Preparing Our Home for the Next Disaster

[00:00:00]So, welcome back everybody. This is going to be an exciting episode. I'm going to introduce you to our new system. We have decided to take this solo house build completely off-rid and we're going to be prepared for disasters, for hurricanes, and just for general outages that we've been experiencing lately by installing a full toptobottom EcoFlow system over here.

[00:00:19]And I'm excited to say we're going to be using their smart home panel that automatically swaps between grid, solar, or generator inputs. Okay, y'all. After experiencing tons of hurricane outages and recently we've been experiencing power outages due to severe thunderstorms. Well, it's got us thinking we're ready to really set this house up to be prepared for just about any kind of disaster. And one thing we've been experiencing here lately is power surges and power outages. And trust me, the last thing we want right now is no power, no ACs with this crazy hot as it's been. All right, I just don't see many people installing these smart home panels. We're going to discuss our system and our setup that we're going to be using over here. And uh you're going to see this in a lot of future episodes. We're going to do a full install of this system. But let me also tell you about what's actually going to power this. So currently sitting over at our other home is our big Delta Pro Ultra X system. This is a massive system right here from EcoFlow.

[00:01:13]And we've been running ours for a few years now. It's literally done below us out of several hurricanes and other power outages. Also, this thing, when I say massive, you can do multiple battery stacks. Not just what you see me having here. You can go from one battery all the way up to about 90,000 watt hours of capacity. Far more than we're going to need at this small riverhouse. We're going to run about 30,000 watt hours, which is going to be sufficient, especially for the smart power decisions and choices that we're making over here at the riverhouse. Now, the cool thing is you can do up to 10,000 watts of solar input on this. Again, that's more than we're going to need to run such an efficient house. Now, we're not ready to install our big Delta Pro Ultra X over here just yet. That's why we're going to leave it at the house. Actually, as I'm making this video, they're already giving us a 20% chance of a tropical storm or something else forming right here on top of Florida. Hurricane season is definitely in full swing. Now, as you may have guessed, EcoFlow is the sponsor of today's video, but this is something I've actually had for quite a while.

[00:02:08]They didn't send me this to make this video. And I've been holding on to it actually for well over a year now, knowing that if we built this, I was probably going to install this right here. Now, I've been getting tons of questions from our viewers about a system like this, especially on our live stream and other things. So, we're going to go over our disaster preparedness system that we're building in the house.

[00:02:26]I just got off the phone with a building official who gave me the thumbs up for solar. We've just got to give him some requested information. Not only are we going to go pick a location for the smart home panel, I'm going to tell you about it, but we'll go over the other stuff. All the way from the solar on the roof to again that big system that's going to power all this up. I've got lots of thoughts and ideas and plans right here to make for sure this house is like truly off-grid capable.

[00:02:49]Although, we're still going to stay grid tied. We kind of have to for local ordinances here, but we can probably almost completely offset our power usage with the solar system that we're going to put in here. But should we have those cloudy days or problems, well, this smart panel right here will automatically swap to the grid to pull power in if solar is not available for some reason, whether we are here or not.

[00:03:07]I love that.

[00:03:43]Heat. Hey, Heat.

[00:03:52]All right, so we're back and as you can see, I brought some LED lights today.

[00:03:57]So, I'm in our utility room right here if you're not familiar with it. And I'm trying to determine how I want to mount this. So, there's a couple different ways that we can put this smart home panel. It's the perfect size to fit in a stud bay of a wall, and I was seriously considering that, but then you lose insulation. probably not that big of a deal, but you're going to have a huge cavity with basically no insulation.

[00:04:19]Whereas, if you'll mount it on the outside of the wall, you just seen I put some blocking in. Now, I can remove this fully insulate behind it. Plus, it's going to help me with knockouts and how I access the large 200 amp cable wires, service entric wires that's going to be coming in from my outside meter and disconnect. It's worth mentioning EcoFlow does have some disaster preparedness sales going on right now.

[00:04:41]I'll put links in the description along with any discount codes that I may have.

[00:04:45]Go check them out. With hurricane season in full swing, with record temperatures going on, blackouts, brownouts happening, wildfires, you name it.

[00:04:54]There's disasters hitting everywhere.

[00:04:55]And the older I get, the more I love my convenience of electricity. I love running water. I love getting a shower.

[00:05:02]We're not going without power no more.

[00:05:05]Done lived that enough in my life through all these hurricanes that we've experienced. So, as much as I don't like it on the outside of the wall, I think that's the way we're going to go with it because this is a pretty tight room. And I also specifically put it right here because I just got some measurements. I went home and measured my Delta Pro Ultra X and it's going to fit beautiful right here with a stack of five batteries. I do believe the 30,000 watt hours worth of batteries is going to be all that I need, but I could put a whole another stack over here and just continue to build that system out in the future if I ever decided that's something I need to do. So, it fits great here. There's room on either side.

[00:05:39]It sits up about this tall. Made sure I left room when we open this door that it will not hit the battery stack.

[00:05:47]I can still fully access all of my breakers. So, let's talk about this panel because boy, have I had a lot of questions about it and some concerns, rightfully so. All right, so for starters, this is ETL certified and rated. It says for us. I talked with my building official, which is the head guy over the building department. told him what I was putting in. He sounded very intrigued by this and we discussed it is fully rated. So, there should not be a problem running this as my main home panel. Yes, I know y'all have concerns about running this as a main home panel.

[00:06:19]I did too until I talked with EcoFlow about some fail safes. We're going to discuss that. The other thing I was really curious about is do I have to use specialized breakers? Is this just going to be expensive to install? No. Turns out after doing a little research online, your typical Homeline Square D breakers is what snaps right in here.

[00:06:39]And what I really like about this Smart Home Panel 3, it's got 32 circuits, which should take care of just about any size home. This is rated for 200 amps in. However, I was reading I believe it's rated for 160 amps out continuous duty. Now, y'all, there is not homes continuously running 160 amps at any given time. Actually, most homes are way under the 100 amp. My home typically on average runs a few amps, like four to 600 watts an hour. It's only whenever you kick on electric dryers, maybe have electric stove or water heater to where you're going to run that stuff up or a big well pump, but it's all going to be for brief periods of time. All right, so the big question is, is it safe? Well, it's certified for US service. It can be run as a main home panel or a sub panel.

[00:07:26]And some of you are going to be asking why we don't run a sub panel. Oh, and the other important thing was very common everyday breakers that we can run in here. That's good. So, I've got two options. I could go get a standard, say, squared ear homeline panel, put right here, and then right beside it, I could run this one and pull my critical circuits into it. Well, here's the thing. Because this house is going to be set up to be fully off-rid, and we're only going to smart switch the grid whenever we need it. We run our battery bank empty. The solar's just not available. That probably will happen a handful of times a year, but in the meantime, we're going to run completely on solar, knocking that electric bill down. And again, running after the hurricanes or other emergencies that we constantly seem to have. So, it makes no sense for me to put in a main panel just to run two big wires over to this and pull all my circuits into it. This might as well be my main panel. So, that's where the big concern comes in. Might as well. What happens? Because this is a smart panel, we all kind of get it in our head that there's all kinds of electronics and things going on in here.

[00:08:25]And there is there's fans and all kinds of stuff. There's monitoring devices and circuits and everything else and switching circuits. But what happens if this were to fail? Well, you don't want your home to potentially not have power, especially if we've already got grid power coming in or the solar is available, vice versa. Well, it turns out there is a manual force feature in here to where we can fail it to grid. It also looks like we could fill it to the battery bank. That made me feel comfortable about putting this in as my main panel. Something else I'm going to do that I typically do not do on the outside wall right here. Normally, our code in jurisdiction allows us to mount a meter base. That's where power comes in from the power pole and then we can go directly into our box. No cut off, no disconnect. But our code requires that it has to go directly into the box. We can't run wires through a wall. Service entrance cable for example. Well, I'm going to fork out a little extra money.

[00:09:17]put a 200 amp disconnect. Well, we're going to have power coming in from the pole. Our county allows us to trench and run underground. So, I'm going to have to move the camper out and run over to the corner of the house. Now, they do have only a certain amount they allow you to go underground. They'll come out and survey all this before they allow me to start trenching. We could have to wind up, say, moving a pole over here.

[00:09:37]It's going to be totally up to them, but the distance looks allowable to me. All right, so we're going to trench, come underground right back to that center pole. We're going to run our conduit up and right about here, this is that utility room. It stops about right here that we were just in. It goes back this direction. So, we'll have a meter base right here. And then we'll come directly out of the meter base into a big 200 amp disconnect. And then that's going to go directly in to my meter box that's right there. That's why I'm setting everything up the way that I'm doing. It's going to be a nice quick, easy install. I'm also going to go ahead and extend the porch around back here and stop it about dead center of the house. That way the power company can visually see the the meter if they ever need to change it. I've got some way to go throw the disconnect in emergencies or if I need to change anything out. And we'll probably go ahead and put some propane tanks back here because we're going to run the house on propane. All right, since this is kind of us explaining our off-grid system, that's something I really need to discuss real quick. And then we need to get back to the panel because I know that's going to be a hot topic. But we are specifically setting this house up with every appliance like a water heater. We're going to do an on demand water heater most likely in that room or either on the outside wall. Our stove, I love cooking with the gas. And then we may run a line for front grills and stuff like that. We're going to run as much stuff as we can on propane. Things like stoves are extremely high demand. Use tons of electricity and water heaters are quite power hungry as well. If you're going to set a house up to be off-rid and try to run on solar, it is best to avoid big hungry high demand items like that. There's no point in taxing your solar system whenever I can just set up to run on propane. I prefer propane anyways. Okay, back at the panel. Here's what I want to show y'all.

[00:11:18]Everybody's big concern again was what happens if this smart device fails? I had the same questions again. Well, look right here. So, in this panel are manual switches right here. And I know with the glare of the lights, it's probably hard to read. Here is your grid switch. I can force the grid off or force to grid by flipping this switch. Same thing with the battery system. I can complete. So if that side were to fail, for example, the solar side, well, I could completely force that off and force this back on straight to grid and it's supposed to make full contact back to our bars right here. We can also go up in the app of the Delta Pro Ultra X and kind of set up charging parameters and battery percentages and all that good stuff.

[00:11:58]We're going to cover that in another episode. But should for some reason this completely fail. And I don't see how when you've got manual overrides here.

[00:12:06]It's not like that's electronic swapping for you, you know, electronic circuit so to speak. That's why I'm going to go put the 200 amp disconnect outside even though I don't have to here because I could technically put the meter base right behind this. We'll punch out and run directly in. And in the event of catastrophic failure, I could go through that 200 amp servers off. Now I don't have to involve the power company, get a meter pulled, none of that stuff. And what I could do realistically, although it take me several hours or majority of a day, I could run to my local hardware store, pick up a standard 200 amp box, install it, pull my lines in, hook up all my circuits again, use the same breakers that I'm using in this and another box, and then throw the disconnect back on, and I'm back in service all without having to involve the power company. I like the sound of that. But the fact that I can manually force this, which I didn't know to begin with, uh, I feel so much better about this. There's no reason I should feel uncomfortable installing this.

[00:12:59]especially since it's also rated for main panel service in the US. Hopefully that answers your questions cuz boy, I've had a bunch of people ask me about that.

[00:13:10]And I will say it's also a real sharp looking unit. Big though, quite a bit bigger than a standard 200 amp panel. No doubt about that. But there's more. Like we got our big nice battery bank here.

[00:13:21]How do we connect that to this for all to communicate, to swap, and to power this up? Well, that's where this box right here comes in. So, the nice thing about this one is I can run multiple inverters, although I don't need it. I can't remember if I mentioned my Delta Pro Ultra X has up to 12,000 watts of output. That'll run this house many times over, but if you happen to have a bigger house with multiple ACs and needed a ton of power, you could run multiple inverters for like 20 something thousand watts. I don't need that. The other cool thing is this one over here allows a 240 volt generator input. And I like that the spacing on these is set up for 16inch on center studs. So, we're going to wind up mounting this right here in the future. That's going to be after drywall. We got a knockout underneath. And then we'll plug directly into that um with our Delta Pro Ultra, Delta Pro Ultra X, and I think even the Delta Pro 3 may plug into this. So, if you're curious about something like this, but don't need the big system that we're going to have, you can run smaller systems into this. All right, back to the generator portion. Yes, we're discussing a solar system, but if y'all watch the channel enough, you know I love redundancy. We are going to have a generator system set up over here. No big expensive whole house system that costs 12 or $13,000. No thank you. We're actually going to run a through wall pass plug over here since we're going to do that little deck out there. And I'm probably going to do a permanent enclosure for one of my small inverter generators. I have a couple different smart models from EcoFlow. and we'll have them to where we can cut those on anytime that we need, whether we're here or not. They literally run off the internet, Bluetooth, or you can manually turn them off and on. And I'll plug it into the Delta Pro Ultra X. So, in the event that, well, say the power's out and we can't go to grid and maybe it's rainy for days, we're not getting the solar that we need, I'm going to have it to where I could fire up a generator, start charging my system, and then it can still output to this. Now, that's with me using a 120 volt generator. I could plug in a 240 volt generator and run everything as well. But the cool thing about the Delta Pro Ultra X is I can run 120 into it to charge while outputting 240 on it. I've shown this on the channel before. So if we still want to run the mini split system or the well pump to get a shower here.

[00:15:41]Oh my word, it's already so hot and bright. All right. So, here's the plan.

[00:15:45]We are going to be going with the roof mounted solar. Why? Why not build an array in the yard? This is river property. The whole desire to be down here. And it does flood. So, the last thing we want is anything on the ground, whether it be electrical or our panels potentially getting underwater and like say record floods. It would be possible.

[00:16:04]So, roof is kind of the only option that we have right now. And it's not my first option. I don't like putting holes in my roof, but there's proper ways to do it, right? and we will be covering that. I'm actually still researching all the mounts and rail systems, although I think I figured out the manufacturer I'm going with. I've actually got to grab some measurements while I'm up here.

[00:16:22]Okay, so here's the plan, y'all. I'm working on very limited room. This is a small roof, as you can see. I'm just probably going to do two runs. I still got to measure. That's what it looks like. Two runs of 400 W panels. So, 400 watt panel here, here, here, and here.

[00:16:38]And then again up there with a rail system that we're going to have to try to get mounted down not only through the roof but into the trusses. I want to make it very strong and hurricane resistant. All right. So, what panels am I going with? I know it's hard to see.

[00:16:50]Y'all remember the big 400 W EcoFlow panels that I put over there on my portable tool trailer? Well, those panels work so extremely well. I mean, highly efficient panels produce more than they claim and seem to pick up all the time. Well, even with them being a little pricey, you get what you pay for, people. Well, I've certainly learned that testing stuff. That's what we're going to go with on the house. The problem is I have a limited amount of room. Now, I know what y'all are thinking. Wait a minute. This is a super long roof. I know you ain't got a lot of room that way, but you can put thousands upon thousands of watts of solar up here. Well, yeah, you're right. But again, back to my concerns of punching holes in the roof. There is only a small section of roof I am willing to put holes in and actually run solar. And that section stops about right here. So I've got from here back. So I think even with 3200 to 4,000 watts, this house will run completely off grid unless we have cloudy and rainy days. That is the kryptonite for solar systems. Nothing we can do about that. So, while I won't get sun all day long, because we have so many trees here, we actually do have a good open section of sky to where many, many, many hours I'm going to get, well, hopefully 3 to 4,000 watts of power, especially on days like today. There's not a cloud in the sky. All right, so here we are back in the house. Sorry again for the poor lighting. We don't have electrical. We're discussing that in this episode. So, here is our little living room. And as you can see, we've got a vated ceiling. No attic access.

[00:18:19]That's a concern for me. All right, so about half the house is vated ceiling and then we go to attic. I purposely did a drop ceiling and attic in this house for two reasons. One, I want access up there to run electrical, plumbing, maybe throw some boxes, stuff like that.

[00:18:35]Typical attic stuff. But I love having access for anything that's going to be run through the roof. The other reason I wanted attic access is cuz I knew we were going to attempt to go solar and go off-rid. And I want to be able to pop my head up in there anytime I feel like and see if there's any potential leaks.

[00:18:52]That's a big concern of mine. So, if I were to install solar panels all over here, I'm going to have limited visual sight in there to see if there's a leak.

[00:19:01]Yes, I can kind of peek in there some, but once we put really thick insulation in there, yeah, you're about not going to see. So, I am going to sacrifice this entire section of roof and not put panels. At least I think right now just because I can't ever see if I potentially have a leak. I wish I could see it and maybe I'm overthinking this.

[00:19:22]That was a lot of talking, but man has this been a hot topic on our live streams and everything else. I wanted to introduce you to what we're doing right here. This also means well we're about to start electrical. My main plan is to get out there and build the porch and some stairs so I don't have to keep climbing in the house via a lift or ladder. But the next 10day forecast, now that I just mentioned how sunny Florida is, is super high chances of thunderstorms and rain. So, we might as well be inside starting electrical. Oh, and FYI, the solar is going to be the huge part of being off-grid, but we happen to have some other stuff that's going to take care of us in the winter time coming. I'll show you all that in the next couple of weeks. We have some really exciting things going on here to kind of make this truly off-grid. All right, y'all. Appreciate you watching.

[00:20:07]I'm about to start jumping into electrical, which means one of your next episodes is going to be electrical.

[00:20:12]Thank y'all for watching. We'll catch you on the next one. Ask any questions you might have. That's what the comment section is for. Thanks for watching.

[00:20:18]We'll catch you on the next one.