DIY Portable Low Frequency Transformer based Power Station | $530 | 1.9 KWh | victron Phoenix

he what's guys back to the channel in this episode I want to talk to you about the most reliable probably uh really efficient and also the most coste effective power station that you can build in probably less than 10 minutes all right uh that's going to be this one right here probably my most favorite reliable power station is this one all right so let me tell you a little story about why we built this thing but before I tell you that let's talk about high frequency based uh Power stations right so almost all the power stations that are currently on the market um are high frequency uh uh inverters pretty much they take DC power convert it to AC using things like MOS fets and H Bridges and stuff like that I can get too far into it but that is one way to convert DC power into AC power there's another class which is not as popular of uh types of inverters that are on the market that are low frequency Transformer based inverters and those use you know like big old coils and stuff to get that uh DC power to AC power and because there's not a ton of mosfets and all that kind of stuff involved into it it actually really really reliable and another thing that people know about that is that uh they can take a higher surge capacity for you know a pretty good amount of time so uh with that out the way let me tell you the story about why we came up with this contraption all right so if you've been following the channel you know we own a lot of power stations and you probably know we've had the warranty I want to say like three or four power stations two of them were Dead on Arrival uh two of them actually just stopped working all right so we had to try to warranty them right so uh that's kind of why we started thinking hm something's not too reliable with these high frequency based inverters right so also with that being said another story continuing on that story is that uh we went camping we took three power stations one of them uh was dead it it just didn't went turn on I know it was charged cuz we unplugged it before we left and took it in there and the screen came on and all that stuff so we know it had uh battery but it wouldn't uh convert to uh AC power so started thinking hm we need to build something that's really more reliable than that and you would think that you know the bigger name brands have something of a more reliability in to those types of products and you would probably be right compared to you know the Lesser known Brands but none of them I believe are lowf frequency Transformer based inverse which are probably the most reliable type of product currently on the market so we're going to show you how to build this for really cheap really reliable and really quickly so if you want know more about this stick with us all right we're going to go through this quick see if you can keep up right first of all this right here is a 12vt 150 amp hour lithium iron phosphate uh battery all right so uh you obviously don't have to use this exact battery you can use any type of battery you like as long as it's matches with the inverter that you want to use and it's the capacity that you want to to use so the most common size of 12vt lithium iron phosphate batteries is probably going to be 100 amp hour this is 150 amp hours and it's pretty much all plastic kind of reduces the weight a little bit uh but there are like 50 amp hour 60 30 you know get whatever amp hours you need or you want but also keep in mind as the uh capacity of the battery changes it also changes the discharge rate so just make sure you keep that in mind mainly because you need to be able to discharge how much power you need to pull from the inverter right common sense so uh this battery is particularly uh important or I really use this battery mainly because the size of it as you can see matches almost perfectly or really well with the inverter but also because this battery has Bluetooth so you're going to see on here there's no screens or any of this stuff right because all the monitoring of this power station is done with the app there's an app for this battery you can check the battery stats and all that stuff on Bluetooth and there's also an app for the inverter we're going to get to that right so this battery is attached to a piece of OSB which is attached via construction adhesive uh to the battery and we've let it cure for pretty much like several days so I'm not worried about it and we've been lifting it up and moving it around so I'm not concerned all right and if you're going to say oh you're you're concern just get like a strap and just like strap it here and then make the concern go away but I would also glue it if you're going to do that anyway just in case just because it'll like wiggle right but uh if you're going to do this I would recommend using something like PL premium uh like 8X or 3x or whatever and just SLA a lot on there and it'll be fine I used a Liquid Nails fuse it mainly because I had a tube already open and didn't want to open another one but had no issues with it this all this stuff has been tested for like multiple YouTube channels and stuff like that so don't worry about it all right um ATT test to the OSB is this victron 12vt 1200v pure sine wave inverter is a test using screw here here here here four screws all right um the other thing to know about this is that this is a low frequency inverter so it is really heavy compared to like a a high frequency uh inverter kind of like the one you showed you in the previous episode where we're using like a booer V2 uh volt high frequency inverter but low frequency one because it is uh has a transformer in it it's really heavy all right so it's attached like I said to the OSB which is attached to the battery all right so pretty easy Next Step just get some uh cables I believe this one may be either six gauge or four gauge cables and I'm using Anderson uh quick connects here so these Anderson connectors a lot of people may you know have may disagree with this but these Anderson connectors are actually rated to be disconnected under load uh depending on which Anderson connector you get I would recommend getting the genuine Anderson connectors uh but they all have a rating so depending on how you build this just just figure it out but obviously I would High highly recommend do not disconnect underload because you'll probably have all kinds of other issues so I would say you know you can do that but don't do it all right so uh it's connected to this Anderson connector and it connects to here the plus goes to the plus minus goes to the minus that's it that's all you really need to do to get the system running because now you're powering the inverter using uh battery power this thing right here is what you call Victory bluetooth smart dongle and this actually connects to a port on here using ve direct and it allows uh Bluetooth connectivity to monitor the inverter so I'm not going to fully review this inverter and all this kind of stuff mainly because you've already seen me build plenty of power stations with this exact inverter not exact but the Phoenix inverter CU we were using 48 volt inverters at that time right so that's all you really need to do to get it to work this thing is literally just attached on here with hot glue I don't really have any issues with it but you know I don't even know if I'm going to keep it there all the time mainly because I'm not going to be sitting there on the phone monitoring the power station as it's in use maybe I'll check the capacity of the battery just to see you know how much run time and stuff like that is left but I generally have an idea how much uh Power the inverter can put out it's pretty simple 1 1200 VA if you don't know a VA is volt ampers it's a parent power if you want to convert it to real power which is really measured in watts uh most devices you're probably going to be using it's going to be a uh 7 or 8 power factor so just take you know 1 1200 times it by 7 and that's probably how much continuous output that you can pull out of the inverter so just make sure you keep that in mind all right because the victon rates their stuff in VA and for some people that's important all right so that's all you really need to do to get this thing going so if for whatever reason uh you know I need to disconnected which I probably don't I can just pull the connections apart or you know you can just pull this apart but because I don't want to ever have to unwind the screws on this thing I just made the Quick Connect here because I can either connect alligator clips here to charge it or just plug in the charger into here just makes life super easy okay uh one thing I would recommend if you're going to build this is to get uh more flexible wire so even though this is pure uh copper um is not necessarily as flexible and that may just be the jacketing type that may or may not be on there but if you can get something like 4 gauge a silicone wire higher then that would be you know obviously much better cuz it'll be a little more flexible and you can kind of clean it up all right so that's really the power station in a nutshell and I know for a fact someone's going to say oh it's not a power station because you can't charge it okay that's technically true and I will also say most people who have a power station are probably going to use it as a point source of use they're not going to take it out and try to charge it all the time but if you wanted to do that and you wanted to charge it just go ahead and spend like 50 bucks or whatnot and get a I would recommend this one the victron energy smart solar charge controller so this one has Bluetooth which is why I'm recommending this one and this one can handle up to 75 uh volts and 15 amps okay uh so all you really need to do if you wanted to use a charge controller like this is to put it here here right and then just take two wires take it out of uh the where it says load and take it to or battery technically and then take it to uh plus here minus there bam you can have mc4 pigtails coming out of PV you can just connect your uh solar panels and you'll be good to go this one is a smart solar has advaned capability that you can connect to like load it can disconnect and and other stuff depending on how much power you have right so uh you have this one but you really it's like four wires you just need to add two here two here for solar you're going to be good to go but like I said I probably not going to really use this because the way I'm going to use this is a point of source and I'm not going to go ahead and try to charge a bunch of stuff right but was going to go camping like that I would just take this with me with some solar panels and be good to go all right so uh Power Station whatnot there's definition so let's go ahead and show you this stuff in action all right so we're going to go ahead and take this heat gun and we're going to plug it in right here okay I'm going to flip the switch which is right here so switch flip done Bam um it will power up and you can see eventually uh this one will have a light an ability to turn on but I do also want to point out one thing on here this right here has a little function called Eco so you can flip it to the ECO mode and you can just leave it on the whole time wouldn't recommend doing that but what it'll do is it'll just keep searching to see if there's a load on the uh AC output here and if there is a load it will turn on and that load threshold I think can or cannot be adjusted inside the app so that's a nice feature to have so if you can you you don't want to put it in a place you have to reach it all the way back around and flip a switch or something like that that may be for you all right so uh I'm not going to use Eco so I'm just going to hit it on uh on and there you go green light means on I'm going to go ahead and plug this in here or I mean hit the button there you go it's going to be loud so I'm going to turn the fan to low but then turn the heat up all right so the heat is up look at that heat up and this is the power station in action so take a listen you don't really hear much from the Power Station the noise you're really hearing is from the heat gun and not necessarily the power station because there's not a ton of air movement that needs to cool the H Bridges and the mosfets that it's a really really quiet Power Station all right you may hear like a low frequency hum or a buzz that you would get from a Transformer and that's what you're going to be getting but you know that's really it in a nutshell so let's go ahead and look at the app so I can show you exactly what's happening so let's go take a look at the app the first app we're going to look at is the the battery app and it's called the ecoworthy app this is obviously an ecoworthy battery you can download it for free from the app store or Play Store connect it via Bluetooth and this is what you get all right so right now the uh battery capacity is at 99% it's roughly around hovering around 13. 19 13. 2 volts and it's drawing right around between like 6 or seven amps or five or 6 amps right uh the power that is being drawn from this is hovering around 70 80 somewhere around there is discharging remaining capacity is 48 amp hours and depending on you know the uh what's being drawn tells you the amounting work time left or runtime left at the rated or at the amount that is currently at discharge right so at this uh rate of discharge it'll be roughly around a day right you can look at the current battery temperature you can go in here look at the data you can go in here and look at the voltage the state of charge all of this other stuff for some reason this thing here says battery total quantity 4 uh and I'm not really exactly sure what that means but it's got four uh batteries and you can see the voltage of each cell so that's also really nice you can go to notification if you get like a warning or something like that or for like Cuts side you can go in here and take a look at it so like I said we're not going to go super deep into this battery but you can monitor everything about this battery using the app now let's go take a look at the victron app so the uh victron connect is the app that you need to get it's different than the vrm app uh and once you get it you just pair it to your Bluetooth dongle and this is the ve direct smart bluetooth app as you can see right here AC output about 120 volts it's in the state of inverting you can go ahead and see the VA is hovering around you know 50 100 somewhere around there and that's all you really need that's all you really you know really get and that's all you need I mean what else do you really need uh you can also tell in here you can look at where it says wakeup power as I was telling you about earlier if you wanted to somehow update the amount of uh when you want the inverter to wake up on eco mode you can change that here right or you can t change the uh shutdown power so it's nice to have in case you want to leave it in somewhere remote and only come on when you like turned on something right uh but we're not going to get too far into that mainly because this is not a review of each of these products it's really a power station that you can build all right so let me go ahead over here and just turn on the uh heat to a little bit more heat so you can see how much is actually being drawn so there we go look at that right now it's at about five bars of heat and it's drawing about uh 1,000 VA right if I hit it up all six bars now we're drawing close to 1200 or, 1300 VA and let's go take a look at the Eco worthy battery app hit the refresh here and you can see now it is discharging close close to 94 92 95 amps all right so as you can see here at the full heat uh of this heat gun it can run maybe about an hour and 30 minutes right so like I said everything is available in the and that's what you get with this power station let's go ahead and turn this off mainly because uh it's just going to be really noisy and this usually if you don't know about heat guns usually just has like a cool down cycle so it doesn't just like automatically abruptly adjust but for the sake of this video I'm just going to unplug it all right don't do that all right so uh otherwise you know that's what you get with this power station it's really easy to build as I mentioned earlier you got four screws some construction adhesive you got this battery OSB inverter maybe some cables really easy to build and you're not going to have a reliability issue because this is lithium iron fosfate battery and this is a low frequency based inverter all right and not even just any low frequency based inverter it's a victron right so if you want to buy this inverter I would highly just check out signature solar because you know they sell a lot of victron stuff and I really like victron stuff and you know you can really get some good deals on there sometimes so uh you can get this battery I believe I bought this battery on the eBay using like some 20% off coupon every now and then they'll have some type of sale Eco Worthy is uh you know probably the most eBay sold battery if I had to guess but anyways let's talk about cost now right so this battery if I remember correctly was somewhere around like $220 uh this inverter was somewhere around I want to say about $300 so you got $220 plus $300 that's like what is that like $520 and then if you want to get the Bluetooth for the inverter which is this guy right here I think that's around like 20 or 30 or 40 bucks right but not more than 40 bucks maybe like $39. 99 or something like that if you need some cables you could obviously pick up those cables from solar or anything like that but that's all there really is to it right is there's really nothing on here to break obviously if you dropped it off the table you know something might get damaged maybe some plastic will crack but my guess is that once you get it back together it'll probably still work don't drop it off the table though okay the point is uh when you use it it's easy to transport because you got this handle to pick it up uh the only other thing I would recommend is just get like some piece of foam or something like this uh I would just cut out like a good piece and just like attach it to the bottom of this inverter just so that when you put it down it's got some cushioning right so when I'm using it I'm always just putting it down on something like this so that way I don't have to like deal with it but even if you're a little bit rough just get something like that put it down here I will also caution you this is going to be way heavier than you know your standard like uh Power Station that you get off the market mainly because this is a bigger battery and this is a low frequency inverter right so uh this right here is a 12.