so last year I installed the Canadian Solar EP Cube It's a hybrid solar power system it's scalable you can build it to the size that's appropriate for you so I did install this whole system myself it is DIY friendly it's fairly easy to put together I've been running it for over a year I want to do a complete review on this system I want to talk about the the pros the good things about this system the the bad things about this system or maybe the problems that I've experienced over the last year and then maybe a few things that I think they can do to this system to make it even better so this system was provided to me last year for me to be able to do video over the installation of the system to do videos on how it operates and how it uh functions during a power outage but even though this was provided to me last year this is going to be in an honest review we're going to talk about the good things and the bad things so first let me give you an overview of the system on top here this is a 7600 watt inverter and then below it these are the batteries they stack up you have to have a minimum of three batteries we've got the maximum of six if you add more than six then you got to add another inverter so this here is the Smart Gateway this is where all of the Power and the communications that all comes together here it's kind of like the Hub of the system and it has 200 amp pass through so you bring your 200 amp electrical service you bring that in it'll go through this and then out to your house or your loads I said earlier that this inverter is 7600 wats and that's really dependent on how many batteries you have or if the Sun is out so if you have at least five batteries or if you have enough solar power this will be 7600 Watts if you don't meet those conditions the wattage on this inverter will actually end up being lower but in my case I've got six batteries so I've got the full 7600 watts of continuous output power and The Surge capacity on this also varies from when you have solar coming in and when you don't have solar so if you've got enough Soler The Surge capacity on this is 22,000 volt amps and if there's no sun it's 11,400 volt amps now I know a lot of people say volt amps that's volts times amps that's the same as wattage well when it comes to you know surge capacity that's that's not true there's a power factor in there and you got to calculate that in so just keep in mind when you see 22,000 volt amps that doesn't mean 22,000 Watts it's going to be something less than that it might be 177,000 18,000 Watts so as we review this today we're going to review it as it's set up right now with six batteries the full 7600 wats of power all right we're going to start at the inverter so one thing I do like about this system is it does have two solar disconnects on it and there's two solar arrays on each one of these it also has a battery disconnect right here with this fuse you can pull out so on this bottom terminal block it has four mppt charge controllers and these four solar inputs are pre-wired through the too rapid shutdown system so a lot of inverters are compatible with rapid shutdown systems but this one actually has it already built into to it so you don't have to buy any additional Hardware to create the shutdown system the only thing you have to buy are the modules that go on your solar panels so these four charge controllers have a maximum voltage of 600 volts DC which is really high and then it has an operating range between 90 volts DC and 550 volts DC so has a really wide operating range on the voltage and then it can actually operate on a maximum of 16 amps so it doesn't list on the data sheet what the maximum solar input is but it does give a DC to AC ratio and it says it has twice the DC as it does AC 2:1 ratio so if this is a 7600 watt inverter it can bring in 14,800 watts of solar with that ratio and then I've had somebody at Canadian Solar tell me that it can take in almost 15,000 Watts so even though it's it's not listed exactly in the data sheet that's really where you're look looking at where the maximum potential is for this charge controller so all our wiring connections are on these terminal blocks here they are the pushin style connectors overall this is very easy to wire up I my biggest complaint is that these are only 3/4 inch connections on the side and you can actually there's an insert in here you can take it out and you can get it up to a 1 in size if you if you need to but I really would like to see bigger connection on here all right we're going to look at the Gateway this is the Hub of the [Music] system so this may look a little complicated but it's actually fairly simple so remember I said this had 200 amp pass through so you can bring 200 amp service into here and then it goes to a 200 amp disconnect that's what that is and if you ever need you got any trouble and you need to operate that disconnect you can actually turn that manually if needed but then you have a 200 amp bus that comes around and then it just goes right out to your loads and right here this is a 40 amp breaker for the inverter power that's coming in and then it just attaches onto the bus bar and then any additional inverters that you want you can just add more 40 amp Breakers and just tie them into the bus bar and you can just keep stacking inverters on this so in normal operation the inverter power comes in and it can go out to your load but it can also go backwards and sell back to the grid and when the grid goes down it will sense that it'll it'll open up this disconnect and separate you from the grid and then your house will only be powered by the inverter and then you're on battery backup so one of the neat features the Gateway has are these two extend ports it has two 100 amp outputs or inputs depending on how you use them so one way you can use these ports is for a standby generator it does have where it can auto start and stop a generator and then it can bring that in during a power outage when your batteries get below 20% it will call for the generator to turn on and power your system another way you can use that is if you have a AC coupled solar array like say you have an inphase system with the micro inverters you can bring that in as well and it will actually stay on during a power outage like normally it doesn't but once you close this the inverter comes on here it creates a micro grid and now the inverter can power it plus if you have a AC coupled micro inverter array right you can bring that in and it can supply power during a power outage as well and the third way you can use this is for a like an electric vehicle charger or like a large Appliance is what they say but you kind of got to think of it as a smart load it's it's a load that it can Supply but it can turn it off based on your battery state of charge so you can supply a maximum of 100 amps of power to some type of a load I mean it could even be like an entire breaker panel like a 100 amp breaker panel full of lots of loads and when the power goes out it can turn those loads off based on battery state of charge and you can set that so say I'm using this to to power up a small shed behind my house and the power goes out and if the battery gets below 50% I can have that automatically turn that shed off so I can save my batteries so it's pretty useful it's pretty neat feature you don't see that on a lot of things I don't know if a lot of people would use that feature but it definitely gives you an option that a lot of systems don't have so this EP Cube system is controlled and monitored through an app on your phone or through a tablet it does have a Wi-Fi signal that is reord ired you have to have that to be able to monitor the system now to set the system up it'll actually talk through Bluetooth and you can set it up through your phone just right next to it without any Wi-Fi but if you want to monitor the system change any of the running parameters parameters it has to be on Wi-Fi so I have set up a Wi-Fi router out here in the workshop just right across from me so I've got one close to make sure that I've got constant communication so this system primarily runs off of firmware there's not a lot of user settings for you to customize so when you get in the app and you pull it up you've got three different modes you can pick you've got self-c consumption that's what I usually run and then I usually run a minimum of 30 let's go ahead and change that 30% state of charge I'll go ahead and submit that and it will load to the system so self-c consumption basically tries to use your batteries first use the grid last so solar batteries then the grid last and then it sells back any extra power that it can't put in the batteries or that you're not using so it kind of sells back last too then you have a backup mode and basically you're setting a state of charge on your battery that you want a minimum of and it it's primarily using your battery for backup and then you have a time of use mode and this is when you have different rates from your power grid I have one rate it's 15 cents for kilowatt hour all day long every hour of the day some people have high times and low times and you can set that on here so that you use the battery during the High Times the day and you're not buying that expensive power from the grid so that's your three different modes that you can set you also have weather watch mode on here you turn that on it'll automatically charge the battery to 100% when there's a storm coming and then you have well we talked about the extend ports and how you can put that to an EV charger or large Appliance or power something right you have the minimum state of charge that you can set that and then that's when it will turn off when the grid goes down other than that it's always powered all the time unless the grid goes down and then if the Grid's down the batter's below that percentage it'll just turn that whatever that is off that's the only user settings that you truly have in this system it's one of the it's a simple system it is made for people who just want to set a few settings and forget it it's for people that don't want things that are complicated so it's for the those kind of people that just want to set it up and walk away and never have to really look at it again if you're one of those people that like to Tinker and you like to play with settings and you really want to customize it to the way you want you're not going to have that with the EP Cube these are going to be people who aren't into solar and and want to Tinker around with stuff and and mess with it this is going to be for people who want to set it and forget it you know it's just there it works it's done so let's go ahead we'll talk about the bad things in fact I filmed this part of the video yesterday so I could even demonstrate the bad things to you so let's go ahead and we'll jump over to me yesterday so there are some things things about the EP Cube that I don't like my number one complaint is when we do lose grid power it's supposed to like transfer within 10 to 20 milliseconds and it's not really a seamless transfer like that a lot of time sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't it doesn't do it all the time but sometimes when you lose grid power it's off for a few seconds we'll go ahead and try it and there you go you see that so I don't know what that was that wasn't 10 to 20 milliseconds that was a good at least a half a second that's enough to to blip my internet router it's enough to to drop out my computer when I'm working on stuff I just kind of find that a little bit annoying and then it comes right on it runs everything fine it runs off a battery so um like I said sometimes it will transfer and you don't know it happens other times it transfers and you get a blip on everything and a lot of times you got to set your clocks stuff like that you know it's just kind of annoying so but in the O but it always takes over it's not like it doesn't come on it's just it it takes a while for it to transfer all right we're back grid tied again I'm going to try it one more time just to see how the blip is see that time that's the way it should be I don't know if you could tell the difference but that was a quick blip and everything will keep its time everything will stay powered up that's the way it's supposed to work and it's kind of a coin toss on what's going to happen when the power goes out whether it blips or not now my second complaint about this system is you actually can't run the battery all the way down to 0% at least with the latest firmware that we have right now it when it gets down to 15% state of charge on the battery it'll actually turn off the output and it and it just holds that battery charge to keep it self awake or alive right and it's going to sit there until the sun comes out and when the sun comes out it's going to charge back up I think to 30% once it hits 30% it will go ahead and start outputting power again that's in a grid outage okay so like say the grid is off for like 24 hours or 2 days once it hits 15% it's going to turn everything off and it and it it saves that battery charge they call it a black start is what they call it but it saves that battery charge so when the sun comes back out it can start charging the batteries back up kind of keeps the computer going right the brain and it won't come back on till you get 30% battery charge I find that that's kind of I don't like that does it really need 15% of 20 kilowatt hours um to stay on all night long just to keep the computer memory up right um I would like that to be less so right now I've got the grid power off I've got the solar panels off we're running on batteries we're down to 16% state of charge so once this hits 15% we're going to see the output power turn off and it's going to go in that black start mode and there it went it's dead so I never did get it to show 15% on the app I kept refreshing it and it just showed 16% the whole time so now we're dead in the water till we get solar or the grid we're going to do solar let's go ahead it's a sunny day outside we'll go ahead turn the Grid or the solar back on and you'll actually hear this the charge controller kick up and start running and there the Fan's kicked on it's it's charging the batteries back up all right the power just came back on it is 131 power went off at 117 so that ended up being well like 14 minutes for the power to come on so there's pretty good Sun out there to charge the batteries up now of course the Wi-Fi is not quite booted up yet so the starlink has to boot up the Wi-Fi routers have to boot up so it'll be a couple minutes before I can actually see the state of charge so my third complaint is that the only way to monitor this system is through Wi-Fi and an app on a tablet or a phone and or they also have a web page you can go to and you can look at it on the internet as well but if for some reason say the power blips and your Wi-Fi is off or like your star Link's down something your internet providers down you're not going to get the information from the system and it' be nice if there was a screen on here so that you had another source or another way to be able to monitor this system so maybe in the future they can add that I think it would be a good Improvement so I'd say my fourth complaint has to do with the app itself it would be nice if it could notify you when the power went out because there is times the power goes out and maybe you don't necessarily know it so if it does switch almost seamlessly you may not know that you're on batteries and that you're running them down i' We've ran the batteries out before and and shut the system down because we didn't even know the power was out and we were like running laundry and like cooking in the oven we were doing things that you probably don't want to do if you're off grid and the sun isn't shining and your batteries are low and so it would be nice if the app could actually notify you when the power goes out and then you can adjust properly right you can like not do certain things so that your batteries last longer so it took about 5 minutes for the app to update but the state of charge on the battery is 30% so you you can see it's going to waight there and charge it up before it turns on so the bad thing about this shutting down at 15% is there is 3 kwatt hours in this battery that we can't use and I don't really think the inverter needs 3 kilowatt hours to stay alive and wait for the Sun the next day and if you had two of these Stacks you'd have six kilowatt hours that you couldn't use so I think they need to re-evaluate 15% it probably should just be a value should probably be like a half a kilowatt hour for each inverter that you have and that would probably be a better way to approach that so just My overall thoughts on the EP Cube system one of the best features has probably got to be the charge controller high voltage really high maximum wattage you can over panel this system quite a bit four charge controllers on there probably one of the best features it has I do think the extend ports are a nice feature to be able to hook up your AC coupled system or a generator or maybe a large Appliance or just a separate breaker panel if you wanted to I think that's a cool feature I think you'd have to plan for it I don't know if a lot of people will end up using it but if you have a standby generator or if you already have a AC coupled solar system that may make hooking everything up a lot easier as for things I think they can improve about the system I think a screen would definitely help also it' be nice if it would work with a like a manual generator right now it only works with a standby generator it requests it to come on and then once it sees it on it'll go ahead and it'll switch over to it but if you hook a manual generator generator to it it just ignores it it only ignore it it just ignores it until your battery gets below 20% and then it thinks it started a standby generator and it's not really a standby generator so it doesn't really work with a a manual generator because you would have to start the manual generator between 20 and 15% to get it to accept it and start using the manual generator because it gets below 15% it's just going to shut down into black start mode but it would be nice if they added that to the software where you could tell it it's a manual generator and then you could go in the software you could tell it it was on you could tell it to charge the batteries that would be a really nice feature for when power outages extended power outages happen and I truly think that one's something that you could just fix with software of course any additional information they want to add to the app would be beneficial if you do get on the website and you monitor it through the website I you can actually I think see more information off of the website than you can the app on your phone so you always have that choice and I'd really like to see the software give you a notification when you have a power outage that way you can try to manage your loads properly and not run your battery out I will mention customer service I have called them a few times and you can have somebody on the phone talking to you in like two minutes so customer service you're actually talking to a person in a couple minutes a a tech and that's nice it's not like you're sitting on hold for a long time so customer service is responsive I've I've had several little issues little errors a lot of times they tell me you know there's a firmware fix for that and that has fixed a lot of little errors I used to get on the system and the power glitch that I have on the system it actually used to be a little bit longer time there and firmware fixes have improved that but I still have a little bit of where the power blips a little bit too long but I will say you can get customer service on the phone and you're talking to a knowledgeable person pretty fast so is the EP Cube system right for you if you're looking for like a system that's that's fairly simple doesn't have a really complicated uh software parameters and user settings then this system's right for you if you got a AC coupled array already and you're wantan to add battery backup to it this system might be um a better choice for you as well but if you're one of those people that like to geek out on solar and you want to mess with all the different settings and you you want to add different things to it different types of batteries and and customize the system this isn't going to be the system for you I mean the EP Cube system you have to use EP Cube batteries you're going to have to use EP Cube inverter you have to use their parts to expand the system but it's very expandable you can build it basically any size you want so if you're looking at the EP Cube system hopefully this video will help you decide whether the system is right for you and if anything changes like the power glitch problem like if that gets fixed if they come out with a screen or any new updates that that address any of the problems that I have mentioned I'll try to do a video on that and do an update on the improvements that are made to the system but I think that's going to wrap up this video if you guys do like DIY solar projects or if you like solar reviews uh please subscribe to the channel this is a new Channel that I just made and I'm trying I'll be trying to get out a few videos a month so anything to do with DIY solar or energy Independence I'm going to try to cover on this channel so if you're into that stuff I appreciate you you follow along but I think that's it for this video guys thanks for watching