January February March April May and you can just see your individual usage for each month of the year and then when I click on total it shows you the entire time since we've been with Solark and we turned this on in late July of 2024 and you can compare that to a full year in 2025 and then another partially here because we're only in May of 2026 as this is recorded. I just want to remind everyone the main reason why we installed this system is not for the ROI to try and save a bunch of money or to get out from underneath the thumb of the big utility companies. We built this system as redundancy and as a way to protect ourselves against a potential of a grid down situation for a prolonged grid down situation and also for continuity of power here in in this area where we get a lot of utility shutoff. Our projected ROI is around 26 years with a total of 168,000 dollars saved over 30 years. That's based on rising utility costs and factoring and other increases in our usage that our current array can absorb, but that we would be paying for if we were still on grid. So I've tried to reflect that in this chart. And then when you back out the 120,000, we spent on the system, you end up with a net gain of $47,000 around the 30-year mark. Now let's get into how my thinking has evolved about the backup generator that we're going to be installing. To juice up the batteries when we have a

multi-day storm, we want something that if the grid is also down, we can use to charge the batteries and keep this whole system running until we get back to a sunny weather pattern again. So that could be three days, it could be four days. I don't think we've seen a storm that lasted more than four days before the sun came back up in the entire five or six years with that we've been here on this ranch. So I'm not really worried about having a robust system that needs to run for days and days and days or throughout multiple weeks throughout the year. It's really only a few spotty storms here and there. And we do lose our power fairly often here in this area. So they're absolutely worth the money. But most of the time they're just sitting there, you know, they'll cycle and exercise once a week. But you know, when you need them, you really need them, but when you don't need them, they're just sitting there. So I've decided after speaking with Chris over at practical preppers who's the company that designed the system for me. And again, I'm not in doors, I'm not paid to promote them. I just think they're a really good company. I'll link them down below. They're based out of South Carolina and the owner Scott is also got a YouTube channel called Engineering 775. If you want to check him out, he's an absolute wizard at these systems. Well, Chris, I believe, is one of his main guys over there and I've become good friends with Chris. He called me the other day out of the blue. We were just chatting and we we were talking about this generator situation. And he recommended maybe using a portable generator rather than a Generac system. So I started crunching some numbers on this. And again, we just installed two generator. So this is really fresh in my mind. And if you're new to the channel, we have a Airbnb right down here, just adjacent to our homes that is on grid. And when we get power out, it just the water goes out too, because we're on well power. So the well is so far away from now. So we had to install another generator at the well and one at the house. So we have two generators, so this is really fresh in my mind. Those are expensive. The connectivity, having a dedicated propane tank, and all the work to have something that really can only be used as one thing. And that is as a backup generator when the grid goes down. Well, I have all sorts of things that I need to do around the ranch and I need power.

So Chris made a really good point. He said, why don't you buy a 9,000 watt tri-fuel generator. You can get them on Harbor Freight. here's one that I found that's relatively inexpensive when you compare it, especially to a Generac Generator. And it runs on multiple different power sources, which we have here. This starts to make a lot of sense. I can put it in the trailer, I can connect it to my welder, I can do work on my various projects around the ranch where I need power. And then when I need it here, I'll just wheel that outside and plug a 50-amp cord similar to what we have with our RV here. And I'll plug it right into the back of the wall, so I'll have my electrician come out and run this into a manual switch on the other side of this wall here. I just pull the generator out there, so it's not polluting the inside with the exhaust. We'll let around plug it in, flip the switch and start charging my batteries. Then when the storm is over, I just unplug it and pull it back in here and I can store it in my trailer or strap it into my trailer and be able to use it with my welder or any other power equipment that I have in our needs around 106 acre ranch here. So I really like that idea and let's do a quick analysis on the cost savings here. The original plan was to take this 500 gallon propane tank on the side of our house and move it over by the barn. That would require a little bit of excavation and trenching down to bring the gas line over to where the generator is going to be. Secondly, I would need to replace that. I was going to put a 2000 gallon underground tank right beside the house. So I would have this huge surplus of propane for a potential grid down scenario. That would last quite some time. That was something I really wanted to do, but I think I'll forgo that considering the cost savings. With a propane generator, I save an absolute ton of money and gain significant functionality. Let me go over these charts. The local propane company, quarter, would be $15,000 for an underground, 2000 gallon propane tank, not including the digging. So I would have to do all the excavation. They would just bring the tank out, I would lower it into the hole that a pre-dog, they would connect it and fill it with propane for $15,000.

A 14K Generac Generator plus the turnkey labor, just like I spent to have one installed down there at Treehouse, is about $13,000. Compare that enormous cost to the cost of this predator 11,000 tri-fuel mobile generator. Another thing I really liked about the Rubik's Gigastack battery is that they come with their own racks. So it's got a little plate down here on the bottom, these really heavy duty casters and you set the bottom battery on that and then you just stack them all the way up and then it comes with this little lid on the top just to give it a more finished look. And having them on wheels is nice if you need to get back there and clean or pull them apart and do any maintenance on them or cleaning. It just you know also if there was a flood or something needed to roll them around or get them out of here if there was a fire who knows, you know it'd be it's nice to have them on a mobile rolling racking system that's built in so So you don't have a secondary rack system. And originally had these arc batteries in my cart as we were building out this system. Practical preppers was helping me design the system. And the last minute they said, here we've got this new Rubix Gigastag battery set. And we swapped out the original arc batteries that had a separate racking system at a pretty significant cost. And I was blown away because I think this is a better battery. And I got this huge refund. I was really quite amazed that Scott, her engineer 775 from practical preppers, had recommended swapping from the arc batteries to these Rubik's batteries for the cost savings. And it really significantly reduced my battery cost. So I was impressed that he volunteered doing that. And I agree that this is a much better system for me. And so if you're watching Scott, thank you for that. I'm really happy with these Rubik's batteries. Another thing I did since the year one video was I added this U-line Racking, right above the solar plant here. This does two things. It gives me a lot of extra storage to get things off of the floor in the barn that are now up here, including my backup wood burning stove, our polycarbonate sheets for our future greenhouse that we haven't built yet, as well as all these other accessories. That opens up a lot of room in the barn, but it also creates sort of a dust protective little cover here. I've got wood in here instead of the wire racking, which further prevents dust from trickling

down through and it's good little addition. This disconnect switch just simply allows me to disconnect the power from the inverters and go to 100% grid power here if we needed to do service on these inverters or on the batteries for example. There's also another disconnect switch over on the side of the house so if I want to kill the grid there then this configuration would stay the same. We just wouldn't have grid anymore and we would just be running completely off the batteries and you would see right now you can see we have 0.04 power coming from the grid, but we have full sun so we're pulling 6,000 watts off of the array right now and we've got a load of 1.35 and our batteries are pulling 4.77 kilowatts into charging those up to 100%. So you know the grid would just go dark it's almost dark now because we don't need it. It's almost always that way. We're almost running 100% off grid. The $15 power bill really is only for the connectivity fee just to have the privilege of having the grid as a backup. And to me, and I know a lot of purest out there, I'll say, you're not really off-grid if you're connected to the grid at all. And I would disagree with that. I mean, I guess you're right, technically you're right, but it doesn't matter. It's not like it's just a resource that's sitting over there. And as long as we're in normal times, and we can use that to back up right now, like if we have a big storm and need to top off my batteries. In the absence of my future backup generator, it's a great resource. Why wouldn't you do that? I don't see any point and resisting that since we already paid the connectivity fee when we were building the house and we were on grid for five years until we could afford to build all of this and buy the system. So I've never really understood the argument that you should be completely off-grid just on principle to disconnect from modern civilization and all the big government and corporate interest and utility companies. To me, it's a resource. It's there. If you can utilize it to your advantage and be prepared, if you lose it and not intimidated, if it goes down for a prolonged period of time, why not just keep it? Here are these inverters humming. That's because we have all of that power

coming in from the sun into that array. It's all being processed through these inverters. It's topping off our batteries right here. And I've really been impressed, guys, with these solar. I know that there's mixed reviews online, but these really are the work horses of the industry. I know there's a lot of power and I'll probably get a lot of comments. In fact, if you have something you wanna say about Soulark and Verors, let me know in the comments I'd love to hear your opinion. I'm sure you have one. But look at these little LCD screens. I love the simplicity of them. I've got the dongle here on the side for my Wi-Fi connectivity. I have not had any issues with them. They just work seamlessly. Really, this is like having your own little private grid in the barn here. So I'm just super pleased with this whole system. Flallist battery performance, flawless inverter performance, haven't had any issues with their array. So on the two-year mark, it's still early on. This is relatively new equipment. I know Soulark does have some new models out now, but guys, I'm really, really happy with this. So if you're thinking about any of this equipment, you want more information. Let me know in the comments or you can DM me, and I'd love to send you some spec sheets to tell you a little bit more about the product. Happy to do that. Just leave it in the comments below. Now, if you want to see the one-year video when I talk about whether or not I think going off-group is worth it, as I mentioned in the beginning, I'll link that video right here.