How to build a Reliable Victron 240v Split Phase Off Grid system | #victron MultiPlus-II #eg4

hey what's guys I'm back to the channel this episode is going to be all about victron and on this episode we're going to show you and walk you through how to set up a 2unit 240 volt split phase system paired with what I believe is the best battery combination making it a you know complete off-grid system which is really really rock solid with good quality and capabilities and later on we're going to do a load test by charging the Tesla so let's get to it these two units are exactly the same it's the same unit in two and that's kind of what you need in order to set up a multi-unit system with vixon especially if it's going to be split phase and this is the multi plus 2 Series the 48 volt 300v 35 amp charger so what that really means is it's a 48volt system 3000 VA is volt ampere so if you want to convert that to real power or Watts you know obviously depending on whatever you put it you want to take 3,000 time7 that's pretty much how many watts it can do for most consumer electronics if you have like other electronics and stuff more inductive loads you may want to use a different power factor but victron rates these in VA you can I just told you pretty much an easy way to convert to wats in case that's what you really wanted to need and this is a 35 amp charger which means it can charge your 48 volt battery at 35 amps granted you're giving it enough juice to do that right so with these multiplus units it also has has an automatic uh transfer switch built into the unit which is also really great quality and on this specific unit uh it has a transfer CA capacity of 50 amps okay so this is 120 volt inverter and if you are shopping around for victron inverters make sure if you're in the US you're looking at the US model and if you're let's say otherwhere everywhere else like Europe or whatnot make sure you're looking at the European model because they do make units that are 230 Volts for Europe and 20 Volts for us you can technically get the 230 volts uh us but you'll probably need to step it down uh using an auto Transformer and that's a you know probably more advanced series we'll probably cover later but the point is make sure you get two units that are exactly the same all right so I will also go ahead and say this this unit is only 3,000 VA they do make this multi plus 2 Series in multiple different uh let's call it voltage ranges so they make a a 12vt model they also make a 24 Vol model and a 48 volt model there may be other models stuck around somewhere else but those are going to be the primary models you have and on each voltage there are other units for I think it was like 2,000 VA 3,000 I think there's also a 5,000 8,000 10,000 15 so that it all varies and depending on which uh model you really get the transfer capabilities the charge capabilities also change according to that unit right so uh just make sure you keep that in mind in this example obviously we're going to be using 3,000 VA units but when you are getting one uh and you're going to set up split phase make sure you get two that are going to be exactly the same all right so first of all going up on here the front panel uh this obviously this has a charger side it tells you pretty much the state of charge that's going on as you progress through your charge State uh this also is obviously an inverter so it tell you that if the inverter is on if it's overloaded you know low battery and all these kind of things to it right so uh this is a low fre quency uh toodo based uh Transformer so unlike the other inverters that we've seen so far on this channel which are mly high frequency based this actually uses a really big and heavy Transformer to take to pretty much convert the voltage and the power from DC to AC so uh victron I believe is one of the few uh most of all the other ones currently on the market are going to be high frequency Transformers if you don't know much about that we'll probably try to cover that in a different video but just know that there are two different classes of uh inverters that are currently available on the market we're not going to get into the pros and cons of each one but uh we will point out with a low frequency inverter you can handle a lot higher surge capacity and it is also significantly heavier than a low frequency based unit of the same class coming around to the connection let's talk about this this right here is your ac1 block here's your ac2 block and here is your ACN this uh uh White cable here is just is your standard ethernet cable is connected to ve bus and the other end of this cable is connected to the other unit on VE bus uh this uh connection right here is your uh inverter ground and then it's connected right now with the 10 gauge wire connected to the other ground points on the system this right here is obviously your DC in uh so plus minus and here is a switch which has the position one and two uh depending on which position you put it in it can do charge only function which means the inverter won't be on or you can just turn it to on which means it's on full operation mode all right so let's talk about ac1 and two and AC in here real quick mainly because this has what uh the automatic transfer switch built-in as we talked about earlier right so first of all ac1 out has a ground a neutral and a hot the ac2 out also has a ground neutral and a hot and AC in has a ground neutral and hot and remember this is a 120 volt unit singlephase unit what that really means is there's only three wires right so uh on this case if you have AC uh connected in or AC in Connected you do have to connect it to both units right so when AC in comes in it Powers both uh ac1 and ac2 but when power is no longer available or coming in the automatic transfer switch built into here transfers the ac1 circuit only to be powered by the inverter so what that really means is it's pretty much like a UPS unit if you've used them before if you look on the back you know there is what they call like surge only right and then there's another uh chain of circuits which are battery backup that's pretty much exactly what's happening here right except on a you know much larger scale so to say mainly because uh ac2 out is not powered when AC in is has no more power and then ac1 is always powered whether you have AC power or not right the beauty of these uh transfer switch units also is that besides it being automatically built into the unit is also is that it's a really fast cut over so if you have sensitive Electronics you don't really have to worry about you know the cut over speed because it's almost instantaneous right so uh computer and stuff you have connected to this top unit you won't really have any issues with that so backing up out of here let's go ahead and talk about the connections to the units real quick so this is a RJ45 ethernet cable standard cable that comes out of this unit and it connects to ve bus on this unit and there are two ports it doesn't really matter which one you connect it to because uh it's pretty much think of it like an Ethernet type switch right so uh you don't doesn't matter whether you connect it on the first port or the second port for ve bus uh as long as they're connected together that's all that really matters there is a second ethernet cable that comes out of here and that connects it to the victron Sero GX we'll talk about that in a second uh but you can connect the victron Sero GX to either this unit or this unit it really doesn't matter as long as the victon servo GX is connected to uh the any one of these inverters using ve bus that's the beauty of ve bus there is another type of a communication protocol which we don't need to use in this type of situation but uh that's how that really works and as you can see here on this unit the ac1 is connected with neutral ground and hot but in this case we used a red wire on on this unit because you know it is one leg of a 240 volt circuit and on this leg we use the black wire because it is another leg of the 240 volt circuit right so if you look at it uh each way the voltage across or coming out of each one is in uh uh 120 volt split phase right here here but if you take the voltage across the hot and the hot because they're 180° out of phase it will be 240 volt split phase so this unit right here is the eg4 indoor wall mount battery and I believe this is the best battery for this type of system we're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a second um I would highly recommend getting this battery but also if you're going to get this battery I would highly recommend getting this unit right here which is the eg4 indoor uh wall mount batteries conduit box which is designed uh to be used with this unit right they are sold separately Unless somehow they started selling them in a kit which I haven't seen so make sure you get the conduit box I believe it's worth the extra was it like 100 bucks or so or whatnot in this case right so uh down here we'll talk about the battery more in a bit but on top of the battery itself the reason it's really popular is that it's a 14 I believe point8 uh KW hour battery pack that you can mount on the wall this battery is indoor rated only right so you know obviously these inverters are also indoor rate only so it's a good pairing but uh on top of that these uh this battery comes with these connectors right so it does come with two black cables and two red cables these cables are two OD cables and um because there's two of them it actually works perfectly one pair for each battery right and not only that it uh the battery also has 600 amp bus bars installed on top of the battery right so uh this battery is really popular for many of those reasons but also the connections to this is called a quick connect some people may call these uh what do you call infano connectors but I would say technically that's incorrect cuz infol is really a brand uh infol is really synonymous with this type of connectors kind of because they made the connection really popular but then other brands have kind of picked up on it and kind of made it more uh like they they kind of built off of it right so uh this connection right now is what they call a quick connect but this brand is called dexon connector and if I can get one out of here see it uses a quick connect cable like this which this cable comes already crimped like this right so uh all you have to do is you press this in and then you wait for it to snap and once it snaps it's a good solid connection and these uh connectors are rated to carry the load that these cables can carry right so as you can see here there's four slots right uh on each side on the negative side and on the positive side so uh that makes it really nice to use the white cables in here stuff we talked about already uh this box is also grounded to the grounding unit right this uh green cable here on the corner is for this front panel just know that all of this gray stuff you see in here is actual metal and not plastic all right so with that this blue cable here is a battery BMS Communications and the other end of this blue cable goes to the Sero GX we do have a separate video completely dedicated to BMS connect uh connection between this battery and the Sero GX so if you're interested in that make sure you check that out uh but uh all of this stuff in here is pretty nice and tidy pretty much once you close the box but like I said everything in here is really included when you get this except for pretty much the ethernet cables which are you know going to be ubiquities you can find them pretty much anywhere right so you probably already have some laying around inside of your house and this right here is the battery screen uh the battery screen is really nice to have because you can actually tell you know pretty much all the specifications you need what's going on with the battery but also on the battery uh screen is also this F fuel gauge builtin you know denoted into like four different sections of how much battery capacity you have left and the screen also tells you how much battery capacity you have left that's really nice to see right so not going to go in super detail but like I said the voltage is here the capacity is here the ampage or drawing is here and then the mode is here right so if you're uh right now it's on standby because I don't have the breaker flipped but if you're charging it'll say a charging if you're discharging and it'll say discharging and it also tell you at roughly how many amps it's going in and out right all this other stuff on here uh right now I have it set to a victron uh communication so that's what this canvus really says but also you know voltage and you can go in and check all the cells uh temperatures and voltage and stuff like that but we don't need to get too much into that just know that this battery we also have a separate review of this uh like I said but this battery is a really good unit for this because you also get a lot of visual feedback from this screen so moving on to the monitoring part of this unit this is the victron Sero GX and this is pretty much the monitoring unit for uh this entire victron system and this can do a lot of different capabilities but I'm going to tell you what we have covered in here or set up in here which is this is an HDMI cable that goes to a screen you do have to buy the screen separately and then this is the uh pretty much power and also feedback that kind of comes back with uh that screen because it is a touchcreen this white cable here um is the cable that we showed you earlier that connects to one of the inverters is connected to ve bus here and then this blue cable is the another customade ethernet cable that we made that connects the BMS bus can port to uh the battery and that way this entire system knows what's connected with the battery how much it's going in out capacity all of that stuff right so this unit we have set up for Wi-Fi Communications it does uh communicate via wifi to what they call called the vrm portal which you can log into online and also see right but you can also connect to uh using the app and also see uh so it's really nice to have because you can log you can look at it from remotely you can be completely not close to the system and look at it remotely and you can look at it in person because there's also a screen and you can also use the app right so this is a really nice plus to have I would definitely recommend spending what it is like the 200 bucks or what it was to get uh this unit mainly because because uh you definitely want monitoring metrics and all that stuff about your system that way you know what's happening at all times right this cable right here is just a power cable that's connected to the battery it does have to have a a battery connection it is fused but it does take one extra connection so this right here is a touch 50 and this touch 50 is connected to uh the serbo GX using the HDMI cable and ethernet cable we showed you earlier right so uh is a touchcreen and right now we do have it on so we're not going to touch any of the connections but this red icon red box here is your grid power I don't have grid connected but if you had grid connected you would see trans transmission lines and also power flowing if we were consuming it right and this right here is your battery box right now the battery is at 87% it's pulling 63 Watts at 53. 2 volts and 1.