Transcription
So, welcome back everybody. This is going to be a fun episode. And boy, when we first started doing solar equipment out here in our shop, we're 24/7, 365 off-grid. And when we started adding batteries, y'all got really excited. But a common theme was, "Hey, aren't you concerned about fire hazard with all these batteries?"
We're going to be building a one-of-a-kind fireproof enclosure for these batteries right here, to make me and you, apparently, sleep better at night about any potential fire hazards with batteries. Just did a full review on this Orient power 230 amp battery—massive battery. And by the way, I've been running one well over a year, zero issues. This whole setup has just worked, y'all. So what we're going to do in this episode is build an enclosure. I now have two 230 amp-hour batteries, one 100 amp-hour battery.
Now, by the way, Jackery and Orient, all from the same company, same exact cells in them. So it looks like I have mismatched batteries; I'm running identical cells here. This battery right here also has the same exact cells in it; this is just an on-the-wall battery. All right, so here's the thing real quick before we jump in and start building this heavy-duty fireproof enclosure. Basically, it's going to be a fireproof server rack is ultimately what I'm building here.
Quick discussion, y'all. This is lithium iron phosphate technology in these newer batteries—very, very safe, actually. I'm going to put a link, if I can still find it, to a report down in the description if you like to read like me. From the FAA, the people who are over all the airplanes in the sky, they did a pretty in-depth analysis and report on the different types of battery technologies, which is smart because you can't have batteries exploding in flames on a plane. And long story short, if you get all the way to the bottom of that report, lithium iron phosphate, they deemed quite safe. It's your older Cobalt technologies and things such as that, your older chemistries, where there was a little bit of an issue of fire hazard. But because I guess the potential is still there, we're going to build this enclosure. We're going to fire-seal the door. We're going to build it out of thicker metal than any enclosure I could find, and we're going to save a lot of money building it ourselves.
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All right, now I've got to figure all this out. The heck am I doing?
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All right, so we're in the final stretches now, so let's go and talk about some of the things that I've done. For starters, I understand that a battery fire could get so hot in there that it could warp this, that it could even possibly melt this metal, even though I did really thick metal. This is just a first line of defense. We may add some Sheetrock or other stuff behind the uh, container enclosure later in the room to help really mitigate fire, but first line of defense. Second line of defense is me—fire extinguishers, things such as that. Fortunately for me, I work from home, so all I need is this to extend the time before my room catches on fire, should we ever have a catastrophic failure. And I pray that we don't. So I am being a realist here that this will help, but may not be completely fireproof. So it's also worth noting that I covered the outside with 2000° fire-resistant paint—we'll call it that—so it doesn't actually ignite and catch flames like regular paint would, should the metal get cherry red if there's ever a failure here.
All right, so now we're in the home stretch, making up cables here to connect everything, and then I've got something else special that I ordered in—kind of expensive—but this right here is going to be a door seal. This is much like you find on gun safes, so this actually swells up when heat touches it. It's made for smoke or fire, and it'll swell, expand, and seal off the door enclosure, just giving me extra protection and an extra little bit of time. Maybe that'll keep flames from actually coming out into the room. Typically what this is for is to seal so flames can't come into a gun safe and ruin your guns, for example, or whatever you have stored in your safe. I'm going to use it for the exact opposite—to seal and keep some of the, hopefully, the chemical smoke and flames from going in the room. But again, I expect this enclosure, even as well-built as it is, will bow, warp; things will come out. But at least now we're keeping direct flames from just shooting out and burning the walls here. The other thing worth mentioning now that with as many batteries as I have, I'm probably going to upsize this wire, but at the end of the day, it won't hurt to go with an even thicker wire than this. But realistically, you're going through a couple hundred amp fuse over there, which is tiny in retrospect, compared to the cable. But next time I'm at the welding supply store, I'll probably upsize this. I'm not running massive loads out here other than whenever my air compressor kicks on. But for extended loads, even my welder is nothing compared to what this system is capable of.
All right, so as you can see, I'm crimping on some really large ends here, and I'm just using a hammer crimper. If I did this quite a, you know, quite often, I would probably invest in a hydraulic crimper, but no more than I do this, I can't really justify it. All right, here we are. All the batteries are tied together; they're all charged up to 100%. So let's go ahead and start kicking everything on, making sure we're good. We're connected to the bus bars over here; we're fused, and then uh, we'll see if we can power up our solar system and swap the shop over. By the way, you see what I discovered? The on-the-wall battery slides perfectly in here—very similar dimensions to the rack battery. I was going to go put this "mother" shot, but I really don't need it—"mother" shot. And I was like, "Heck yeah," let's go ahead. Now we've got over 30 kilowatt-hours of power in here, which was my ultimate goal. We're well over that. I discovered this would slide right in. I was going to build an extra shelf in here just in case I get another battery down the road. So heck yeah, it worked out perfect. Don't forget it's the same exact 3.2-volt cells that's in all of these batteries, so we're okay to put everything together.
All right, so the only thing is I can see the LCD screen, but you can't. If I ever need to check out an alarm up here, but I can see the words, see what it's saying right there. But once they're all tied together, they tend to show very similar percentages. So if I ever want to check my battery percentage, all I got to do is just come check one of these screens right here. All right, so hindsight's 20/20. While I can still access to see my screen, if I hadn't known I was going to go to server rack batteries, I built this room with a heavy reinforced wall right here for on-the-wall batteries, I would have put this inverter over here, had these two together and be good to go. Then I could just slide this back against the wall. But again, hindsight's 20/20. And yes, I can still technically move this inverter, although I can't get access to the inside of this wall. I have to run my wire and conduit on the outside, and I may do that down the road if I come in this room enough and that starts bothering me, the way that it looks. We may go through all the trouble of going and buying more wire, tying back into the main panel and moving everything. As of right now, I'm taking it one step at a time, but that would certainly look better and allow me to move this back a foot over here and not really have it in my walkway. Yeah, I'm slowly talking myself into doing that. We'll tackle that down the road.
All right, no battery alarms, everything looks good. We've got power here. All right, even though it's raining outside, we got so much battery power now it doesn't matter. I can run all the way till tomorrow easily and then some on this battery power. And uh, even though it's raining, I guarantee you with 5,000 watts of solar outside, I can still pull in some power. So let's go ahead and swap the shop [Music] over. All right, we're back on battery power. Everything—no alarm showing, everything looks nice and good. All right, so all it's doing is misting rain out here right now, but I guarantee you I can still pull—you'd think as cloudy as it is and raining that I wouldn't pull in any solar today, but I'm telling you, having two big arrays, while it won't be nothing breathtaking, I'm pulling in—it's still pretty awesome even while it's raining to pull in power. We're supposed to get a tremendous amount of rain tonight, and it's supposed to rain all day long tomorrow—like 2 inches of rain and storms—so I'm probably definitely not going to pull in much power tomorrow. It's going to be a really good test to see if having all this extra battery power now can get me through a couple of days like this.
All right, I just kicked on the uh, breakers from that big solar array, so we got two solar arrays feeding the shop right now, but batteries are charged, so it might not even pull any solar. Of course, I've got these set up to—I actually use solar power first, then battery second—to power the shop, and we're running quite a few things in here right now. Let's go ahead and turn on 1,000 watts worth of lights in here; that'll get us pulling in something from the outside. So look at that—366 watts coming in from one array, 276 from another, and keep in mind we get that again down here, so we're pulling in—oh goodness—well over 1,000 watts while it's raining outside. That's pretty awesome. All right, I can already tell we're going to do a revamp here in the future. I want to clean this up a little more—my bus bar section and short cables like this—so I think we're definitely going to uh, next time we go to Lowe's or a hardware store, get some new cable to pull into here, move this one up here, plug all the holes up going in the wall to feed this, get it to where I can work on them nice and easy, and uh, get a foot of room gain back by moving this box. I think that's going to be a future project after trying to go buy all the stuff that I need. Okay, you can see how I have this uh, steel square tube frame in here. I did this on purpose and spaced the door out so I can now put our seal, so let's do that. And the other thing you notice I did—I reinforced the outside of the door with angle iron, and I did that not only to strengthen the door, but if there was ever to be a fire in here, this thing—all the steel—is going to buckle, bow, and kind of collapse on itself. So when this door is completely closed around—and you can see I did a really heavy-duty locking system over here where I'll put this big steel rod through—but if this buckles and bows under a bunch of heat, well the walls are going to come out, catch on the angle iron, and the door is technically going to hold this together from bowing out. But at the end of the day, if all those batteries were to ever ignite in there, this thing's going to turn cherry red. That's why I'm concerned about it potentially uh, igniting the wall. I think next time I go to the hardware store, I'm just going to get some Sheetrock, cut a big piece, and slide it right back down behind here as a buffer. But don't forget I'm always home. We've got security out here; I got cameras, and my temperature-controlled room fan right here hooks up to Wi-Fi, and I can get an alert whenever the room gets hot on my phone, letting me know, "Hey, we got a problem here." Plus I got to thinking, I was like, "That somebody's got to make a Wi-Fi smoke alarm, right—smoke detector." Well, sure enough, got on uh, Amazon—three pack for 40 bucks—so I'm going to put a Wi-Fi smoke alarm in here too, and it does push notifications to my phone. So if at any point in time it senses and thinks there's smoke or a fire, I get alerted on the phone. I can rush right—right the heck—out here. What I'm going to do with the big battery fire, who knows. All I'm more concerned about is venting the room, and if I see anything wood-wise or shop-wise igniting, put that out with fire extinguishers, whatever the heck I can get my hands on, and I've got a bunch of those staged around here.
[Music] All right, we've got our gasketed seal on; everything's wired up, ready to go. All right, we're latched up; we're protected. All right, y'all, this was a fun build, and technically viewer-requested, although y'all didn't request this specific box, y'all had concerns and interest about fireproofing. Well, this is just one of the many ways we can go about doing that. We're going to do some rearranging in the future, probably do a little more fireproofing as well. You know, one thing I got to thinking of—if I ever have a fire in the shop, this kind of protects the batteries from igniting, and we do a lot of work in the shop that could cause a fire, so this kind of helps both kinds of ways for containment. So thanks to viewers like y'all with your suggestions, watching, and companies like Orient power, we're able to do things like this. So a huge shout-out and thank you to them. And FYI, I've bought a lot of this equipment with my own money, especially over at the other shop—my extra inverter in here, on-the-wall battery, etc.—and some things they have sent out in the past for testing, reviewing things such as that. So huge shout-out and thank you to all of y'all making this possible for me to do fun builds and fun things like this and run my shop completely off-grid, saving some money, us all learning together and having fun.
So a little disclaimer, y'all—just because what you see me do on my show doesn't mean it's legal in your area, especially whenever it comes to homes, homeowners insurance, permitting, and things such as that. I'm out here in a metal shop, not tied to the house, so a lot of the things that I do are just based off of being technically off-grid. Depending on where you live, you may have to go pull permits or do things completely different. So watch my stuff for education and fun, not necessarily for an exact how-to. So I guess we'll wrap this video up by doing kind of a 2-year review on this equipment. By the way, I just did a full review on this battery on our review channel; could check it out. We opened it up; we looked all on the inside; it's a beast of a battery, very well put together. You should go check that out. I'll put the video at the end of this one and down in the description. So for the last 2 years, I have been running Orient power 6500-watt inverters, all the batteries you see, and been slowly adding to the system, and y'all, look—the shop's still working. I haven't had to send any equipment back; it just flat-out works and very affordable. The last time I checked on the price for these inverters, they were extremely affordable. Their big battery that I just showed right here in this episode—the big 11.7 kilowatt-hour battery—it just dropped $500, and I've got a 10% off coupon code that I'll put down in the description. So if you're really thinking about doing an off-grid system for a shop, a home, whatever that may be—a cabin—go check out their equipment. I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised with the price. And the price, honestly, is why I bought some of this equipment myself over the years; it's extremely affordable and suits my needs just fine for running a big off-grid shop like this. All right, we've got more solar content coming in the future, y'all. Keep requesting it; we're going to keep providing it. Thank y'all so much for watching; we'll catch you on the next one.