CAN THE ECOFLOW RIVER 2 MAX SAVE THE DAY?

Get yourself and your family an EcoFlow for Christmas, and save up to £450 on all the products in December (except the new arrivals)
Purchase from EcoFlow official website: uk.ecoflow.com/pages/christmas-sale?aff=133
Purchase from Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BFQB86ZL?maas=maas_adg_41710ECD7A72F810A666156971E98824_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas&th=1
Our ECOFLOW RIVER 2 MAX review:
kzbin.info/www/bejne/epaQi62ufpqrqc0
Thank you to Ecoflow for sponsoring this video.
Thanks for watching,
Fraser, Rachael, Grace and Albie
The Off Grid Family
#EcoFlow #SolarGenerator #PowerStation #Christmas2022 #christmasgifts
#winterpowerchallenge #survivingonsolar
Please note that this description may contain affiliate links.

[@brotherkith]

Surely you have a Victron shunt and app showing 'time remaining' on your main system. The Ecoflow is only the equivalent of one 100ah battery so surely making very little difference.

[@attaurrehmanmeorajput3255]

Very Informative Review about the Eco Flow River 2 .....Thank you

[@IamMotorHomeless]

I love my River 2 Max. it ran my full size Beko Fridge/Freezer for over 11 hours.

[@FarmsVilla]

Well done so far. As I said before good luck. Here in southern Italy I can’t get through winter without a generator and we normally get a lot more sun than the UK. The cold temps will be affecting your battery bank capacity. You were down to -6 last week?

[@michaelansell9203]

It would be interesting to know what temperature your batteries were registering during the night

[@debbiebee9077]

Today we have sunshine in East anglia. Wooooppppeeee! Hopefully u can charge up.

[@aureltanasan1413]

LPG generator, or wood gas, build a gasifier. With LPG is easier, buy a refillable bottle, take it down to the garage and fill up, like Motorhomes do. For £10 you get around 12L ish of lpg, can keep the genny running for a fair amount of time. We did this challenge about 2 years ago, when fog and mist hit, followed by snow, we had to run the generator. Also, your battery bank reserve it’s quite small for your needs. Convert your generator to lpg, bigger battery reserve, and you will do well.

[@dannywilson5852]

Can always make biogas (methane) in an ibc then use a converted generator to run on methane best way to make free fuel plenty of videos on YT to make it and convert the generator .. you can then charge your off grid batterys or just use the generator when you need electric .. so simple and so much cheaper than solar and wind and far better

[@MrMonero]

Nice. I’m gonna look into this. Thanks

[@thorselckmo7378]

Given it's been -9c in the UK I thought you would bed done for by the 15th December or thereabouts

[@fredflintstone1428]

After your last video, I looked into a gasifier......interesting thing to have if you're in a remote location.

[@joschmoyo4532]

So the big question I have is this. How are you recharging the ecoflow ? Generator, pv, car 12v output ? We are semi off grid and very familiar with your challenges.

[@matthewwakeham2206]

Is the floor insulated under the batteries? They may be cold soaking through there. If you could get them in one stack (like a server rack), they would take longer to cool down. Even just building a box over them would help. Even if it was a 25mm insulation board just cut to size and arranged around the batteries. Also a fan heater would be more efficient to heat the space as you wouldn't get a hot spot up high and you could direct it towards the batteries which may mean you could get away with a lower set temp. Ultimately if you could heat/insulate just the batteries themselves that is going to be the most energy efficient solution.

[@dodegkr]

How did you get down to 20 watts!!, our base load is over 500 and that's walking around in the dark, when it rains it's more like 1kw, led everywhere. amazing

[@MrMonero]

I was just about to ask exactly the same thing. She said the Ecoflow was powering their house but it was using only 20w?? That’s roughly the equivalent of charging one phone or tablet. No way was their house running from the Ecoflow at the time she made that statement. Also the only thing connected was a 240v outlet so the inverter alone would be drawing a large chunk of power.

[@michelleelsom6827]

Could you maybe use the ecoflow the way we do? ie charge your river 2 via your sockets in your home ( using the power in your solar batteries) then you can keep the river 2 in your home, using it directly via it's 2 sockets.

[@michelleelsom6827]

Also I didn't realise battery power depleted during very cold weather. We are charging our solar batteries early in the morning on cheap rate electricity if we know it's going go be cloudy all day, do you think we may be losing some of this power due to the cold weather? The solar batteries are in a brick built insulated double garage ( unheated)

[@bloodynorahvan2203]

Fair play for at least trying to go without the genny. I guess even with the sizable array you guys have, you need to supliement it with something else, otherwise you're kind of sitting in the dark for long periods. It's a real shame that you haven't got any hills/streams for water hydro, or a small wind turbine. But both of these systems need maintenance to keep running tip top.

[@lyntondell4882]

May seem like an obvious question but a general question but I'm new to the whole solar world. Would having more solar panels have fixed this problem?

[@timfulwell8472]

No. If there is no sun you get no power. Much better to spread your bets and have a few sources of power. Is your location windy at this time of year. Wind generator off you go. Do you have a stream with a steep drop? Stick in a small water turbine for a few months. Even a good size pond can be enough to take you through the winter till the sun is back.

[@Qosmio1955]

The short answer is, yes. The long answer is way more complicated but I'll try to summarise it... The Victron MPPT controllers they use will accept as many panels as you can throw at them BUT the input voltage must not exceed what the controller is rated to. So you must be very careful to configure the array so as to not exceed this voltage. Happily, the controllers don't care too much about input current, they will throttle that as required so that the rated output of the controller is never exceeded. This means that you could theoretically have so many panels that on cloudy days you could always have maximum output from your controller and not blow it up when the Sun comes out. The problem is that in the UK, this would require a sh*t-tonne of solar panels and you would need an awful lot of suitable space. Clouds do stop most of the light frequency that solar panels use, but not all of it. I have measured this at my home in Australia. On a cloudless day I can get typically, 1000W per square metre at midday. On partially cloudy days I can get slightly more than this due to the albedo effect. On days of full cloud I have measured as low as 50W per square metre, but this was exceptionally dense cloud. Solar panels are only about 20% efficient, which means that from this, only about 12W would be garnered per sq m. In a nutshell this would mean 8 sq m of panels for every 100W. Complicating this is the angle of incidence of the light at higher latitudes. In an ideal World you would set your array up so that you could seasonally change the angle of the arrays so that the panels would always be perpendicular to the Sun but this can be a seriously expensive option. Even here in Australia, where we have far more optimum conditions for solar, I am giving consideration to building a portable array on wheels that will have the ability to adjust the elevation of the thing as a whole. This will assist on cloudy days but, more importantly, on sunny days will smash the energy into the batteries, which will doubtless be at a very low SOC after the cloudy period. All this said, the OffGridFamily have stated, in a previous video, that additional panels aren't an option...

[@greenbimoon]

Victron Battery monitor have a Time to Go function

[@aureltanasan1413]

Indeed, and a pretty accurate one to.

[@locostse7en]

Admire the intention of this .

[@gmuzz]

The weather really hasn't been kind to you. Hope you're all ok now the temps are increasing

[@tiredofeverythingnew]

Inverter losses also mean about an additional 20% reducing in available WH’s - better warm up the generator 😢

[@hesasteadypacer]

Does that ratio change with different volt systems? 12v versus 48v, etc?

[@ttkddry]

20% is a bit of a broad average... surely it will depend on the PV low or high voltage system, battery 12V, 48V or 450V system... I can tell from experience the Victron Quattro draws about 180 W, no matter how much load... so even in idling...

[@tiredofeverythingnew]

@@ttkddry cold is the killer for sure with lithium or any battery really.

[@ttkddry]

@@tiredofeverythingnew as long as you keep them from freezing, no problems with lithium. The BMS will stop you from charging them if it gets too cold. Besides this is a residential setup, the batteries are inside a heated home

[@timfulwell8472]

Can you borrow someone’s electric car and charge up your house batteries? At the amount you are using you might get a few days from it.

[@loveofsisrael]

go green

[@MrMonero]

The amount of bots / fake accounts in the comments here is crazy. Jeez 🤦🏼‍♂️

[@The_OffGridFamily]

Thanks for drawing our attention to this. We’ve deleted them 😊👍

[@johnnyjrotten59]

Turn all of the shit off, this is all first world problems