 Okay, this guy apparently just carries this fricking thing right up the ladder. Okay, here you go. I was expecting there to be like a little crane truck or something. Whole room water cooling, that's old news. This video is going to be about whole house water cooling, but maybe not really in the way that you'd expect. Isn't it water heating? It's complicated. Basically, the contractors are here at the house right now, installing some of the trippiest solar panels that I have ever seen in my life. On the one side, totally normal photovoltaic cells. On the other side, fittings for water pipes. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to be using these combination solar panels to power my house and heat my pool. And we're going to explain why that actually might not be as crazy an idea as it sounds like. Thanks to Epic Games for sponsoring this video. It's coming, PC Building Simulator 2 is coming, and you can wishlist it now at the Epic Games store. Stay tuned at the end of this video to learn more. There are a lot of reasons I wanted solar at our new house. It's infinitely renewable, zero emissions. In BC, we have net billing, which means that any excess power I generate can be sold at the same rate that I buy it back to the grid, and it's relatively low maintenance without any moving parts. At least a normal install without a pump would be. But here's the thing, despite advancements in the field, most solar panels are only between 15 and 20% efficient, with these ones from dual sun landing at around the 20% mark. For the uninitiated then, that means that the solar panel can only convert 20% of the incoming solar energy into electricity, which in optimal conditions would yield 375 Watts per panel. Multiply it by the 24 panels we have for our installation. That is a theoretical peak output of 9,000 Watts. Holy sh- Point of clarification though, we actually have two different kinds of panels for the install, and that was based on a recommendation from, well, Dualsun, the installer and the distributor. Yeah, the distributor. Basically, when you have multiple banks of them, it can be pretty hard to lead the system once you fill it, be drain it when you need to in the winter, because it does go below zero here. So on one side of the house, we're gonna have regular non-water-cooled panels. They're called their flash model. There you go. And on the other side, we're gonna have their, I shouldn't say water-cooled panels, because it's more like the panels serve as a water heater, but it's actually both. And we'll give you a little bit more explanation of that once we talk about the water ones. In the meantime though, I mean, it's a solar panel? What else can we really say? We definitely aren't experts on solar. I know that you point the sun at it or this at the sun and electricity comes out. More sun, more better. Yeah, more sun, more better. They use shingle cells. I guess that's fancy. Look, the solar installer over there is laughing at us. He knows stuff that we don't. Why don't we do them a favor and carry this over to where they're actually dragging these things up the roof. Sound good? Yeah. All right, let's do it. Oh God, wow, they're actually heavier than I expected. That guy was just raw dogging this by himself. I know, right? Okay, this guy apparently just carries this fricking thing right up the ladder. Okay, here you go. It's upside down. What, you want to flip it that way? Oh yeah. Oh, I see you take it from that side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you want it, oh, you want it like that. Wow, we had it as wrong as possible, I think, Jake. What is this bloody thing way? I was expecting there to be like a little crane truck or something. And they've already taken like 15 of them up. So there's 12 on the other side of the house that are already installed. This is great. Our intention was to show you guys this stuff on the ground, but I think this is even better. So it's a simple aluminum extrusion kind of frame. I actually wouldn't really call it a frame because it's just, yeah, it's just bars across. And then you can see they're bolted into, there you go, the roof trusses below. All right, these are our end phase micro inverters. And the reason we need inverters is that solar power is inherently DC. So in order for it to be used by any of the electronics that we have in our homes, we're going to want to convert it to AC. So you can see these leads are going to go into our solar panels. And these guys out here, you can see are wired from panel to panel to panel, and are all going to go back down to the ground to the main shutoff. We went with these micro inverters from end phase for a few reasons. One is the efficiency. So by having micro inverters on each panel, apparently it's better for efficiency. And it also means that in the event of an inverter failure, the whole system doesn't just get taken out. Two was that they came strongly recommended by both our roofing company, as well as a commercial supplier that I got in touch with. They wouldn't sell me anything because I was an end user, but they were happy to give me recommendations. So shout out for HES PV. Thank you guys very much for the information. And number three, end phases inverters apparently can communicate to home assistant. Now, I'm not sure what, if anything, I would do with that information, other than just monitoring the solar output of the array. You know, you're never going to want to turn them off. So there's not really a whole lot of home automation you'd want to do, but being able to at least monitor them is cool. There's one more thing that we want to look at here. It's the junction box, or they call it a, no, it's a solar deck. They offered to open it up, but it's pretty straightforward. Basically you just take all of the output of these banks of panels. They go into here and then they make their way. Oh, actually you can see all the grounding is connected through here as well. And then they're going to make their way down the house and we'll have a look at the shutoff down there. Another fun one, check this out. The beginning of this video, I talked about whole house water cooling. That's what these tubes are for. These are going straight to the mechanical room, which is also the server room. And they're going to be used to cool the entire server rack, which is going to be the vast majority of the computing power in the building. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that one. The reason I bring this up though, is actually this. This right here is the armored power cable that is also going straight into the mechanical room. And this is wired up to our shutoff. Let's go have a look. Actually we interrupt this look at the cutoff to bring you, they are actually installing the panels now. So we're getting a good look at them hooking up the DC side to the inverter. And then they've actually got the water cooling tubing up there as well. Stop calling it water cooling. I don't have to stop calling it water cooling cause it's kind of both. It serves two purposes. One is to heat up the water that presumably you will use somewhere, whether it's for hot water out of your tap or whether it's to dump into your pool. Or hydronic heating. But the cooling serves a purpose as well because cooling solar panels actually increases their efficiency. So when they rate solar panels, typically it's done when the cells are at 25 degrees Celsius which is, that's great. But your solar cells might reach degrees of like 70. I mean, they're black and they're sitting out in the sun. You do the math. Like in LA or something like that. Here maybe not so much, but they say that it can increase the efficiency of the panels by five to 15%. Or actually not the efficiency, the electricity output. So it's not like it's 35%. Now it's like five to 15% on top, 20%. Combined with the solar energy they pull out through heat, supposedly it's about a 2X increase of solar energy harness, which is pretty insane. Yeah, I'm excited. Here we go. They actually did a pretty nice job with the install here. Armored cable running down from the junction box into this guy right here, which presumably I can open. It wouldn't be powered yet. There you go. Couple of 20 amp breakers. So that would be the two different banks are both coming through here. And then we're gonna have a main shut off. Come on. Woo. Look at that boy right there. At the beginning of the video, we showed the front of the panels, which is the same for both models. Now that we've got it flipped around, we can see what's different about the hybrid spring panels. So there's a couple of things here. One is that the backs of them are actually insulated because we don't want the heat to be dumped out into the surrounding air. We want the heat to go into the water. The second is we've got these tubing hookups here. This one's a hookup, that one's not. Seems to be. Here and there. This is kind of trippy. Is this just made out of like plastic poster board? It kind of looks like that. It looks like it, just like a corrugated. I wonder if there's like thermal pad in there. It doesn't really look like it. Yeah. Maybe it's just like so much excess energy that it doesn't really matter. So basically it goes in here, spreads all out here, comes across the panel, and then this is blocked off and it comes out this side. And here we go. These guys right here, which seem to be just protectors. Just a cap, yeah. Pre-lubed, got some O-rings in there. Lots of lube on there. And these look like some serious clicky jobbies here. I am not going to click this all the way in because I don't know how easy that would be to remove, but basically it clicks in a little something like that. And the whole thing hooks up to, well, your pool or your in-floor heat or whatever the case may be. I was actually a little bit worried about putting pool water through this thing, but it turns out that- Oh, it's meant for that. Chlorinated water is totally a-okay, but that's one of the reasons that we're going to have to winterize it. So if we had water with antifreeze in it and we were using a heat exchanger to move the heat into whatever other system, then we probably wouldn't have to drain it for the winter, especially here where it doesn't get that cool. But there's some efficiency loss doing that. It is pretty heavy though. 27 kilos, so that's just shy of 60 pounds, about 60 pounds for our American friends. Asking about the tubing, he says that it's a lot of stuff to fit behind the panels, so the cable and tubing management is a bit challenging. Fortunately, the tubing's really low profile and flexible. He's like, yeah, sure. When we ordered that, did that whole tube thing come with the panels, like pre-measured? It came in a big roll. It wasn't cut or anything though. Oh, so you guys had to make, oh, and then like add the connectors on? Ah, yeah, the plumbers did that. Oh, okay. And they definitely did it right, right? I'm not a plumber. I'm an electrician. It's been a couple of days now and all of the panels are installed, the wiring done, the breakers flipped on. Now they haven't quite finished the plumbing, but they're going to do that over the next week or so. But in the meantime, they were able to flip the switch on so we can actually see how much power we're making. Now today is kind of gross. It's totally overcast, so we're not expecting a lot, but I guess we'll see. I'm going to give Linus a call once we go back inside. Back inside the house, we can actually see the breakers they've installed. So we've got our 240 volt, 40 amp, and then we've got the Enphase Envoy connection. So now this is the Enphase Envoy. It's basically like a little computer that monitors all the statistics of the micro inverters. It can check the individual panels since every panel has its own inverter. It monitors how much power is drawn by the system or your whole house, and also how much power is generated. And you can show your grid independence. Now they just sent us an invite to the app. So hopefully, if I log in here, we might actually be able to see how much power we're making. Oh, I see power. Let me call Linus. Hey, you're on speaker. Okay, so they set up the Enphase system so I can see how much power we're making. Wait, we can get a readout already? I got a readout already. It's only been up for like 20 minutes or something like that. So guess how much power? It's complete overcast. Yeah, I don't know. So the absolute peak was 9,000 watts, and I know that we had to reposition the panels, and they're not water-cooled. I'm gonna say like 1,500 watts. Right now, the latest measurement was 1.2 kilowatts, and the peak was 1.3. I think he said it updates about every five minutes. So far, we've produced 1.5 kilowatt hours of electricity, and you've consumed 1.2, and it says we've actually sold 0.5 kilowatt hours to the grid. That's awesome! So you've made like maybe five cents or something like that. I'm completely grid independent, even on an overcast day? Well, I mean, with nothing in the- Not at night, obviously. Nothing in the house running, but yes. It says 100% energy independence. Now in the app, there's actually like statistics so you can see your, how much power was consumed and produced. You can see how much was imported, which is like electricity that's come in from the grid and how much you've sold. Man, on a sunny day, when we're, even when we're running the AC, I bet it's gonna be sick. Dude, on a sunny day, you're probably gonna be producing like four or five kilowatts. In the app, there's also like, they haven't set it up yet, but there's gonna be a grid view where you can see all the panels, like how they're arranged on the roof, and then you can click on an individual panel and see how much power it's making. So like you can see one side of the house makes more power than the other. We'll be able to see if the ones that are water-cooled are like making more power. It's pretty fricking sick. I love it. So the system works. And so does our sponsor. Thanks again Epic Games for sponsoring today's video. Do you think you have more tech tips than me? Well, you might be able to prove it with PC Building Simulator 2. The original has been downloaded over 13 million times since 2017, and the game is basically what it sounds like. Building PCs, but with a new career mode. So you can operate your shop and build your business one PC at a time by either repairing them or getting commissions. There are a few big differences from the original though. There's a major graphical step up with richer details in parts and environments and better effects like more vibrant RGB. There's also enthusiast features, such as thermal imaging, power monitoring, revamped thermal paste, and custom VRM, RAM, and GPU water blocks. You can even customize the look of your workshop. So get hyped and wishlist the game right now in the Epic Games store at the link down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the Smart Home power monitoring one that we did. Because that's kind of related. That's gonna be relevant soon. Yeah, we're gonna end up using that to monitor usage. Home Assistant has like a solar energy page now. So maybe the end phase we'll hook into that and then we'll use that for like power draw. And the time we've been working on this project, the technology has like caught up to our ambitions for it, you know? It's... We're gonna use thermostats.