us wide that has a solar wind solar hot water and also a sales certification i have hot water in the solar electric installer ones i'm also very very interested in energy auditing and passed the company and competency exam for for minnesota in that and you know that's a very very important thing to pair with all of the stuff that we're talking about  it's you know an event like this makes me want to use a bigger metaphor and it's it's bad to put good beer in a leaky glass you know if you're going to if you're going to harvest some green energy or if you're going to use regular energy why not keep it around a nuff said about conservation i can get stuck in that quagmire too quickly but my contact information the reason why we're here which is off grid solar so with that i can i can hit forward you know three reasons to go off grid the best three reasons i can think of number one we'll change the first one to you want to do the right thing you want to make green energy i put down not because it's easy but because it's hard it was a john f kennedy thing about the space program i like the challenge of going off grid and that's one of my motivations but you know i think  could say we want to do things the right way could be a great reason to put a couple of modules on your roof and start powering your loads with something other than the grid you know for those of you with cabins and with with fish houses or any other thing that you want to power off grid these are probably the two reasons that you'll go to either solar is the cheapest option and we can compare the the amount you spend on a solar system to a a line charge that you might be being charged by the utility right now a thirty month thirty dollars month in some cases in town here it's about seven dollars a month but in the country it goes up them keeping your line maintained from wherever they're generating the energy all the way to where it drops into your wires can cost a lot of money and i'll tell you you can buy a lot of solar for thirty dollars a month a lot of people get that frustration of opening up the and going thirty five dollars and i didn't use any energy zero kilowatt hours it makes a very strong case for going solar there are costs but they might not be greater than those costs and then finally some time solar is the only option you could be so far down some road across some field or as i talked to somebody earlier today on the other side of the lake you're not going to get utility to to bring lines to you and if you have to pay for a an underground utility connection it can be upwards of fifty cents or more an inch and i don't know how many inches it is over that lake we were talking about before but you have a hard time getting a trencher to work under water under the what it would be i don't know i don't even know that that would work so anyway those are those are good reasons to do solar and and get keep in mind here that we're talking off grid there are lots of good reasons to use the grid well and you know the electrical grid one of the main reasons we want to use the electrical grid is not the appearance of the electrical wires in my reliable and it's simple to use the grid you pay your bill you get your energy you get as much energy as you want you you know you do there's no limit to how much energy they will want you to use and and sometimes trick you into using so the grid is good because it's reliable because it's always there in the amounts that we need and it almost never let's face it it almost never goes out it's a rare event when you have to turn on they get the candles out do laura ingalls wilder for a night  it's a lot you know solar is a lot less reliable in that in most cases because we're not sizing these systems to never fail we're sizing them to be available most or all almost all of the time a good thing about the utility they are a tremendously large battery and i was talking to somebody before this about going solar for their whole house and going solar for your whole whole house if you don't learn how to use very little lecture city involves very many batteries and buying them installing them maintaining them replacing them that can cost sometimes more than the seven or eight dollars a month you would pay for a utility connection so why not buy energy in a cheaper form than than solar basically there's a there's a simple formula if you go with the grid and you back feed your energy if you grid connect and you don't offer it you don't have batteries they give you credit for the kilowatt hours you produce or you save money based on not having to buy them in the first place that's that big that would get lumped together with battery costs and then you'd compare that to your monthly service charge to see if it was worthwhile for you to go off grid in a certain location and i'll tell you this the xcel makes a better battery bank than i have in that tub down there less expensive easier to maintain safer go with the easy and simple third good thing about the utilities as they sometimes have a incentives for grid connected but there are no incentives for off grid because often it does not help the utility do their job grid connected solar does help the utility do their job please feel free to point to stop me i'm going to i'm going to start talking faster and faster as the coffee kicks in yeah grid connected means that if you use it on site it gets used onsite if you have extra gets imported at night when you're not making it on site you import and at the end of the month if what you use is greater than what you produce you write them a small check and then this is not a good thing if you produce more than you use you you get a check from them and it sounds good but it's not good because you're not saving taxes fees all those other things and you're delivering to x l a resource it's more valuable than what you're paying with they're paying you for so i mean it's not i mean i hear a lot from a lot of people i want to make a system that's big enough for all that i use and i want to sell back to the utility who has to it as well you know they they love to buy middle of the day middle of the summer they love that electricity they they think it cost them more to produce that electricity than they charge you for so i don't know if you really like the utility you can sell as much as you want to them otherwise you're better off just making what you need or a part of what you need the numbers are better ok what does solar electricity do for us i mean solar electric the off grid lights are a great load charging things providing entertainment providing air movement refrigeration that works pretty well now we're getting to some tougher ones tools microwave and now we're getting to the off limits ones almost the you use other energy sources if you want an air conditioner or if you want to space heater or you want to or a stove top because those are such huge uses that they drive the side of the size of the system up and now it's way too big for your normal use and just to just air condition you know two or three times during the summer so these are not recommended those are great kind of in descending order you have to at the beginning of this process figure out what kind of weekender you might be in a cabin do you do you love roughing it you might consider not using solar at all i would say though that solar is a better way of lighting than  oil lamps because oil is kind of smell there's a fire danger so lighting lighting would be the one i'd peel off of here and say even if you love roughing it solar lighting is more convenient than none solar lighting do you like to bring some of it with you do you require a couple of computer charges so that you can get some of your work done or do you want full power these are different categories of equipment and size and expense so so choose wisely and choose you know choose what you are here is a quick rundown of some of the parts of a solar system and like i started talking about outside we have a paycheck a bank account and expenses it's just like your personal finances what's that paycheck bank account or expenses that's your paycheck that's your income it takes sunlight it turns it into energy that on a daily or weekly basis is going to give you an amount of energy you can budget for different things if you get a bigger one it's a bigger budget if you get a smaller one you have to learn to live with less or you have to expect less so paychecks come in different sizes and luckily expenses come in different sizes too so balance your your expenses with the paycheck that you you're able to afford or you or you have  got a bank account right here this thing can hold on to several days of solar if it's big enough it can hold on to several weeks of solar if it's big enough it can get you through several days without any sun at all so depending on the choices you make with your battery it will affect how well your system works too much battery means too much cost too little battery means you're run out sun times and you might run that battery down to a point where it doesn't act last as long as it could if it was doubled so there's your your bank account and then your expenses are the different kinds of loads that you have whether that is a twelve volt load that might run directly off of the solar system's charge controller or maybe you have this thing called an inverter and i stole a picture from europe i guess because it says two twenty and then you've got you've got normal plug into the wall loads that you can use with that if you take this light bulb and screw it into that fixture it's made for twelve volts that's two hundred twenty volts it's going to pop immediately so keep in mind that d electricity is like a river of electricity that's what a solar panel does that's what a battery does that's not what our walls do the walls are may give off sixty cycle ac alternating current so different animal this this machine takes d c and turns it into a c so you can run anything you can by twelve volt loads stuff that you plug into your car through this the cigarette lighter  those are available some of the ones made for solar a little fancier a little more expensive little more efficient but there is a world of twelve old appliances up there just just don't plug into the wall because they don't last long this by the way is a twelve hour late and it's running on a cigarette or cigarette lighter right now i should call it a d c power port good the inexpensive ones can work just fine a lot of the time this charge controller has a a load circuit on it so you can run things directly from your battery through your charge controller and this charge controller is there so that your solar doesn't bully your battery bank doesn't force it to over charge and so that the load doesn't believe your battery bank and pull too much out of it the charge controller is there to keep the the energy coming in at a good pace to stop it before too much goes out and to make the battery last longer one thing i should say too is that this this module has one two three four five six by one two three five six seven eight nine one two three four five six seven eight nine they don't make them like the hatch the the normal twelve for a simple for a simple system the normal twelve volt module has one two three four by one two three four five six seven eight nine it's got thirty six  battery it's battery abuse so the charge controller takes some of that voltage away waste some of it the less efficient charge controllers just waste it they turn it into heat on on on a heat sink in the back of the charge controller good charge controllers are able to transform that voltage into more amperage at twelve volts or at fourteen volts whatever you're going to charge your battery at so next sli e it gets more complicated and you know this this is a level of complexity that some do it yourself for years can do and most if not almost all of them  can't big systems you've got to buy the you get to buy the stuff you might have to at this point pay somebody to install it for you and there is going to be made and higher maintenance costs in a large system there are more things that can go wrong with it so the bigger you get the less simple everything is and the more it can get out of a do it yourself firsthand i think well you know the the moon the bigger your battery bank and the less you can draw them down the better i like to stop at about a lemon nine or eleven seventy down below twelve you know i don't consider that at that that i'm living on borrowed time and i'd better stop i don't i don't like to get batteries down that low but they you know they can go down to eleven without getting damaged  more time you spend down in that part of the battery the lower the lifespan of the battery will end up but twelve is not really the dangerous point i like to say it's the danger point because then there's some buffer below it so yeah eleven and a half that you're not going to hurt a battery too much if you take it down there and get it back up but if you drive are down below eleven i mean that's you know you're you're kicking a dead horse at that point and you will could you make your battery into a dead horse now and on some level this is super simple you know i don't want to complicate it i do want to complicate it but i'll save that for a little bit later this is simple you've got detachable solar you've got a battery you've got a light which  might be on a motion sensor might be on a pole switch so that you can control it a friend of mine who i am doing his house system for his cabin he's doing this for his out house and it makes total sense i mean you buy something for twenty two dollars on amazon you don't expect it to last for twenty years and when you need to use the outhouse in the middle of the night you've got a life simple let's not design the heck out of something and say that's not good enough but it's probably not going to last forever there are larger systems like this and there are kits that you can buy and some of those kits are good deals and some of them art you have to get savvy with equipment costs and and what you're getting sometimes to know if it's a good deal or not but this is just a parts parts picture from a top of pole street light that you know might be might be very functional i mean you could modify a kit like this to do almost anything looks like there is a battery in part part number three and four are there so there's even a battery camera cabinet that's better than my rubbermaid rough rough night so i mean totally integrated they've made all the equipment choices they found the right stuff to put together that's that's worth something it's sometimes not worth as much as they want to charge for it and this is my best example of that these these solar attic vents back when i started in two thousand and six they didn't seem like a bad deal because the solar would have cost more than one hundred dollars on a thirteen watt module you'd pay more than one hundred dollars for that paying two hundred twenty dollars for the whole flashed attic fan would be a pretty good deal but now if you can get that together this is a ten watt module that i you know i probably paid one hundred dollars for seventy eight years ago it's a great investment back because now it's worth nothing so this is this is a fan or this isn't this is a solar module this is a fan standard twelve and i think it was stolen out of a computer here is a switch that i put in it because the way it works right now in the way that one w it's the sun's out the fans going when the sun goes away the fan goes away this is going to be a ventilation system for a greenhouse so i put a little control thing in it that allows me to win when the top of the attic gets ninety degrees the fan goes on and then when the fan gets the the temperature down to eighty degrees the fan goes off so there's a five dollar controller in there that was chosen because it does exactly what i want it turns on a fan when it gets too hot and it clicks back when it gets reasonable again so piecing this together i don't know let's let's give me a budget of twenty five dollars to buy this and let's do this for free and let's put five dollars on it grab the wire from some place and for thirty dollars i've got to get a ventilation system i can install that works when it needs to and doesn't work when i want to keep the heat in the structure now finally let's get to off grid solar systems this is about the simplest piece together system that that you would consider using  the the parts in it this thing is designed around available high quality and inexpensive parts ok so this is an eighty watt module it like i said it used to be the big dog of the industry and and now it's it looks it looks and feels really small you know it used to this used to be what an eighty watt module fifteen years ago i got where did you get an eighty watt module the biggest i can get is a fifty three and they end it would've cost an incredible amount of money this one is old but this this module is there's a there's a label on back that tells you everything about it that you really need to know about it it'll give you five a about of twelve volt electricity when it's in full sun so five amps you know it's a number let's try to make sense of what that means in a little bit but that's that's that unit right there and notice one two three four by nine that is a thirty six l eighteen volt module and it feeds to a charge controller this is the same as that and this charge controller is a twelve volt charge controller that means it can take the eighteen it can chop off some of those balls and it can give the battery an appropriate voltage to to charge it well and then we've got we've got the the solar hooked into the part with the little sunshine icon on it there's a positive a minus you have to worry about so you know polarity is important for those of who don't know what that means you probably should be wiring these yet there's a twelve  battery that gets hooked into the little battery icon and then hooked up to the little light icon is any twelve volt load you want to put on it doesn't have to be a light by the way this won't break if you put a non light on it but the thing about this sun saver is the writing on the side here says don't power more than ten amps so ten amps times twelve volts equals one hundred twenty watts and you can about this type of system it's simple it's kind of fuse protected in this charge controller if you asked this charge controller to do fifteen amps instead of ten amps on the load side it will blow up and then it's safe if you ask him to do eight amps instead of six amps on the solar that's what the six stands for it'll blow up and you'll be safe so you've got something in here that if everything goes wrong this thing will disconnect and the battery which is sort of like a big bomb sitting there it's a lot of energy you don't want that and that battery to be able to discharge fully out there in a short circuit that will cause heat that will cause a fire so hooking everything into a charge controller is one level of protection a better thing to do is to put a fuse or a circuit breaker on the battery positive too to make so that if anything out here happens funky even together in parallel are a big battery a bigger battery two batteries in series is a higher voltage battery so yeah i mean if you hook them in series and we'll get to that definitely  threw a quick number on there you can buy some of this is this material you should be able to buy for around three hundred dollars it will produce for you about a third of a kilowatt hour a normal average i'm minnesotan uses about ten kilowatt hours a day so a third of a kilowatt hour is much smaller than ten so we're not talking normal everyday life here we're not going to be turning on air conditioners space heaters we're not going to be electrically heating water we're not going to be doing a lot of things but we will be able to accomplish lights ventilation charging computers that kind of activity could be used in this kind of system and i want to get down to a little bit more nitty gritty here by by by  doing some math and doing some accounting right now right now we're we're calculating our income and our hand come is based on our hourly rate times how many hours we work so in the summertime you can expect five and a half hours of good sun a day on average sometimes it's all day sometimes none of the day but five and a half hours is our july average it's a little bit lower than our july average so if that eighty five gives you five amps of twelve volt and it does it for five and a half hours that means that you're going to produce at sixty percent efficiency you're going to net there's your tax right there you're going to net sixteen amp hours a day now that battery in the previous page was about one hundred amp hour battery so you could throw several days into that battery so sixteen amp hours in the summertime in the wintertime you get cut back on your hours you have to try to survive on last so in the summertime or in the winter time you're down to about seven you're less than half of what you were in this in the in the summer time if you have a single storage battery one hundred five amp hours about sixty percent of that i mean let's take that down to a voltage of about eleven point eight or so about sixty amp hours of that battery are usable a little nuance here is that if you guzzle that down fast a lot of amps at once it's not as big of a glass as if you sip it so using it slow and steady is better than trying to get immediate use out of it just because of the way the battery works sixty amp hours well a battery itself is only twenty percent efficient are eighty percent efficient at charging discharging so twenty percent of a charge is used up in in heating heating the battery which is a good thing sometimes because you end up with heat in your battery container and even if you've got a cold cabin if you insulate the container you can keep your batteries from getting as as cold as the as the air in the cabin so so there's that twenty percent you take off the top because it's a battery and then there's at least another twenty percent that you can eliminate because these things take eighteen volts these pulse with modulator do less expensive charge controllers they take eighteen volts and they chop it down to thirteen and a half miles to charge the battery so they they eliminate almost a third of your energy right there sixty percent might be generous i mean in in real life it doesn't seem like you end up with all sixty of that percent but but let's assume it's a perfect world even though we know it isn't and so if we're sitting with sixty usable amp hours and week and we take that sixteen amp hours a day we can make with the solar module that's a label by the way it says eighty five watts it says peak or our voltage seventeen point seven there's are eighteen volts that it puts out it's got other numbers on it too i want i want to explain all of them but sixteen amp hours a day in the summer you're throwing it into a one hundred five amp hour container it can take a bunch of those and then at the end of five days you've produced about eighty eighty amp hours so you can expect at the end of a summer day or summer week you come to your cabin you're more than likely going to have a very very charged up battery ready to go with sixty amp hours at your disposal if it's sunny the next day and you use some you'll be replacing it with the sun but in the winter time thirty five amp hours for a five day week two and a half hours times five amps times sixty percent that's seven times five is thirty five that's not going to fully charge a discharge battery so if you go every weekend in the winter the sun in the winter might not keep up with you do you go more frequently in the summer of the winter though i winter ok you know most people do most of their cabin ing in fair weather where you're going to be fully charging this system in a week if you take a week off if you go every other week in the winter you should be fine you should be able to charge your batteries up pretty close any questions at this point i am getting into math and i'm i'm going to veer away from it a little but i got to do some math with you because you've got to understand yes i would assume and here's what we did for a couple years ago we did this communication trailer for up north so that the cell signal could be transmitted in a book in an area the company i work for lost a lot of money in that job because they put in a very well insulated trailer and then they had another well insulated battery box and then they put a slab underneath it with a propane heater to put heat in the slab of that box and the cost just overran more than likely you're not going to freeze those batteries if they stay in a high state of charge so if you've got a system that is in a well insulated container and you're not going up there enough to to drop down to nothing every weekend you're going to keep those things in a state of charge so they won't be very freeze sensitive when you draw down a battery more of the acid turns into water and the freezing point of the water goes down ok how cold does it get in the cabin maybe negative ten probably not negative thirty like outside right inside ok so i said negative ten and and you're contradicting me with negative eleven i think you're my daughter i believe i think i know you sound like one of my kids ok anyway so it negative levon inside that battery box with with an over charge creating heat and the battery creating heat and a high state of charge your batteries are going to be fine if you like i said though if they discharge a lot you could run into some problems but i figured that for the price it costs them to put in the the propane tank the on demand heater the control system and that slab with packs in it that was inside that battery container they could probably replace the batteries two or three times i wouldn't worry about that i think i'd stop it insulate the hell out of it and then i think you'd be good young lady ok so this is on the expense side and i'm looking at some lighting here a twelve volt light twelve watts is going to be  so twelve divided by twelve is a one amp light that is a by the way this one running right here is a twentieth of an amp and of an ample light so this is not very bright really but but a twenty of an amp regular light bulbs are about an amp if you had a twenty four volt fan that would be a two amp thing if you use these lights four hours a day you'd have to budget about twelve amp hours for hours equal amp hours the same ones that we put into the battery were taken out now on a fan if you wanted to drown all night long and blow cool air in your body or even hot air in your body it's going to you're going to be budgeting about sixteen amp hours a day and i did some testing with my computer and found out that a forty eight volt forty eight watch charge which is a four amp charge takes about an hour and if i want to do that twice i should budget eight amp hours a day for the computer charging now in a simple system that this month that might be about all i expect from the system and that's going to get me about thirty six amp hours out of that battery remember we have about sixty to use so i can do that almost twice before i get into the red line with the battery so that's you know it's a pretty good load to be thrown at this battery if you want to use more you can't use the same battery else you're going to drain it and if you want to use less than you're fine but you might have paid a little too much for some of the equipment if it's this big just for  sake of argument you know in the wintertime we use lights more in the winter time we might use computers more in the winter time we use fans less so the budget be a little different but i would expect a little bit more use in the winter time just because it's darker more often and you're stuck inside using electricity so winter demand winter expenses are higher than summer expenses but winter paycheck is lower than summer paycheck so you're kind a design problem here you're not real load matched the two don't go up and down together they they were countered each other but you know the figuring out what you expect to do with this figuring out how how much that's going to draw on your battery is going to make you decide which better to buy and how big a solar you need to throw at it to get it charged up again any questions you get too far away from your eyes and so directional that it's hard to read five five watts is what's on the trailer right now and it works pretty well ten watts is the blown out when i am right there that i don't know must have gotten jostled in the trip but it was a great light bulb folks have so sorry you can't see it i don't know if this makes sense the way i put it but i wanted to give you an idea of how these things work you know here's our here's our daily production with this system and our daily use remember we get five days of non weekend to charge off so that kind of works out then in fall our our paycheck goes down but our our expenses go up even more so in the winter you need time on your side in the winter you need a lot of days to have that thing charging or you need a really big solar system that that might not be necessary in the summertime and then in the spring kind the same thing as the fall takeaways from this is all we charging has time on your side load matching is great especially if you take more summer trips than winter trips because you're going to get more summer s than winter sun and then the last two comments cloudy weather and continuous use make it necessary for you to really monitor what you're using and cut back on it really conserve it unless you're going to build a system that's designed for those things designed for a lot of days or clouds or design for a whole lot of regular week long use it's just a different design not going to get into too much detail here i hope but i have two storage batteries in there from menards they cost me less than eighty dollars they are not starter batteries they are either storage or marine batteries they've got thick lead plates in them that can discharge deeply and then when they reach charge the led that redeposit sonam stays smooth instead of getting all pockmarked like a starter battery a starter battery will work for about a week and then it'll be garbage in a solar setting so you've got a choice between flooded batteries which if they tip they can spill you have to check the liquid in in a flooded battery or other st paul pretty close to hamlin the guy who runs it always says look for the dominoes were right by the domino's people always come in here and ask for pizzas he was also the guy who walked me all the way back into the back of his warehouse when we were looking for  a seal battery and he pointed to one and said that one's pretty good and i lifted it up and i said what is that like seventy pounds he said sixty four so he knew that battery exact weight and it was there was only one of them there it was way in the back so near the battery can give you a lot of really good advice on this stuff maybe you don't need the advice and maybe an eighty dollars maintenance required battery is going to do it i went with these because i can check  d there is you know and when i was growing up i had a whole bunch of different pairs of pants that from batteries what happens is you get battery acid on your pants you don't know if you wash your pants and you have a big hole right there so you don't know right away in your skin is fairly resistant to it otherwise i'd i'd be scarred i guess but you pop the top on a battery you suck some liquid into the density meter and there are a certain number of bubbles or balls will float depending on the density if it's really dense and good and thick most of the balls will float and if it's runny and light and low density then most of the balls will sink so very inexpensive can give you a good idea of what the concentration of gas it is and that should be done about every year  e the other thing i should mention about doing that is whenever i work on batteries even if i'm not going to take anything apart i always put safety glasses on because i it's one of my phobias i guess is the battery blows up in my face when i when i jump cars i'm always doing this  and you just if one blows up in your face and hit your skin that's not a big deal but if it it's your eye skin then it's going to do some super damage and it's you're going to be sorry about it so definitely always always always be aware that this thing is a loaded bomb they can blow up on you in a sense in a couple of different ways you shouldn't start working with batteries without knowing what batteries ar know they don't blow up in that sense they can release their their acid they should be in a a closed battery container i don't i don't have that here but i do have it there was one of them i was going to get a second one in but i didn't anyway i just wear the glasses and you know what i do is i always tape up to the positive lead of the battery if there's a dangling wire because i don't want the positive of the battery hitting the negative terminal because that will short circuit the battery and and it will discharge and create a lot of heat in a hurry so you know if there's one thing that can hurt you here oh don't put both of these wires in your mouth when the panel is exposed to direct sunlight one of my one of my former bosses once did a little demo with a twenty watt module about double the size of the little one on the table where he was with a bunch of people he said no it's perfectly ok and he put both sides in his mouth and he you know like his soul was was rocked i think just but you know you can put your hands on it you know you can put your hands on both sides of a twelve volt battery it's not going to hurt you these are low  voltage is that they're not a problem unless you give them like a direct connection t to the liquid in your mouth that's just ridiculous i used to think my my son was very interested in trains very early so later on he got you know he got his asperger's diagnosis but when he was really young and wanted to play with these trains there they've got a transformer the changes the wall actressy to twelve volt and so the two rails of the train are twelve volts and my wife was going  to electrocute himself and i thought for it about it for a while and that but the only way you could kill yourself is if he drove those things into his chest really hard right where is and missed the ribs and got to the heart tissue that that could kill you with but it's you know it's not going to hurt your hands i'm not going to try to mine though so we went through that you can buy expensive batteries or less expensive batteries this one you'll have to maintain that one to you you won't you can buy an x an inexpensive charge controller for as little as ten dollars you know these polls with modulating ones they chop off voltage they're inefficient on purpose they work very well it's  good charge controller but you can get these for as little as ten dollars and then right down here is the one that i put with this system and the reason why i paid fifty dollars for a charge controller is because i had to because it was a better deal than not doing it  this charge controller is called an m p p t charge controller and it looks a lot like the other one it's got a meter on it it's got you know places for the load for the solar for the battery this one's got an additional temperature sensor on top that will come out that tells the computer how hot the battery is so that it can charge it according to how hot it is so more efficient way of charging it's better in your batteries but the reason why i paid fifty dollars for this and you know you can pay one hundred you can pay as much as eight hundred dollars for a charge controller it has fancy circuitry that turns that extra voltage into more amperage you get more out of your solar with with a fancier charge controller sometimes it's cheaper just to buy more solar you know to get one hundred watt instead of a eighty watt or or whatever when solar cost ten dollars a watt it was less expensive to get a good charge controller to get that extra energy now in a lot of ways it's less expensive to buy more more solar and throw more solar at the mix same goes with  tracking systems and houses it's really not worth tracking solar with the sun now because it's expensive and it doesn't provide you with as much extra energy is as the x or solar would the reason why i bought that charge controller though is i want my cabin to be powered by a different kind of solar panel and ok it's the same really but it's a little different that one's got thirty six cells eighteen volts this one has one two three four five six cells by ten it's got sixty cells it's thirty volts and that less expensive charge controller that will fry that charge controller can accept that and it can't transform it into a useful twelve old battery charging either but this kind of charge controller in n p p t v can take in this case up to seventy five volts of solar so i could put two of these together feed it to that thing hook it up to a twelve volt battery and it's going to charge that battery just fine it's going to figure out what voltage it needs to you know make on the other side and it's going to take that seventy five or whatever and it's going to turn it into something appropriate now the reason why i do that the reason why i didn't just go with a really big version of that is these costs about two dollars a watt and these cost about ninety cents a wad so if i can buy this for two hundred dollars now and this one's going to church cost me one eighty one set one sixty maybe i want  bigger one i'll pay another forty dollars for a charge controller that will do that and as we get bigger you know it's not it could be just a matter of doubling this and quadrupling it and putting eight of these out here but at some point there's a less expensive way and the less expensive way is before you even double this you go to that if you go to that and then you'd have three times more energy a two forty this is an eighty three times more energy there forty dollars more charge controller it only doubled i mean only added ten dollars to my charge controller cost and i get three times as much energy that's  age if you hook them up in series the five amps that the little one puts out will be what happens or if you hook them in syria or a few them in parallel trying to get around that then you get an eight amp or no you've got a thirty volt you've got a an eighteen volt you've got two different voltages so no you really can't hold together dissimilar modules if they're the same voltage you can all come in parallel if they're the same amperage you can all come in series but if they're different in those two things you can't so maybe i should have answered maybe but not in that case those two wouldn't work  a good deal in expensive r v stuff vs expensive solar stuff sometimes it's better to go with the efficiency and sometimes it's not sometimes a mix or a blend of the two is is a good idea efficiently so you could run a mac easier on an off grid system than you could a p c but there are not huge loads there's just a difference that i like to point out every once well and then there's do you want to be twelve or twenty four volt forty eight  controller double the battery instead of one area that the living underneath here i've got them hooked together so they are large twelve volt battery instead of i twenty four volt battery i got the book in parallel for batteries is really wish that were but that means that you need forty amp hours a day coming in from solar and if you little or little better efficiency since we're using a better charge controller that means that description of what i was talking about before two hundred forty volt sixty cell fancy charge controller battery in any of three configurations you can get a system like that for batteries for about eight hundred dollars you could  squeeze squeeze that system out of eight hundred dollars remember the previous one was three hundred dollars so this is three times more energy for less than less than three times the cost will give you about a kilowatt hour a day that's triple what  can cause interference in t v s radios sometimes you get a review that goes like that and you might have heard of before those inexpensive sixty takes sixty amps of solar and we're throwing about medium sound so we get it running it's living a good life up there doesn't have to work too hard we have to storage batteries in the front containers there we really should have about four for the size of the system we could we could probably charge heat pretty easily with this system but in terms of energy calculation we have five hundred seventy was we got five and a half hours in the summertime we can get about almost complete harvest out of that energy and eight percent and that gives us the power to have kilowatt hours a day do you remember how much an average minnesota uses daily through the house ten so we get up in that neighborhood normal everyday living but up you know there's there's not i don't like to come in here and there's not an air conditioner or a space heater we also have water heating up on the roof that's a minnesota made my tools walker collectors well this is winter if you don't want to just grossly oversized this thing need some sort of backup generator or power source sometimes people are sold or we that's a pretty nice area because we just better night we does better in the winter and me well thank you very much i am not going anywhere i don't know if jan did would you like to come up for a last last word or something but i'll be style stick around i have some stuff you can take a look at closely in and  i can answer questions so thank you very much i'll i'll do i'll answer questions after