DIY Off-Grid Solar Power

YouTube encourages generating content that rates well, i.e. is entertaining. I agree that learning should be fun, but I don't want to learn about life threating topics from videos that are designed foremost to be entertaining.

This is the dumbest take I've read in a long time. From him I've learned which lifepo4 batteries won't burn my house down, proper wiring for stuff, etc. I've got a 144ah battery pack sitting right next to me as I type this I built from learning from him. Are you sure your comment isn't about the youtuber Electricboom?

> ... and I've been known to rescind my references and recommendations upon making such discoveries.

Why?

If person A makes some claim about subject X at some point in time, and you find it true and worth sharing, what then makes their claims invalid if you discover later that person A believes something you find distasteful? If their statement about X was true at the point in time it was made, is it any less true if you discover you can't stand the person?

What if you read a book by someone who makes well written arguments and an enjoyable read, and then attend a book signing years later and realize that they have rancid BO or something, and are oddly vocal about [insert some fetish you find exceedingly disgusting here]? Does the character of the author you discover later impact the arguments in the previous book?

It's a really odd and, IMO, exceedingly broken filter for what sources of information you're willing to consider. It makes it really easy to never go outside your own head, because anyone who believes all the same things you do can't have anything terribly interesting to teach you, and anyone who believes different things can be spun as somehow abominable.

I'm not nearly so arrogant as to think I know everything. I'm certain there are things I'm wrong about, though I've no idea what they are at the moment. I'm equally certain that I have rather different opinions about subjects than many of the people I interact with, either in person or online. Some of them make for interesting conversations (I prefer a fire pit, pipe or cigars, and a bit of whiskey to make things civil), some of them we simply agree not to discuss, and that's fine.

The website's author hosts an excellent forum [0] focused on DIY solar power, for anybody who wants to get a bit deeper in to this and has questions or needs help sourcing parts (like LiFePO4 cells and BMSes) from China.

I recently built a LiFePO4 battery and upgraded our caravan (trailer) electrical system following these guides and with help from the forum. Couldn't have done it without those resources.

[0]: https://diysolarforum.com/

The problem with holes in the ground for storage of things like batteries is that... they're holes in the ground. The ground, as a general guideline, actively dislikes holes in it and strives to fill them in whatever way possible. Liquid rolling in, soil creep, debris blowing past and building up, it doesn't matter - given a long enough time, a hole in the ground won't exist anymore.

You can build a hole that will hold up to this sort of stuff for a while, but that tends to be expensive - underground concrete work is neither cheap nor easy, and given the number of people injured in trench collapses who do it for a living, a serious underground hole isn't a good DIY project either.

That just leaves the maintenance, which also sucks for a hole in the ground. Anything you have to do on the batteries is easier with them on or above the ground, instead of underground in a hole. For lithium, it's fairly low maintenance but you may have to replace some BMS boards every now and then, manually check balance, etc, and for lead it's water every few months, unless you go with sealed, which are "maintenance free," but also "maintenance and status check impossible," so you really just set them and run them to failure - you can't monitor condition like you can with flooded.

It's the sort of solution that, technically, would work - it just ends up being radically more expensive and a hassle than it's remotely worth. Think "Spending $5000 to save $20/yr" sort of thing.

You see the same trend with things like the complex solar trackers that were common in the 80s and early 90s. With the cost of panels, optimizing every bit of power from them was critical, so spending an awful lot of money on support infrastructure to optimize $10/W panel production made quite a bit of practical and financial sense.

Today, with panels at $0.50/W, very few people bother with trackers anymore (for off grid installs). Most things you could improve with a tracker, you can improve with less effort and less money by just hanging more panels. Bonus: With more panels, you get more production on cloudy days when panel orientation doesn't matter (because the sky is more or less evenly lit).

I've got south facing, east facing, and west facing panels on my office, of two different brands, all fed into a single MPPT charge controller input (I do have some blocking diodes to prevent backfeeding a shaded string, though). It's not nearly as "efficient" as some other options, but it's a whole lot cheaper, and gives me more power on the low cloud days that are the rough ones. The rest of the year, I have so much power out there that I'm demand limited, not supply limited (actually, inverter limited - if I added some 48VDC loads, I could use another 5kWh/day easily).