Bluetti Power for Hours - 24h Stress Testing the AC500 and 4x B300S Battery Modules.

Welcome Intro In our last video, we installed this Bluetti AC500 whole-house battery backup system in the home of my in-laws. And in this video we're gonna push this thing to its limit and run all of the critical loads for as long as the batteries will last. Since our last video, I've done some basic testing of the AC500 and the B300 battery modules, just running the fridges and furnace, but only for a few hours at a time and then I would plug it back in and let everything recharge off of the grid. And everything is working exactly as expected. In fact, we hadn't left for the big city for more than a day and Mom had already emailed First Honest Power Outage saying that the power had gone out and they were watching the Bluetti app on their iPad, watching the battery discharge. And then once the power came back on, watching the battery recharge again automatically from the grid. So it was very nice to have a real power outage that they could see a real-world practical demonstration of everything working as it should. And because the Wi-Fi is one of the backed-up critical loads off of the AC500, it itself was able to stay connected to the cloud and then I too could remotely monitor the status of the whole system from hundreds of kilometers away. In the comments of the last video, I had a few people wondering why I only backed up the fridges freezer and Backed Up Critical Loads furnace, but didn't connect anything else to keep them comfortable during a power outage. No lights, no way to cook, et cetera. But in fact, there are lots of things that share the same circuits as these critical loads. These lights in the garage are on the same circuit as the fridge and freezer. These lights in the kitchen are on the same breaker as the upstairs fridge. These lights and outlets in the basement bathroom still work. These lights in the basement office are on the same breaker as the Wi-Fi. This basement TV and all of its related video equipment is also backed up and is a happy little accident. This little gas fireplace here in the basement is also on the same circuit, which is excellent because if they happen to run their batteries down and they're at their last 20%, they can shut down the main furnace and run this little guy for hours and hours using hardly any energy from the battery. And of course there's a bunch of outlets scattered throughout the house that still work, which could be used for small cooking appliances like this little crockpot, a microwave, a little induction, hot plate, or an instant pot. So thank you so much for your concern, but don't you worry I wouldn't leave my dear sweet in-laws in the dark. Now that's not to say everything went off without a hitch. I did find a flaw in my plan and that is this garage refrigerator. Our Efficiency Problems When I was testing with a kill-a-watt meter and measuring all of the consumption for the fridges and freezers, I would average the consumption over 24 hours. But with this harvest gold unit right here, the power flickered during the test and the timer reset. And so I didn't get a good 24 hour measurement. And because I was cramped for time making that last video, I assumed it was pretty comparable to this similarly aged harvest gold fridge in the basement. You might recall this basement fridge used 1.37 kilowatts in 24 hours. Well, I later found out that this garage fridge is using nearly 5 kilowatt hours every day. It turns out that the original compressor in this fridge died years ago and Kara's dad replaced the original compressor with a large commercial compressor normally found in a dairy cooler at a grocery store. And this basement freezer's pretty old too, and it's not super efficient because it seems to be running most of the time. In fact, we can even visualize it with our new thermal camera that we recently got from Amazon. You can see the sides are hot and it's even radiating up and heating this concrete wall. So both of these units are on the chopping block. I'm recommending to the in-laws that they try and replace them with something more efficient so that these can be decommissioned. The only saving grace with this garage fridge is as the name implies, it's in the garage so half of the year, it's just above freezing in here anyway. And so this unit doesn't actually run that much. In our last video I said we'd try and get some solar panels lined up, Get Some Solar Panels which would allow them to take all of these loads off grid and power them from the sun and it makes complete financial sense now that they have the system in place with the batteries, the inverter and the solar charge controller, it would just cost $1,200 for 6 big panels and then you could power all of this stuff directly from the sun. It would serve not only as an excellent uninterruptible power supply for a whole home battery backup, but you could really take a huge chunk out of your monthly power bill by powering all this stuff from solar using the UPS in solar priority UPS mode. But unfortunately there just isn't time for me to do that before we need to fly back to Ecuador. So instead, Bluetti has supplied us with a 4th battery module, Sutablity for Home Backup and RV Campers which I have stood up on its end here on the top shelf. So now they have 4 battery modules with a combined capacity of 12.288 kilowatt hours. In our last video I had some comments where people are asking if this setup would be suitable for a RV environment or if it was too big. To be fair, our full-time overland RV rig has a pretty large lithium battery bank at 11.48 kilowatt hours and this is even bigger than that. So packing this into a small RV for the holidays is a little bit overkill, but because of its modular design, you don't need to take it all with you. If you were just going on a short camping trip, you could take one battery and the AC500 and in fact you don't even need to take the AC500. You could just take one of the battery modules and use the 12 volt outlet for your 12 volt appliances. Use a small inverter for some of the small, small 110 volt loads and charge your phone and laptop from USB Type C. And then you could leave the rest of this at the home backing everything up. And that's a really great feature of a modular set up like this is you can use it at home for your home battery back up, take part of it with you on the road for a camping trip or even load it up and take it to a friend or a family's home if they have a power outage. But you don't. It's like a jerry can for electricity. But enough of all that, let's get to stress testing this thing and see how long it can last. Start of the 24 Hour Stress Test Okay, so as you can see, it's a little after 12 noon and I'm gonna start the test. All four batteries are fully charged at 100%. Now I just need to go switch the breaker to this subpanel. You'll see up here the transfer switch flip over to the other direction. So now all of these devices, the fridges and lights and so on are running off of the Bluetti AC500 and you can see it here on the App... 462 watts, probably just one of the fridges or two probably. So we're gonna let this run as long as she'll go and check back with you periodically. Okay, so as you can see, it is now a little after 6pm in the evening and the Bluetti battery is down to 79%, call it 80% We can safely say that we're using about 20% every 6 hours so we can predict we should get about 30 hours in total and everything's running exactly as you'd expect. Nice and cool. And if we put our TOPDON infrared thermal camera module on here. The inverter box is sitting at about 32 degrees and the fan just clicked on actually, which has been pretty unusual. It hasn't been running. The batteries themselves are at 22 degrees. That one's at 20, which is approximately ambient as you can see. But the inverter box is a little warmer at 30 33. Good morning everyone. It's a little bit after 8:00 AM the next morning. And our Bluetti batteries are still at 32%. It seems to be pulling about 550 watts with all of the fridges running, and then it'll drop down to maybe 50 if they happen to all shut off at the same time. And with 4 hours left to go, clearly we're gonna sail past the 24 hour mark, but we'll check back in with you when that happens. Okay guys, as you can see, it's almost 7:00 PM on the second day, Test Results - Drained to Zero nearly 31 hours since we started the test. And the Bluetti battery is still at 1%. The odds of us catching it in the exact moment that it decides to shutdown is pretty slim and we're all hungry and waiting for supper. So we're gonna shut it down here and be right back with you with, oh, well I'll be surprised, she just shut down. It's beeping. The alarm says D-Bat drained. So there you have it. 10 minutes short of 31 hours. Let's go get some supper . So there you have it. 30 hours is more than enough for a typical power outage. Kara's dad says the longest outage he can remember in the last 40 years of living here was 12 or 15 hours overnight one time. So this power station ensures they'll never be left in the dark. And if you need longer than that, just hook up some solar. But for now, we're left recharging off of the grid. So let me show you that. Recharging Tests and Settings As you can see, we're charging just over 1700 watts and that's the most that's supported with the included NEMA 5-15 cable. But this AC500 has the ability to charge at 5,000 watts or 5 kilowatts. If you have the optional NEMA 14-50 charge cable, then you just access this advanced settings page, enter the password, then you can access this advanced setting page and increase the charge current to something higher than 15 amps all the way up to 50 amps. But as you can maybe tell, even though we have the charger set to 15 amps, the fans have spun up and the charger throws a good bit of heat. In fact, we get out our thermal camera here, you can see it's warming up the whole wall and the left side of that Device Thermals charger unit, even though the batteries are staying nice and cool, everything there is cool, but the charger does throw a good bit of heat at at 15 amps. This is actually a real useful little tool made by TOPDON, It's USB-C and it can plug in that way or you can flip it around and go in selfie mode if you'd like. We're gonna be using this for all sorts of testing in the future. It's nice that it's nice and small for travel but good for checking leaks around windows or electrical loads. If you've got breakers that are getting too hot or want to check for efficiencies around your house, that's a cute little thing for looking at that sort of stuff. And because I know you'll hound me for it, if I don't, I'm going to put a link down in the description if you're interested. Now, because this whole Bluetti battery backup system is located in a cold storage room here in the basement, along with canned goods, garden potatoes and garlic to last them the winter, we don't want it any hotter in here than is necessary and there's no need to charge so fast in our case. So we can go in here to the settings and change the maximum current to something like 10-amps. And you should be able to see here on the app, the grid input current is dropping from 1700 watts or 1.7 kilowatts down to 1200 watts or 1.2 kilowatts. Dropping it again, one step further, let's go to 5 amps. Drops to 500 watts, 600 watts, let's call it. That's, that's low enough that the fan speed will drop right down and it'll charge nice and cool. Or you could even go in and set a user defined value. We'll set it to 1 amp And that will drop down to 100 watts. Super slow charging. But that's a really nice feature that you're able to reduce the charge current and that keeps the whole system charging a lot cooler so you're not putting as much strain on the batteries and the charge circuitry in the Bluetti AC500. Now, I mentioned this before in the last video, My Suggestions for the App it's really unfortunate that none of those settings in the touchscreen on the Bluetti are available in the App. I can't go in here and set any of the charge settings within the App. And that's really important to us because we're setting this up in our in-laws house and I want to be able to remotely administer this device while we're in Ecuador and Peru and check in and see how things are doing. But there's no way for me to come in here and change the charge rate. It would also be very nice to have push notifications from the app telling you that the power had gone out or battery level warnings at 50% and 25% so that you knew the battery was getting low if you weren't here when the power went out. The second frustration is that when the battery is run down to 0% as we just did in this test, the inverter is switched off, as you'd expect the battery's depleted, it turns the inverter off, that's fine. But now that it's getting power from the grid and recharging again, the AC inverter output stays off. So imagine a scenario where you're away from the house on vacation or something and the power goes out and then the battery is eventually depleted to zero and the whole thing shuts down. But when the power comes back on and it charges back up, the AC inverter doesn't come back on. So your loads wouldn't be protected from a second power outage. Fortunately, you can remotely control this from within the app and turn it back on. But you would need to know that the power had gone out and that your battery had been discharged and then recharged. So again, another good use case where push notifications would be very helpful. So that's gonna wrap this one up. We're going to let this thing charge back up so that it's ready for the next power outage. I'd like to thank Bluetti for sending this home battery backup system to keep the lights and the freezers going here at the in-laws when the power goes out. My Conclusions and Discount Code Having tested it for the last few weeks, I can confirm it's working super well exactly as intended. And because of its modular design, it can be expanded to meet almost any home backup RV or van dwellers electrical needs. If this is something you're interested in, Bluetti has given me a discount code to share with our viewers EverAC500, and I've left a link down in the description for your convenience. An extra big thank you to our supporting channel members. It's the support of these legends that lets us continue making these videos for you fine folks, especially our Tier 4 and 5 members Furious, George Alan Krum, John S, Austin Space, and Aaron Isaac. Thank you guys very much for your support, especially during our time back to Canada to spend time with family. Now that we have this thing all buttoned up, we'll be heading down south on a jet plane back to Ecuador, where we'll reunite with our truck and continue our adventure south into Peru. 10 bonus points for everyone who made it to the end of the video. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye.