I also like to gain a better understanding of how much power my tools are actually consuming during use. Along with that, I made a substantial upgrade to the control panel, adding real, honest-to-cod light switches and a remote controller for the power inverter.Ī post shared by Andrew David Thaler folks are interested, I’ll do a whole guide on how to make the power regulator and control module for the Cybershed. The Cybersher also allows me to access battery and panel information from my phone, in the event that walking the 20 feet from my office to my shed is too great a burden. So, in addition to everything else, I turned my shed into a bluetooth-capable Cybershed, complete with addressable RGB lights that can dance to music, add some ambience, or glower menacingly in Cylon mode. There’s no way I could build an off-grid solar shed without also kitting it out with the nerdiest DIY electronics possible. Parts: Electric Heater Plate, 12V Electronic Temperature Controller It could run continuously for 10 days without a fresh charge. And its low power consumption means that the heater barely affects the charge state. This ensures that we get the best possible performance, even when it’s below freezing. This little 12v heater, when combined with a temperature relay, will keep the batteries at a nice, warm 15oC. Probably the most significant performance upgrade I did was to install a low-wattage heater in the new battery box, along with a lot of extra insulation. Parts: Renogy 12V 100AH Deep Cycle Hybrid Gel Battery, 3MM Reflective Foam Insulation Shield I also built a box around the batteries to keep them protected and insulate them from the cold. Or it’ll run a bench planer continuously for an hour and a half. That’ll run the pellet stove continuously for about 27 hours, which is more than enough time to get through a couple days of low power and not great sunshine. To get some long-term backup, I added two more batteries, bringing the system up to 300 amp hours of capacity. The original set-up could run our pellet stove indefinitely, but not much else. The secondary goal of this project was for it to act as an external backup generator for the house in the event of a power outage. Parts: 100 Watt 12 Volt, High-Efficiency Monocrystalline Panels, Waterproof ABS Double Solar-Cable-Entry-Gland The system can still receive another 400 watts of panels before I need to think about upgrading the charge controller. I also changed the way the power lines enter the shed to make them less exposed and clean up the cable management, but there’s not much else to this upgrade. I pulled off the old mounting system and added a hinged bracket using aluminum angle to make working up on the roof easier and safer. The system was always designed to be expanded and this winter I added two more 100 watt panels to keep the batteries topped up even when the sun isn’t perfect. Parts: 250 Amp Circuit Breaker with Manual Reset I swapped it out for a much stouter 250 Amp breaker that can handle higher current draw and haven’t had the inverter trip yet. ![]() I liked the old one because it had a manual trip, so I could disconnect the battery at will, but that set-up was just too wimpy and when I pulled it off this winter, I could see just how much wear there was on the switch mechanism. ![]() It could not handle the loads being called by the inverter and resulted in many instances where the inverter’s internal safety stops tripped because it was undervolted. The 250 Amp bus breaker connects the 3000 watt inverter to the batteries as well as the 12v panel. This is the one part of the original build that I did wrong. So here we are, 2 years later, with all the upgrades and modifications that I made to my off-grid workshop to keep things running hard. There were limits, though, as I added bigger tools like a bench planer and started hogging through much tougher stock, I began to run into more and more issues. It wasn’t perfect, and it had some issues with overdrawing, but the safety stops I put in place ensured that when I did push it too hard, it shut itself down rather than compromising components. I beat the heck out of that set up and, other than in the dead of winter when it was too cold for the battery, it could handle most everything I threw at it, pretty well. ![]() That first build can be found here: I turned my woodshop into a personal solar farm. The entire system could cost no more than one American Recovery Act stimulus check. This array needed to charge all my cordless batteries, but also drive my table saw, miter saw, circular saw, and the big router on my slab flattening jig. Two years ago, I set out on a little mission: to build an off-grid solar array that would power my woodshop.
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