Solar / Battery Kit for Apartments, Backup, Camping, etc

What if energy generation was a consumer electronic you could order online? 

Build an easy DIY solar micro-grid in your apartment, balcony, shared rooftop or garden for easy renewable independence, backup power and the odd outdoor adventure.

Due to popular demand, we've decided to offer mobile apartment solar kits with hand-picked and tested components guaranteed to work reliably together, distributed, sold and supported by sunboxlabs. If you'd prefer, you can still order components separately and assemble them yourself following one of the guides at https://sunboxlabs.com or from the original article here.

• This is a pre-sale, so we'll only order in bulk when the first 10 orders are in. 
  
• For this initial run, we're taking a very small margin (under $100). 
  
• Additionally, we'll offer every sale a 1-on-1 personal installation session over Zoom with Niko, the founder of Sunboxlabs.

The problem

Apartment renters need the landlord’s permission to install anything on their rooftops. This makes installing solar difficult for people who rent. Because most of the world lives in urbanized areas where renting is common, I think this is a problem standing in the way of solar adoption.

An additional speed bump is the complexity of installing solar: regulation around net-metering. Grid-tied systems. Installation permits (even if you do own your property). Getting quotes from different installers. Solar financing. All complex processes inherited from the construction industry which slow down mass private adoption of renewables.

We attempt to bypass both these problems by building a standalone solar power plant on for windowsill, rooftop or garden with off-the-shelf parts, and discuss the pros and cons of this approach to solar.

A possible solution

A windowsill solar system bought we install ourselves solves both problems at once: Renters don’t need permission from their landlords to place things on their windowsill and rooftops if it’s not altering the building, and it’s a one-click, direct purchase with no regulation as long as it’s not tied to the grid (which this one is designed not to be). Two birds with one stone. This makes the solar buying process more like buying a consumer electronic.

Questions remain. Can this system make any meaningful energy? Does it make financial sense?

The Components

Pre-order your Mobile Apartment Solar Kits, and you'll receive in 2 boxes by us hand-vetted and tested components:

• 200W flexible solar panels (2 x 100W) with MC4 connectors. incl. 8 x zip ties to attach to balcony/RV/rooftop/garden structure.
• 20ft solar cable (2 cables - 1x 20ft positive, 20ft negative) with MC4 connectors on both sides.
• Indoor Storage Battery with integrated MPPT solar charge controller, 500Wh of storage, 500W inverter for max output (A/C), 3 USB-A, 1 USB-C, 1 A/C out (220V, 110V, up to 500W). 2 DC outs, 1 DC solar in.
• Personalized Zoom session with sunboxlabs founder for installation help.
• Money-back guarantee.

Assembly and installation

The kit should arrive within 30 days of the pre-order phase closing. It'll look like below:

Assembly is simple – zip-tie to the panels anywhere in your garden, on your rooftop, to your balcony, etc. We zip-tie them so that strong winds don't blow them away.

We then pass the cables through to the window inside...

... and plug it into the inverter indoors. Close the window on the (thick) wires and you're good to go!

Energy independence and resilience

In case of brownouts or blackouts, this is be a helpful way of wirelessly charging communications devices without the grid. This 500W, 500Wh system can even keep full-size, 120W refrigerator running for 4 hours to conserve food, or 10 lights running 24 hours.

Other use cases

• Utility power outage backup (not grid-tied, so you'd have to re-plug your devices into this) during wildfire season, hurricanes, etc.
  
• Camping, outdoors & off-grid uses.
• Make off-grid power in your garden or on your apartment rooftop (south-facing, slightly slanted or flat surfaces strongly with some hours of direct sunshine preferred). The cable should be able to run indoors, or you can provide power to your greenhouse, etc.
• Burning man or music festival use.

Our mission is to make purchasing solar/storage as easy as purchasing any other consumer electronic, as we believe in a bottom-up theory: once renewable energy does not require a professional it will spread as rapidly as other consumer electronics like window A/C units and satellite dishes, etc.

What if autonomous electric generation could be added room by room to a household (like window A/C units)? 

If we look to the car, the smartphone, the window A/C unit — these devices spread like wildfire across the globe because they were off-the-shelf products that required no configuration but great benefits. Identical appliances were churned out at an industrial scale for a global audience. They were “plug n play”. Plug n play solar has been around for a while, but has never taken off (probably because behind-the-meter power is still sketchy and poorly understood). The potential for plug n play solar is huge — it could mean cheap, zero-configuration solar energy spreading to consumers at the pace of the smartphone, the car or air-conditioning.

Order Details

You will not be charged until June 25.

If we do not receive 10 pre-orders before June 25, you will not be charged.

Shipping around $34-$90 anywhere in the US. You will receive a follow-up email about this separately once we have received enough orders.

Est. arrival time after pre-sale closes: max. 4 weeks.

• Daisy-chain the batteries and solar for a bigger system up to 10kWh / 4kw.
  
• Grid-tie them to your fuse box to run your household seemlessly during a power outage.
  
• Window transmission (currently there will be a gap).
  
• Energy trading between separate households and selling back to the grid (demand response, etc).

See original article for further calculations, but in short:

How green is it? Does it have an impact on my CO2 footprint? Let's calculate:

Production footprint PV multicristalline: 4200kWhee/kW [1] * 0.2kW = 840kWh embodied energy

Production footprint li-ion 18650 battery: 321kWhee/kWh [1] * 0.5kWh = 161kWh embodied energy

Total Footprint: 1001kWh

Annual energy production system: 310kWh/y

Payback period: 1001kWh / 310kWh/y = 3.2 year CO2 footprint payback

Will this system save me a money? What's the payback period?