Author: BenjaminNelson via YouTube
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Well, I’ve officially done it. A solid test of powering my entire garage, off-grid, from a ten-year-old econo-beater electric car!
I have a 3D printed CHAdeMO connector drawing power from my 2012 Mitsubishi iMiev. The power goes through a pair of fuses, through a pre-charge resistor, and finally into the PV inputs of the Solar City H6 Hybrid Inverter, which is running in an off-grid mode.
From there, AC power goes out through a NEMA L14-30 twist-lock connection, over a generator cable, and into a generator power inlet attached to my breaker panel. That then feeds the entire panel, and thus everything in my garage.
10 Gauge, 4 Conductor, 20 foot long Generator Cable: https://amzn.to/3Pkqjit
Generator Power Inlet Box: https://amzn.to/3LdZwB7
I had no problem drawing 2,000 watts or more to run the lights, battery chargers, and even an electric space heater. (I could have drawn more, but the hardware store had none of the 30A breakers that fit my panel, so I’m just using an existing 15A breaker for the moment.)
The important thing to remember is to be DISCONNECTED from the grid while powering the garage from the car. In this case, the easy way to do it was just turning off the 100A input breaker. Unfortunately, this is a "Main Lug Only" panel – meaning that there’s not a separate main breaker away from the rest. (This is common on sub-panels, such as the one in my garage.)
Main lug panels are not designed for the simple "Generator Interlock" kits available from the big box home improvement store. I might end up 3D printing a bracket that locks together the main breaker and the Generator Input breaker so that only one or the other can ever be on.
Alternatively, I’d still like to also test feeding power back to the house main panel, but I’m just not sure of the best way to design an interlock for that.
I’m also experimenting with turning ON my grid-tie micro-inverters with the car powering the garage. It looked like as long as I had loads heavier that what the inverters would produce, they WOULD sync to the H6 inverter and activate after the 5 minute disconnect timer.
Micro-inverters will automatically disconnect if the grid signal is out of spec. It appears that if there isn’t a heavy enough load for the power the inverters are making, it will push up the voltage, until it’s out of spec, and the inverters will kick out.
My inverters are on three separate breakers in the combiner box, and basically come together as 2, 8, and 16 amp circuits. I ran a few tests with the sun providing either 2 or 10 amps of current and that much current WAS subtracted from how much the H6 inverter was providing.
Still, MANUALLY balancing loads to solar production would be a pain. I think it might be easiest to simply provide a HEAVY load to the system, so that the solar micro-inverters never make too much. A good heavy load would be charging an electric car.
So, I gave it a try – I charged one electric car from the other (through the inverter and an AC EVSE.)
And it worked!
I’ll have to experiment with it some more. Ideally, I’d like to use the solar panels to charge the car that I’m drawing power from in the first place. No, that’s not a perpetual motion machine – the additional energy input is from the solar panels.
I just plugged in my 16A EVSE, and it fired right up!
https://amzn.to/3whWM13
That’s it for now, but this is becoming a pretty exciting project. I still have a bunch of details to work on, including properly buttoning-up the DC balance of system components, adding a voltmeter display, and a whole bunch of clean-up and making it look safe and professional.
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