A PowerVault is a weather-resistant chest that provides for safe electrical usage outside of the confines of a sheltering building. It is especially designed to leverage modern solar and battery power capabilities to provide electricity in house-adjunct (e.g. a pergola, shed, garage, or ADU) and off-grid situations.

PowerVault-4 Electrical Box
PowerVault-1 Closed PowerVault-4 Open Front

PowerVault-6 Open Front

The core characteristics of a PowerVault are a central main vault where electrical equipment is housed, a circuit breaker and junction box, and a front panel providing AC outlets and inlets. Solar power or other DC power is connected to a vault with outdoor-capable PV wires or through conduit.

This writeup is after building several of these with varying characteristics. These varying characteristics include:

  • Vault Organization:
    • AIO-Vault (battery/solar/inverter)
    • Component-vaults (e.g. battery/solar-collector/inverter all in separate vaults).
    • Note this does not refer to the system components in the vault
  • Insulation
  • System Aspects:
    • System Voltage
    • Inverter Power
    • Storage Capacity
    • Component brands and aspects
    • Manageability

The build examples here will be from two vaults:

  • Vault-1: A 12V AIO vault
  • Vault-4: A 48V Solar Harvester (MPPT Collector and a BESS with 48V batteries)
  • Vault-6: Solar Collector (Just the MPPT Collector)

Both Vault-1 and Vault-4 have similar design aspects with Vault-4 being the most sophisticated as well as the largest (24x24x30). Vault-6 is a different shape as it is designed to rest on top of Vault-4 and has a lid. It can not structurally support items on the side like Vault-1, 4, and 5 can with their more vertical box-based shaped.

Note that any pictures are of running systems: excuse the mess :-)

Vault Details

The details of the vaults are in the following pieces: