We Saved THOUSANDS on Off-Grid Solar - Here's How! (Full DIY Cost Breakdown)

[Music] hey i'm jonathan i'm ashley and we are tiny shiny homes how much did it cost us to build our 7200 watt 28 kilowatt hour 5000 watt off-grid solar power system less than you think since relocating to our off-grid desert homestead property a couple of years ago we've been busy with all sorts of important infrastructure projects first was our high tensile electric fence then our solar powered water pump and then our very first structure a hyper adobe solar shed office this would house all our power and electrical gear for our solar power system and devil as an office and a guest room as you can imagine we get asked a ton of questions about how we build the system and how much it costs the first question can be answered by this detailed planning and installing and building video here and the second is this video [Music] before we talk cost let's talk about sizing because the size of your battery bank and your inverter and your solar panels are all going to have a big effect on your bottom line this is the size that we chose based on our needs so feel free to use it as a reference when designing your own off-grid power system 7 200 watts of solar power by connecting 30 used 240 watt panels in series of five we could create high voltage arrays that charge well even in cloudy conditions this also helped keep our wire size down as we had a fairly long run from the ground mount to the charge controllers 28 kilowatt hours lithium battery bank a key part of us saving tons of money was buying 280 amp hour cells shipped directly from china we knew the bms would only have 16 cell inputs so we opted for 32 total batteries grouping them in packs of two 5 000 watt 120 volt power inverter we settled on a 5 000 watt quattro inverter charger from victron it runs 120 volt ac power and surges to 10 000 watts which should be more than enough for us the decision to go with victron also tied to our charge controllers bms the ability to monitor the system remotely and manage all power systems on the property from one app which has 120 volt single phase power as we plan on supplementing with gas and wood for heating and cooking line drying our clothes and building naturally with earth bags using thermal heat transfer and passive solar again we cover a ton of important information about how all this stuff connects together in our previous wiring and installed videos so make sure you check that out if you have questions how much will your off-grid solar system cost get a better understanding of your project and save thousands of dollars with our solar cost calculator besides an intelligent spreadsheet that does the calculations for you it includes links to everything we bought on our off-grid solar power install and nearly one hour of videos that cover behind the scenes thoughts details and tips grab yourself a copy in the link below now maybe you don't need a cost calculator you just want to read through everything click the links to go buy it yourself you just want to see all the numbers written down we got you covered there too you can go to this link on our website and read through the entire cost breakdown [Music] one last thing before we jump in creating resources like this take an enormous amount of time and energy and so sometimes we set up affiliate links with vendors to help offset that cost that means if you follow those special links to products we've mentioned we may get a small percentage of that sale if you buy not all links are affiliates in fact we're only linking to products that we genuinely recommend in many cases we're going to share with you ways to buy that may bypass our affiliate links anyway so you can save more money our first priority is to help you save money building your system but if it makes sense use the links oh and just to cover all our bases i am not certified or licensed as an electrician all this information is for entertainment purposes only and if you ever feel uncomfortable trying to do any of this work yourself please reach out to a qualified individual cool let's dig into the full cost breakdown of our off-grid solar system [Music] first off because we know that you are going to ask why did you not just put the solar panels on your roof it's a great question it is a great question the reason is this building is built to take advantage of passive solar which means we have south facing windows on the front and our roof is slanted to the north and because of where we are located that means that those panels would get very little sun because they're tilted completely the wrong way as you'll see the solar panels were relatively cheap compared to that ground mount so if you have a way to mount panels to an existing roof you will save a lot of money first up is our solar panels now we bought used residential solar panels from a company called san tan solar they're in phoenix arizona and what a lot of people don't realize is that uh residential and commercial panels can both be replaced fairly early in their life cycle due to contracts they still work great so the santan actually buys them they test them all and then they sell them back and they're way cheaper than if you were to buy them new and how much cheaper are they babe they were only 25 apiece they're 240 watt panels and we bought them during their sidewalk sale so like if you go to their site now the price is higher than that but one time a year they do a special sale and that's when we happen to do it we bought 30 of them it cost us 712 dollars and 50 cents in order to connect all those panels and series of five and then go back to the combiner box we had to buy a whole bunch of 10 gauge solar pv wire so we bought 300 extra feet of that only cost about 150 and then we had to buy 24 mc4 connectors that cost us 40 and then we made up our own cables to make those connections those custom wires were then connected to combiner boxes we got two combiner boxes because we have so many panels those cost 132 dollars for both of them and they do have a lightning arrester inside them as well as fuses now out of the combiner box we ran 500 feet of six gauge wire into our solar shed now why was it 500 feet because we have multiple wires traveling 100 feet right four wires two positives two negatives because we have two combiner boxes so so extra coming in and connecting to what it needs to connect here yeah we also purchased three eight foot grounding rods and lugs for how much for forty five dollars now i get to the fun part the ground mount like we said before the mount itself cost so much almost five times as much total as the actual panels themselves and the biggest cost by far was the three inch schedule 40 pipe that we needed to build it with that cost us 1 763 and 83 cents that includes them bringing it out to us because no no we'll talk about that later it was eight 21 foot pipes right so it's a lot of steel it's super heavy they did have to deliver it and we'll talk about delivery fees at the end of this section but that was only part of it we still had quick crete we had so much quick crete this is a ridiculous amount on quikrete we used 236 80 pound bags and it cost us 844.14 now if you go back and watch our other video we go into detail explaining um why we had to build this ground mount so robust it's because of our our wind events here our sandy soil so we had to make huge holes that went down like five and a half feet and that's why we needed so much concrete in this particular case right your case may be different but for us that's what we had to do to build it safely so it's five and a half feet deep two feet wide we're talking at least 20 bags of cement pearl oh concrete yeah vertical and there were eight holes to make the process a little easier for building we also bought a bunch of cinder blocks and we stacked them up and then were able to sort of set the horizontal poles in place and that only cost us 178 dollars you could totally do it without that but it made it easier for us i like doing it this way because we can always reuse those cinder blocks for other projects here on the homestead so i was okay with spending that much money for cinderblocks and we have we've used them for all sorts of stuff and then we're going to get into all the ironridge components so ironridge is the one that helped us plan this ground mount they're the racking system that you are going to attach to the pipe that you've already set up and it will let all the panels sort of attach safely and it does a bunch of other stuff too but it was an important part in us being able to plan the system for the wind and the soil conditions and all that stuff so the main component is the rail and we went with the xr 1000 rails because they're like the big heavy duty ones right we needed 12 of their 17 inch rails and that cost us 720 for this mounting system we needed 72 ufo clamps now what's a ufo i don't know it's a universal fit object and it does kind of look like a ufo it's specifically from iron ridge so it's a it's a piece that locks into the top of the main rail and then it's got like kind of a little hat on it and the hat holds down the solar panels and so you put them two in on each side at the top and bottom and then all it connects together you torque it down it's a clamp it's a clamp yes and that cost 140 and 40 cents we also needed 24 stopper sleeves right so at the top of the array in the bottom of the array that ufo needed a flat surface on it to hold the panels and so that's what those are those 24 sleeves cost us 6.72 cents that's pretty cheap we also needed a grounding lug that connects to the frame and then to your ground rod that was a grand total of 3.93 and then we did need some important pieces to help connect that schedule 40 pipe together so there's the top cap we needed eight of those and that cost 290 dollars and 64 cents and then we needed 24 rail connectors which attached the actual rail to the schedule 40 pipe that costs 241.20 and then just to sort of finish things off we bought end caps and wire clips you totally don't need those but the end caps will help debris and stuff from getting inside the rails and the wire clips just kind of help you you know put your wires up so they're not hanging everywhere makes it neater too yeah we needed 40 of each of those so we got 40 wire clips and in caps and that was a grand total of like 39.50 so pretty cheap we also needed six gauge bare copper wire for grounding and that cost us thirty one dollars for fifty feet so if you're looking through our cost breakdown article you will see that not everything has a link and the reason for that is that you know there's not really a way to link to um hundreds of feet of schedule 43-inch pipe some of this you have to source from a hardware store or like an industrial metal supply store so that's going to be by far the cheapest way to source those so we didn't even bother to put links in and finally delivery fees which we kind of talked about earlier you may not have delivery fees if you have like a trailer that you can haul 20 feet of pipe on true flatbed would have saved us a ton of money but we didn't have one and we didn't know anybody that had one and also we live in the middle of nowhere so delivery fees are high yeah so we paid three hundred dollars for the the schedule 40 pipe to be delivered to us and another 300 to deliver all the iron rich components pricey pricey so 600 in delivery fees if you have a way to transport those materials yourself you can save a good chunk of money so the grand total for the solar ground mount system that we paid 5 66 and 30 cents and remember the panels themselves cost like 700 right so the majority of that cost was the ground mount again if you've got a roof if you've got somewhere you can go ahead and put them on do that and one thing we realized sort of after we went through this whole process is we came into this looking for sort of the cheapest panel and we weren't really worried about how much space they would take up because we got 11 acres like we thought we'll just build a really big array we didn't realize how much that ground map would cost if we had bought sort of the same size panel but with a higher capacity we could have built a smaller ground mount and saved a bunch of money that way i mean at the end of the day if we ever want to add higher capacity panels to what we have now then we just have a whole bunch of solar and it's okay but if you're trying to save money up front then yeah just maybe spend a little more money on higher capacity panels [Music] now let's talk about our battery bank we did something a little unconventional of course um we were looking for ways to save money on this install and it turns out that if you source your lithium battery cells directly from china manufacturers you can save a ton of money that's not to say that this whole process doesn't come with some caveats we go into detail in that other video about the entire process of buying from start to finish it was super weird but at the end of the day we got a ton of battery storage for a fraction of the cost and so let's talk real quick about the whole buying in the us versus buying in china thing the more research that i did i realized that almost every american company that was selling lithium battery cells were actually buying the same cells from china putting them in their own packaging putting their own proprietary tech and and sensors and stuff on top and then just marking them up and reselling them i think tesla's the only exception they actually manufacture the batteries here but everything else is assembled here but it's they're using those same cells anyway so if you know how to assemble your own battery packs which we're going to talk about then you can save boatloads of money boatloads boat loads so we went with rep t cells 280 amp hours lithium batteries they're 3.2 volts we bought 32 of them for 3 827 and eleven cents that is 28 kilowatt hours of storage for less than four thousand dollars and that is shipped from china like that includes the freight if you've done any sort of research into buying batteries from somebody in the us you know that the cost can range from anywhere to three to seven times as much for that same amount of storage so there's potentially tens of thousands of dollars of cost saving here one thing about the batteries that we didn't like was the cheap bus bars that it came with so we decided to build our own with copper bar stock yeah we got a 1 8 inch one and a half inch copper bus bar we got 16 feet of it and that was 170 which sounds kind of pricey it is but you know like we wanted as much flow through as possible and then we just cut it and drilled it and and built it ourselves so all of those bus bars are custom-made these lithium batteries also need to be compressed right so we use three-quarter inch plywood and all thread and we just sandwiched them together yeah so we had to buy we bought one sheet of three quarter inch plywood we use that for the bottom for them all to sit on and then pieces on the end to sandwich it together and we also use the leftover for other things we did yeah now as you know at least as of 2022 wood prices are all over the place so at the time we made 40 for that sheet it wasn't anything super high grade and then we needed the all thread rods and then nuts and bolts and washers and lock washers to hold it all together that all cost us about 120 for building the battery box we also needed some angle iron some bar stock and square tubing and that costs 260 dollars so the reason that we built our battery box metal and welded together is that we had a very small space in the corner of the solar ship so we needed a frame that was as small as possible if you wanted to build your own battery box out of wood you could you could totally do that and it might cost less depending on what you're you're viewing this in and when we say that we welded this we really mean our friends beginning from this morning wanted michelle they actually came and helped us and showed us how to weld this together yes so thank you guys so much we couldn't have done it without you and now i need a welder now you need a welder and finally we just had a few other items like wires and fuses that we'll go through real quick that were sort of tied to the main system so we needed two watt cable to run from the battery into the main system and into the inverter we needed 20 feet of red and black also that particular pack that we found on amazon also comes with five lugs as well in each pack so we had 10 lugs 20 feet of black and red wire that cost about 115 for each pack and then we needed a few more lugs so we got five of them for 11.81 then we needed a 300 amp t-class fuse to protect the system the housing was about 44. and the actual fuse itself was about fifty dollars and finally we needed a battery switch to make sure we could turn off the power from the batteries to the system if we ever needed to work on anything and that was only thirty dollars and forty three cents so the grain total of the battery box was four thousand seven hundred seventy nine dollars and fifty three cents nice sounds like a lot sounds like a lot until you look at buying those other types of cells remember that's 28 kilowatt hours of storage that is a fraction of the cost for what most people pay for that kind of storage [Music] i wanted to take a minute to share an important big picture idea behind this install and how we managed to do it so cheaply and that's the idea of smart versus dumb components i see so many people that put all their money into solar panels and batteries buying brand names thinking that these components are going to make a huge difference in the quality and usage of their system but really both of these are dumb components solar panel just takes sunlight and turns it into energy a battery just stores energy and can be charged or discharged i'm okay with buying used certified solar panels and sourcing battery cells directly from china because i know that these items while important to the system don't actually require the sophistication that many of us think they do it's the other smart components that are going to make the difference by putting a little more money into my smart components my solar charge controllers my bms i can protect those solar panels and batteries better over the long term and save potentially tens of thousands of dollars in the process it's the charge controller that pulls maximum power out of my panels it's the bms that protects the batteries and keeps them balanced so they last for years and most importantly it's the inverter that needs to provide clean stable 120 volt power that won't ruin everything i connect to it with dirty power so as we get into these smart components and you may be wondering why i'm buying something a little more expensive like a victron as opposed to like a grill watt that's because i have decided to save money on panels and batteries so that i can invest into what i feel like are higher quality smart components for the long term [Music] so let me talk about the rec bms i can't even say it was a straight face i don't know what it is guys a battery management system is super important for a lithium battery bank right yeah a good bms should protect your batteries from over voltage and under voltage protect from temperature extremes charge and float the cells properly and balance the cells we chose rec bms because it does all this and more and it talks natively to our viktron equipment the bms install was definitely the most complicated part of the wiring at least there's there's like 50 wires coming out of the thing so we're going to give you just a list of all the components that we recommend because a bms is not just a bms it comes with multiple components that all have to talk to each other for it to work if you have questions about how it works go check out that other video our main bms unit was 559.75 then there's the current sensing shunt we got a 200 amp cost 69.95 we also have temperature sensors and that was 37.90 there's also a pre-charge resistor delay which we recommend for a 48 volt system it helps sort of protect your contactor from a big inrush of current since the voltage is higher that costs 85 and 45 cents there's an rec wi-fi module which we also recommend because it allows you to change any setting on the unit from your phone or your laptop anything that can connect to the wi-fi otherwise you got to like hook up a pc install all these crazy drivers run a cable to it it's like a whole thing and this makes it much easier to update and that costs 198.55 they also sell a touch screen display that gives you more granular information and some of that you can get by going to the web app and the wi-fi module but if you want to just go over there and touch it and turn it on you can see what the voltage of each cell is what the temperatures are it gives you a lot of good information that cost 208.95 then there is a special cable that connects to the victron color control gx it has a ve can cable and it costs 28.45 then there's the main sort of heart of how the whole bms works is that there's a contactor and that contactor is how the bms lets the power from the batteries go through to the rest of the system and it only allows that if all of the checks are good that's the point of bms is that it wants to protect the system and shut things down if any of those situations that it's looking for don't match like temperature voltage i was going to say wrong oh sorry that's okay contributing temperature and voltage are the main ones that cost 189 and 5 cents okay what's next current sensor harness 18.95 and we needed some small wire to make most of these connections because we needed big wire for some of it but most of us just sort of connecting to individual cells and it's just sort of passing data and so that was we needed like 100 feet of it we paid 18.76 pretty simple yeah grand total 1 415.70 a couple of important things this unit that we used has 16 inputs and so we grouped our batteries in packs of 2 so we would have 16 cells even though it was 32 and that way each cell had its own wire if you want to go bigger then you have to buy additional units so they do sell like a master unit and then you can connect multiple units underneath that each with 16 inputs on each one so if you want to go down the road go for it it seemed a little expensive and complicated to us so we just decided to keep it simple and finally if you do follow any of our links to rec we do have an affiliate relationship with them but also let me tell you the best way to buy the unit you want to go to the main unit and then all these other things that we listed are listed as accessories and add-ons underneath that and when you add on to the main system you actually save five percent per thing so make sure you don't go like add them individually to your cart build the system that way [Music] i think now is a good time for you to talk about our solar wiring guide yeah so as part of this project i created a super detailed wiring diagram of everything all connected together the charge controllers the inverter the bms the batteries all of it where every single wire goes how it connects i know that i am a visual person and seeing it from a high level overview was really helpful for me so we made this high-res wiring diagram and also individual wiring diagrams for every single component and you can check out the link in the description if you want to [Music] buy now for the big guy let's talk about our inverter yes so we decided to go with victron and the reason for that is that they have a thing called the victron color control gx which acts as sort of the heart of your whole system everything connects to it and you get all that information in one display and then with that it creates what's called the vrm so you can access your installation online anywhere in the world and see all the stats about it it's really helpful so first up was the victron color control gx which like i said is what everything connects to it's a little pricey it's 516 and 80 cents and then we got the inverter oh the big dog like you said the big guy it's 5000 watts surges to 10 000 watts yes can you believe i remember that was impressive nice it turned out that was good it was really good but it's only 120 volts and we talked a little bit in our other video about why we decided not to go 220 just our personal preference if you need 220 i believe the way you do that is you actually buy two inverters you connect them together that way each one runs a single phase so you get split phase when you have them both together obviously that's way more expensive and we decided we didn't need 220 so but it is something that we could add on to later if we wanted to right for sure yeah we would probably add a whole battery bank right to power that one as well and then yeah that whole thing yeah it's a whole thing it's all thing but totally doable now you're going to need a bunch of custom cables for this because remember everything connects to that color control gx via different protocols right so let's talk about those real quick the ve direct cable was 37 and 40 cents we needed two of those and i believe they went from the solar charge controllers into the color control gx then there's the ve bus or ethernet cable and it's 24. yeah so of all these cables this is probably the only one where i would recommend trying to save money on all the other ones are victron cables just buy them from victron don't try to get cheap knockoffs but this one is actually just really an ethernet cable so you can get those anywhere now in order for the vrm to actually push your information to the cloud and be accessible from anywhere it has to be connected to the internet obviously so you can either run an ethernet cable from your router straight into the back of it or in our case we weren't really close to that and so we you can get a usb nano wi-fi module these are pretty standard you plug it in the back and then you just go into the settings and log into your existing wi-fi network and then it's connected to the internet words it was only 22. and finally is sort of part of this install there was another set of protection it's a c series double pole toggle circuit breaker 200 amps it cost 116 and three cents and that comes from the batteries through the switch into the inverter as another set of protection for the system double pull toggle circuit breaker it's a lot worse yeah i know oh and one more thing if you want to do any programming on the inverter unit itself you can do it with the dip switch dance there's like a panel you take off and like dips like tiny dip switches and a button you can do that but it's awful it's the worst so what you can do is buy their um mk3 to usb cable plug it up to your mac or pc download their software and make a lot of those settings that way which i wish we had done but we didn't i would recommend you check it out it's expensive it's 69 for the cable but if you need to change any settings in that inverter that's the way to go the total for the inverter and the collar collar color color color cooler color color color grand total for the inverter and the color control gx was 3 327.58 that sounds like a lot then it does but you know the inverter is what gives us 120 volt power that we connect everything to yeah so i feel like that's a good place to spend money if you're gonna do it and you feel like 5000 watt inverter was an appropriate size for us i think so um we will we're just barely scratching the surface of this system right now because we haven't built our house yet and the house isn't connected so the theory is that should be enough especially with that 10 000 watt surge but we'll see and if it's not then we'll just like i said add another inverter we'll chain them together we'll make it bigger there's lots of options there for expandability if we need to sounds good babe thanks bob [Music] hey let's talk about solar charge controllers cool yeah so just because we have solar panels doesn't mean we can just hook them straight up to the batteries that's true that would cause an explosion probably so you need something that will sort of fill and float those batteries will slow that solar energy down if the batteries are full charge controls are really important especially for a system that's this big right so important so important now because of the way we connected our panels and because we're still thinking about future expandability we decided to get two solar charge controllers because we had two combiner boxes one combiner box is full the other combiner box still has two open circuits on it so if we want to add more panels we can do that we went with the victron smart solar 250 volt 85 amp tr these are big charge controllers they're not cheap like i said we got two and they cost us 1 669 and 40 cents again if we wanted to i think we really could have just used one and saved ourselves eight or nine hundred dollars but again we're thinking ahead and so we went ahead and put two in so that wouldn't be a huge pain to expand if we wanted to as part of this we needed quite a few additional cables um and fuses so let's talk through those real quick so we had the pv wire coming in from the combiner boxes and that actually went through a 40 amp 250 volt circuit breakers one for each set of power from each combiner box circuit breakers protect the system just in case the other circuit breakers at the combiner boxes were to ever fail so there's just extra protection out of that we ran two gauge wires so we needed black and red let's see we needed 20 feet of each one and each of those cost about fifty dollars for each set and then we needed lugs to go with that because again we're crimping on our own stud lugs to each of those cables so that cost us 13 and 88 cents for 10 of them okay cool we needed 50 feet of 12 gauge wire for grounding how much did that cost that cost 26.25 and then we had more circuit breakers so many circuitry big circuit breakers these are the c series pole toggles but these are both single because there's one for each section right those are 100 amp circuit breakers we needed two of them and that cost us 70 dollars it's not expensive one thing i'll say about these c series pole toggles it is impossible to find anything to mount them we had so much trouble like we had we built a custom metal facing for the big one and we tried buying something online but like it wasn't c series or i don't know it had like a circle instead of a square we had to like dremel out all this stuff i don't know why you're supposed to put these things in it was a huge pain in the butt it was just so you know because i had the dreamline you did you were very and then we didn't even use it no we used it so oh yeah which one the one in the model yeah we did we did use okay okay grand total for all the solar charge controller gear all of it was one thousand nine hundred dollars and 49 cents that's a lot better [Music] now we're going to talk about conduit wire service entrance like things that you need that are going to be a little different for everybody but it's important not to forget this during your cost calculations because things can add up really fast like many of the other items in the cost breakdown we do have some amazon links but honestly just go to the hardware store your cost per piece is going to be like half or a quarter um i don't know why stuff is so expensive on amazon but it is like and then you can't buy conduit on amazon right it just doesn't really work that way okay so let's talk about all different pieces and again like what we needed is going to be very different from what you need but this should just give you an idea of what all might be involved if you're doing conduit runs first up is the main wire that comes out of the inverter right you've got 120 volt power it's got to go somewhere and so we opted to go with six two wire and i know that's huge and probably overkill but again we're just thinking ahead if we ever decide to go um 240 or if we decide to add another inverter we just want to make sure we aren't having to pull wire back out of the ground and we do it all you can only go through that service entrance so many times so we bought 175 feet of 6-2 wire for 400 which is a lot that is a lot good but you know what we're investing in our future [Music] we also needed some things like junction boxes we got a 8x8 pvc junction box for 34 we got two 30 amp rv plug outlets one to plug our airstream into and then one that we actually took apart and put a nema 30 amp rv electrical socket that's sort of like the opposite so we could plug in our generator and charge the batteries if we needed to during an emergency the total cost sorry i kind of skipped over cost the the power outlet boxes were 35 dollars each so 70 total and then the plug itself that we replaced was 31. we also needed some unistrut to mount all this pvc stuff too right and that cost us 18 for just a 10 foot piece yeah and then we cut it up and you know used it a few different ways in order to clamp the pvc to the unistrut you need pipe clamps and we bought six of those at 23. we needed 160 feet of one and a half inch pvc conduit and that cost us 296 dollars then we also needed a hundred feet of one and a quarter inch pvc and that was 230 dollars and so if you can see from this overview you can see we had some pretty long trench runs and that's why we had to buy so much conduit we also needed 90 degree bell curves because we had a lot of different ways that we were going with that pvc and so we bought um 11 of them for 44 and remember not the like sharp corner like bell curve all the way because when you're pulling that wire you need a smooth turn over at the solar panels we needed a way to get that pv wire to go down into the ground but be protected from the elements so we use a service engine's head it only cost 10 bucks then we needed some pvc male terminals one and a quarter inch we got four of those for five dollars total pretty cheap then we needed some rigid steel locking nuts to hold those in place got four of those for also five dollars then we needed lb connections and those are sort of those 90 degrees so we have pipe coming up out of the ground and then we had to go through the wall of the building we got three one and a half inch ones for 25 so most of the conduit we bought already had sort of a bell end on it that you could put the next piece into but we did have to buy some additional conduit couplers six of them for seven whole dollars the total for this section is one thousand one hundred and ninety eight dollars see if you haven't thought about that that's a lot of money but you need to have sitting around to be able to actually run all those wires and connect everything [Music] now let's talk about some tools and connectors yeah if you've never had to make your own cables or do any sort of electrical work there's a chance maybe you don't have some of these tools laying around we definitely did not we didn't i mean we had some of them but not all of them and so obviously you don't want to be in the middle of this job and be like oh crap i need a wire crimper so we're just going to run over sort of all the things that we realized we needed to have on hand when we were doing this install first up is a heat gun yeah we didn't have a heat gun but luckily our friends who are helping with this project did and it's important to have a heat gun because you're going to add that heat shrink on each connection yeah each cable that you make you put it on there and then you use that heat gun and it shrinks it up and it's got glue on it and it sticks it all together anyway it's called heat it's called heat shrink yes it's good to have um yeah so how much did the heat go so the heat gun is only 21.10 sweet pretty cheap okay also you're going to need an assortment of spade ring and butt terminals it's just a good idea to have an assortment pack sitting around because you never know what kind of connection you're going to need to make there's there's hundreds of these options on amazon the one we got was 18 and 95 cents what's next bit well the heat shrink that we were talking about earlier oh yeah so you can also get assortment packs of heat shrink yeah we needed all different sizes we did but so so first get yourself just like a normal assortment pack of heat shrink that cost us 9.97 but we needed like the bigger size right so because we did so many of the two odd cable size we however much of that that size heat shrink that came in that assortment pack was not enough so we had to buy extra three-quarter inch tube heat shrink that was 12.49 well breaking the bank red and black of course for both because you want to try to keep that to match your wire color another way we connected wires were with juego connectors and so these are little plastic things that have these ports that you push the wire into and kind of locks it down and holds it and it makes that connection then you can flip up the lever pull it back out if you need to change it you can get these with two three four five sort of ports on them and we just got a big old connector pack that came in handy what was it called a wiggle connector way to go 12.82 we also needed a 10-ton hydraulic crimper well sounds like a lot it's 10 tons so you could be like us and you could buy yourself a really cheap hammer crimper don't be like stick it in there and take a sledge hammer and just knock it and like get it to crimp but that's not the best connection so a hydraulic crimper um just gives you a lot more power i don't know it's hydraulic it's in 10 tons yeah yeah tons of power yeah it's only 54.99 cents how come we didn't get one if you're going to be doing large custom wires i think it's a good investment i do too it's a really good investment and of course if you're doing any electrical work you should always have wire strippers and wire crimpers those are easy to find at any hardware store on amazon you can get it for 23.99 for the crimping tool and 8.99 for the wire stripper now you may remember that we built a metal battery box for our lithium batteries in order to do that we needed to weld it together obviously if you don't want to deal with metal if you've got more room and you want to build it with wood totally doable but if you want to use metal you will need a welder and believe it or not you can get started with a small welder relatively cheaply yeah which has me questioning why we still don't have one you can get one for 226 dollars my birthday's coming up it is coming up you should probably really give me a little bit she really liked she got the whole sum of the box and she really liked it also on a plasma cutter one day so okay slow down also when you weld you need a mask and gloves right so get a mask for 35 some gloves for 23. really if you want to weld i mean guys we're talking like 300 bucks here less than 300 bucks to get started yeah how come we don't have one and finally fish tape we do need fish tape it doesn't have anything to do with fish no but it does help you pull wires over long distances yeah and it really helped us for our like 100 foot runs however because our runs were so long that means we had to buy the really long spools of fish tape so that was a whopping 179 however this is something that we are going to be using more than just this project oh for sure yeah we can definitely use it again all right you want to do the total for this section for tools and connectors your total is 626.30 [Music] and now the moment you've been waiting for them okay finally we're getting to the total i know we spent a lot of time talking about everything and you just want to know how much the dang thing cost okay so we're gonna tell you right now ready set go okay okay first section was solar solar panel array and ground mount for 5666. and thirty cents then the lithium battery bank four thousand seven hundred seventy nine dollars and fifty three cents the rec bms for one thousand four hundred and fifteen dollars and seventy cents victron color control gx and 5000 watt quattro inverter that is way too many words on there 3 327.58 our mppt solar charge controllers 1 900.49 conduit and wire was 1 198 and tools and connectors 626 and 30 cents this brings our total to 18 913 so almost 19 000 yeah now remember this is for a 7 200 watts of solar 28 kilowatt hours of lithium storage and a 5 000 watt inverter at 120 volts for only 19 000 and if you take off like 5 000 of that for the ground mount yeah we're talking about 15 grand for a massive off-grid solar system now this is not just for the solar shed this is going to power our airstream our solar shed and eventually our house yeah so this is a big investment for here on our property and by sort of piecing these elements together and by approaching it from the smart versus dumb components we were able to source the panels and the batteries much cheaper and then build the whole system ourselves and save boatloads of money boatloads boatloads i butt loads butt loads do you say boatloads i say butler well i usually say boatloads but i was trying to keep it pg oh you can save boatloads of money [Music] we hope that this cost breakdown helps you build your own off-grid solar system and save you a ton of money and don't forget if you have more questions we have that other video for the full install we have a wiring diagram for purchase a solar cost breakdown article so you can read through it and click the links and a cost calculator that you can buy to help plan and price your own off-grid solar system if you found this video interesting we are just getting started here on our own off-grid homestead yeah besides building unique off-grid sustainable structures we're also doing rainwater catchment and even other solar systems so we've got so much going on we'd love to share it with you make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our next project we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you