- We finally have our solar
installed and it's awesome. - It is, it's super exciting to finally have this project done. Today we're gonna tell
you all about the project and how we did it. (upbeat music) - This is not a how to video, we just wanna put that out there now. This is a how we did it video. By we I mean him of course, I'm just here to maybe ask some questions that some of you might have. - Yeah, this is a super complex topic. So we're not gonna go
away into the weeds on it. But we will have time
indexes below to each section in case you wanna skip ahead. Before you attempt any kind of DIY project with this type of wiring and complexity. Be very familiar with what you're doing, be familiar with Ohm's Law and Watt's Law and how to convert them
and what all that means. You gotta know all that stuff. - If you're unfamiliar, or this seems very overwhelming to you, if you saw our video about the NRVTA, you know that we highly
recommend their courses, and they actually have a solar course too. So that would be a great place to start before you attempt doing this yourself. - Yeah, and the fundamentals course is also a good prerequisite to that. They don't require it. But the first two days of the fundamentals goes over RV electricity
and get you comfortable with all the things I just talked about Ohm's Law, Watt's Law,
all that good stuff. I did not take the solar course at NRVTA even though I think it would be great. I have a background in electronics and electricity and
everything with the Navy, I did find a really good book, if you're already comfortable with the fundamentals of
electricity and RV electricity, Will Prowse who has a
YouTube channel also, that's very solar related, I think it's actually a solar channel. He has written a great book that I read and is really great and takes you through the basics
and let you build on that. I'll have a link for that below as well. - We're probably gonna
have to take this topic and make it into multiple videos, because it is so complex,
and there's a lot going on. This one is our install primarily. And then we will have
some videos down the line about how it's doing and us actually working
and living with the solar. - Yeah, the install
itself took me nine days. - Nine times? - Nine times. - So this could be a
little bit of a long video. But like we mentioned, we will have time indexes
to get you to the part that you're looking for. - None of these products are sponsored or given to us for promotion
or for us to talk about them, we did pay for everything ourselves. And we do that because we like to really be able to get a good feel for it on our own time and do
our own thing with it. - Right, and not be obligated
to a bunch of different things 'cause solar takes a lot of stuff from a lot of different places. We do have some partnerships
involved in this where we have affiliate
codes for the batteries and things like that, and
we'll have those links below. - Hold on. I think Daisy
has got to go outside. You're in good hands with him. I'm gonna get her. - Oh, going outside. - Oh boy. I'll be back. - You don't need me for this anyhow. - Before we jump into our installation, I wanna cover just a few basics to have a baseline on which to build some of the solar stuff. An RV has actually three
electrical systems. Two of them are for the
actual house DC and AC. The third one is DC for your tow vehicle or the coach side of your class A we're only gonna be worried
about the AC and DC systems that are in an RV and that
is the big difference. RVs have AC and DC systems. Unlike your house, which is gonna be just 120 volts AC you plug stuff into the walls
and that's pretty much it. RV's have batteries so
you can run off grid. Those batteries are your 12 volt system and that will be used to do
things like power your lights, power some of your control
panels for your fridge and things like that. It powers the motor on your furnace. There are a lot of things that are direct and DC powered in an RV. Your hydraulic jacks are
a good example of that your awnings, a lot of those
smaller motor type of devices are gonna be DC powered. And just like in a house, your 120 volt systems are gonna
be things that you plug in coffee pot, TV, the air conditioning, all of these high wattage things are usually going to be
on your 120 volts side. Microwave is a good example. On that ac 120 volt side of the equation. RVs do have two different
flavors of that as well. You have a 30 amp system
which is a single hot leg providing 30 amps or you
have a 50 amp system, which is actually 250 amp hot legs providing a total of 100 amps. Not gonna dig deep into that 'cause it really doesn't matter that much when it comes to solar
and how it interacts but you should know that. These two AC and DC systems
are pretty much on their own and isolated but they
do have to be connected in some way so they can
make use of each other. The most basic way is a converter. Our RV came with a converter and all that thing does
is it converts AC to DC, it's made to charge your batteries and or supply some DC power for loads while you're actually running. The other type is an inverter, an inverter goes the opposite way, it takes your DC power and
turns it into AC power. So you can run things like your microwave and your fridge and all that good stuff off of your batteries. Typically, an inverter is also a charger. So it can actually go both directions, they can charge your batteries or it can be draining your
batteries to supply AC power, it can do it either direction, what you can actually run on the AC side via your inverter depends on two things, the capacity of that inverter, how many watts it can provide, and that determines what it can power. That's pretty straightforward. The other thing is how it's wired. If your inverter came with your RV, there's a good chance that your AC systems aren't hooked up to it and maybe not even all of your outlets. So how it's wired into your
system makes a big difference. Our system is designed so that it powers everything all the time. Obviously, we can't run
everything at the same time, but it's there in power
if we wanna run it, we do have a separate inverter video. So I refer you to that for
any more details on inverters. As we go through this discussion, I'm gonna try to stick
to watts and watt hours. A watt is basically a measure of energy. And the reason I'm gonna be
using that versus voltage and amps and things like that
is because watts are watts, whether you're talking
about DC watts or AC watts, they're kind of the same. So you don't really have
to do a lot of conversion other than the energy
lost across the inverter. Another convenience there is
that most of your appliance do list their energy consumption in watts. So it makes it much easier
to figure out what you need. So watts versus watt hours, all you're talking about in watt hours is how long you're running something. So 100 watt light bulb run for
two hours is 200 watt hours, he ran 100 watts for two hours. So when you're talking about watt hours, it's kind of like your power bill, right? You pay for your power
bill in kilowatt hours, which is just 1000s of watt hours. It's a way of measuring energy over time. So when you talk about
sizing a battery bank, we're gonna be talking about watt hours. So let's jump into a little
bit of an intro on solar. Solar, as a concept is
really pretty simple. You've got panels on your roof that take light from the sun
and turn it into DC voltage. So you're getting DC
power from the panel's when the sun is out. That's the basic simplified version of it. Just like your converter
can charge your batteries and your inverter charger
can charge your batteries. Solar, also charges your batteries, and also can supply some
runtime load depending on how much you're using versus how much you're getting from solar. But that's really all solar is is just another way to
charge your batteries. But it's free, and it's from the sun. And you can do it anywhere
you have sunlight, which is really cool. I'm gonna touch briefly on planning solar, because again, that by itself
is a very complex topic. Again, that book by Will Prowse has a really good section on that. But the general idea is to
basically look at your usage or what you wanna be able to
run off of your batteries, and then plan based on that. So you take the wattage
from your microwave from your air conditioner
from your coffee pot, you figure out how long
you're gonna run those on a given day, add all that up and you'll come
up with a watt hour number. And then you wanna look
at your battery bank and size of your batteries double that. That way if you have a rainy day, you can go for a couple days
running off your batteries. That's the battery side
of a solar installation because a solar setup is really useless without a way to store that
energy to run things at night or on a rainy day. Also, when you're planning
your battery bank for solar, you wanna keep in mind
the type of battery. We covered this a little bit
in our mooch docking video. But there's lots of different
types of batteries out there. You've got AGM, flooded cell, all kinds of different
flooded cell varieties. The thing about those is most of them can only
be discharged to 50%. So even if you have 100 amp
hour flooded cell battery, it's really only good for 50 amp hours, whereas lithium, those
things can be drained to 100% and 100 amp hour battery is 100 amp hours. So be aware of that
when you're planning out your battery bank. When it comes to planning the solar side of your solar system, the actual panels and
controllers and things like that. You wanna size that based
on the charge capacity of your batteries. You basically wanna have as much solar as you can fit on your roof but you don't wanna overdo it and supply more power than
your batteries can handle. If your batteries can only
handle 100 amps of charge having a solar system that
gives you 150 to 200 amps is just wasted it's not
gonna do you any good. For us it was no big deal because we have a large lag battery bank and we would never be able
to put enough solar panels on our roof to overcome
the charge capacity of our batteries. One of our main goals
with our solar install and our battery bank upgrades
was to be able to run our air conditioning,
when we're boondocking, we wanna be able to run it at night and have it run all night. So we're looking at it
probably roughly six hours of actual run time, 'cause it turns off and
on that kind of thing, our AC is about a 1600 watt system. So if you just figure an
average of six hours a night, we're looking at about 9600
watt hours to run our AC for six hours. We also have to factor in the fact that we're going to lose
about 10% of our power, converting it from DC to AC, you're gonna lose about 10% average, you're looking at about 10,500 watt hours, when I was sizing our battery bank, I kind of did it based on
what I could fit there. Turns out, they match up pretty well. We have 10 100 amp hour 12 volt batteries from a Battle Born and that
calculates to 12,000 watt hours. Again, I'm not gonna go
into the math on all that. But 12,000 is bigger than 10,500. So we have enough batteries. And then again, that's just a very rough example we're gonna be running other things, you know, our computers,
our TVs, things like that. But 10 batteries was all
I could fit up there. Plus they are super expensive. So again, that factors in as well. We went with Battle Born Batteries simply because we already
had three of them, and they have been rock solid, you know, aside from
wiring them improperly, you just can't mess them up. Their BMS is top notch
it protects the battery from any kind of unsafe conditions like overheating overcharging, they have 100 amp continuous current each. So we have a ton of current available. They also do have a 200 amp surge current, and they have a 10 year warranty. So they stand behind their product. They're a really, really solid player in the lithium ion game, and we've been really happy with them, we do have affiliate links below we'd love I it if you use our links. With our 10 Battle Born
batteries in parallel, we're looking at 100 amps per battery charge capacity in parallel, that means we have 1000
amps of charge capacity, which really means we could
probably fit 20 30, 40, panels and plug it in and it'll be fine 'cause we can handle
1000 amps of charging. So with our solar setup, it really comes down to how many panels can I fit on the roof, and
then how to wire those. So with all of that kind of prerequisite
baseline out of the way, let's jump into our setup. First of all, you know that
I like to do projects myself, which means I like to break the projects into small chunks that
don't disrupt our lives. I think the planning process for all of this is probably
one of the most confusing parts because you kind of have to
design your overall system ahead of time. And think about where
you're gonna put things, how big they are, how what kind of wiring you're gonna need, the types of fuses and breakers, you got to get all that
kind of out of the way ahead of time. So you can order the right
parts and get them all in. Guaranteed you'll forget something. This is our wiring diagram. And it's gonna be a lot
to look at it first. But we're gonna cover
each section as I did it. So if you look here, I've got this split into two sides, all of the DC stuff is over here. All the AC stuff is over here. And you can see how they're connected right in the middle here
by the inverter charger. Also in part of the planning process, I wanted parts that all
kind of worked together. I know Victron is really good about that. So that was the way I went was with Victron controllers. And you'll see how I got those wired once I get to that point. But first let's talk about panels. I did a little bit of research to try to find some
kind of new, inventive, cutting edge panel that
was better than the rest. Quite honestly, most of
them are about the same. I've got several friends who use high tech 200 watt solar panels. So I decided well, that's what I'll do. That seems to be kind of the top end of that form factor of
solar panels at 200 watts. Initially, I had planned on
upgrading the batteries first in this step stage process. But while we were at the NRVTA training, I saw that Todd had a
whole pallet full of panels of this exact same brand. So I asked him, can I buy
these panels from you? He said, sure. So that's what I did. It was super convenient, 'cause that's one of the big problems too is just the logistics
of getting the panels. So the first step was trying to figure out how many panels can I use. So what I did was I took
a piece of cardboard and I cut it to the size of a
panel, I taped off the edges. I went on the roof, I taped it into a spot where
I knew one panel could go, I took the drone up, I took some pictures, and then I just copied and pasted that little square all over the roof to figure out where I
could put out panels, that worked out to be pretty good. I also didn't wanna have our
roof just completely jam packed with no walking room. So I spaced them out. So I had at least a
foot between each panel to get to the sides. And I came up with a pretty
comfortable placement for 10 panels. I was pondering how I'm
gonna get these solar panels on the roof. And lo and behold, Roger comes by who's like seven feet tall. And he's just gonna hand
them to me on the roof. So this should be short work. We're getting up there. Then I can bolt them down. By the way, Roger and his
wife have a YouTube channel and social media presence. Tall and Short Travelers
or is it short and tall? - It's the Tall and Short Travelers. - I'll give you one guess
which one he is, tall or short. - Somebody said, I hope
you're the tall one. I'm good for handing solar
panels with Chad on the roof or getting things off the
shelf in the garden for. You do have plenty of room up here. - Oh, yeah, my plan is to
wire these five in series. And then those five
wrapped around in series, you'll see that the access port is right between the two right there, I
have no idea where that goes. But I'm gonna find out. Nice, now all I got to do
is bring brackets up here and do them one at a time, awesome. It's gonna be sweet. I decided that with 10 panels, I would do two strings
of five panels in series. A couple of reasons behind that. Each of these panels
provides about 24 volts at around 10 amps. So if I put five of them in series, I'm looking at about 120 volts at 10 amps. When you wire something in series, the voltage adds up and
the current stays the same. That's a huge advantage on the roof. Because the lower the amperage
means the smaller the wire, which means the easier it is to run. So you wanna run as many
in series as you can and still get away with it. I can't do all 10 in series because then we're looking
at 240 volts at 10 amps. And there are any controllers out there, at least them that are reasonable that can handle 100 240 volts
with two strings of five, I'm looking at about 120 volts at 10 amps, which means I could use something like eight gauge wire up there. And I can use two controllers that can each handle the 120 volts. I also know how to configure
out what that means on the output side. Since I know that I'm gonna
be converting it to 12 volts, I have to look at okay, I've
got 120 volts, at 10 amps, that's 1200 watts. When I break that down on
the current side on DC, it's 1200 watts divided
by 12 gives me 100 amps. So I know that I need a controller that can handle up to 120 volts in and give me about 100 amps out. Victron on has a 150/100
that fit the bill perfectly, so I needed two of those. And that's how I ended up wiring these in. I decided to use some
sealant that Todd recommended that's a special non shrinking sealant. So it's not like Dicor that shrinks, what I did is I put that
underneath the feet. And then I've screwed through
those, through the sealant, and then I put some
EternaBond tape on top. This is fine for TPO roofs,
but it does not shrink, but it's also not self leveling. So I'll have to smooth that out a bit. But this should be good
for what I'm doing there when I was taking these
screws into our roof, I gotta consider where I want
my walking space up here. Obviously I can get around
this way really easily. It's not a big deal, I can always step in between here and still reach here if I need to. It's better to have
some stepping space here than on that side, I think. So I think I'm gonna go
with the line I've got here. Rather than do a panel at a time I'm gonna prep each one
with the brackets first, then come back that way I'm
not dealing with the cop gun, priming and D priming and all that stuff. Step one is to put feet on each panel. (upbeat music) I don't know how well this
audio is gonna come out with the drone up there. I was gonna wait and do
all this wiring later but since I'm wiring these in series, I can go ahead and get all
of my negative to negatives going down the line and
get those connected. While I can still turn the panels over. Luckily Todd also has some
good eight gauge outdoor wiring and MC4 connectors so I could
finish up the wiring on top. MC4 connectors are basically
just waterproof connectors. They usually come pre attached pre wired to your solar panels. So it's just a matter of when you're connecting
solar panels together. You can connect one side and then you have to make
a wire for the other side the negative side of it. MC4 connectors are super easy. I'm not gonna go into
a lot of detail there because there are plenty
of videos out there on how to current and make MC4 connectors. Time to start sealing through and seal it. That's all I'm gonna do is I'm going to lift these panels up and seal the squares
underneath over there, seal on the deck here. Lay them down on top of the sealant and then just put screws in. (upbeat music) Day three was basically making those wires getting them bolted down, I wasn't gonna worry about
putting the wiring anywhere I just zip tied the cables together with a zip lock over and secured them up real good with gorilla
tape, taped it to the roof, and consider the panels
done and ready to connect. With the panels done and out of the way. The next step was the batteries. This was a little bit more
complicated logistically because I wanted to keep everything in that front bay if possible. If you've seen our videos, you know, we have slide trays and everything's kind of
just perfect in our basement. And I didn't wanna mess that up by stacking batteries and stuff in there. The biggest problem was just having to move
everything around in there. To put the batteries on top
of the generator, of course, I've got to get the inverter off of there. And where am I gonna put that I decided that I was gonna put it up. So all I did with our inverter, I didn't even unhook it from AC, I just unmounted it, flipped it and mounted it to the ceiling, that was an entire day process. That inverter is heavy. And there's not room for more
than one person in there. So what I ended up doing was
building a ratchet system the I put ratchet straps around the frame. And I cranked it, cranked it, cranked it,
cranked it, cranked it, until I got up where I wanted it. The other thing that I had to overcome was how to mount it to the frame up there, the inverter was just a
little bit too narrow, it didn't reach both beams of the frame. So I used half inch aluminum squares to mount the inverter to that and then mount that to the
frame worked out great, but it was a huge, huge
pain took me a whole day just to get the inverter
off and crank it up. So that takes us through project day four. Project day five was to finish mounting the inverter underneath and
start on my battery wiring, I decided to use two by fours just like I did with the inverter on top of the generator compartment. This basically distributes
the load of the batteries across the whole compartment to the edges. That way we're not looking at you know, anything sagging and bowing
on top of the generator, it's using the sides as
weight versus the top. So I just needed some extra boards, I had two runs, I needed two
more runs for the batteries. So day five was just basically building all my interconnects. And again, that's part
of the equation here is you got to figure out how you're gonna connect
your batteries together, how you're going to connect
your batteries to your systems, I'm going to need four
interconnects times two, I'm gonna need eight interconnects and then two rows of these and then I'm going to need
eight of the red also. So time to make 16 cables. And then of course I'll
need the interconnects going this way. All that has to be taken into account, heatshrink, crimper, lugs, there's a lot to do in this project. (upbeat music) Looks good to me. You see what I mean by the
welding cable super fine strands. Okay, now I need seven more like that. I've got my eight interconnects done, and I got to do eight red ones. But I've got one more black cable to make. To run the two strings
of five in parallel, I will need to go here
to here and here to here. Black to black red to red
positive the positive is parallel. For this one I am going to
take into account the bend and twist. ♪ So call me a man on a mission ♪ ♪ I'm guilty by my own omission ♪ ♪ Watch out what I bring to you ♪ ♪ No change could ever change me ♪ ♪ Can't stop ♪ ♪ Won't stop ♪ ♪ Don't stop now ♪ These pieces of wood here
they go from edge to edge on the top edge of the generator box so it helps distribute that
weight all the way across. (upbeat music) Day five, finished with me basically starting the install of those batteries and getting them laid out. I got a little bit overzealous when I was attaching my interconnects and I had two ratchets going like this and that heated up a bolt so much that I seized up two of them and ended up having to cut
them off with a Dremel tool. Take it easy. Don't get too crazy with the thing and make it hot and seize it like I did. No it didn't get cross threaded. It just seized. So I had to go to the hardware store. Get some new bolts and lock
nuts and handy dandy Dremel tool gonna cut that sucker off, Dremel tool wins the most
valuable tool for 2021 for sure. Day six, I disconnected
our three batteries. I moved them up to the top. Got everything finished wiring up there. Connect our inverter basically got our 1000 amp hour battery
bank installed and completed. Before I go, making new
runs to the battery bank, I'm gonna wanna reorganize
some of this here to make some more room for the
charge controllers up there. So I wanna try to get
everything down to this level. And I need to actually
go look up the dimensions on those charge controllers. See what we got there. This project, I'm going
over nine days of work, but it spanned about a month, which actually I got it done faster than I thought I was going to. So at this point, I got the
solar panels on the roof, I got the batteries down here, we got to connect them together. And here's where more problems ensue. Project day seven, I planned on basically putting
my junction box on the roof and getting all my wiring down into the front bay where
all the batteries are a problem I ran into is
these RVs have a conduit which is really awesome. They give you a little panel on the roof that's designed for solar that you can run your wiring down through the conduit into the bay. So that means getting
this stuff here in here. So I have a little box
here, the bottom cut out, that I can run two into this
side and two into this side. But my first goal is to just see what's under this sealant here and how this panel connect to the inside. (upbeat music) Let's just double slit insulation. I'm gonna have to cut this out and kind of dig around down there and see what we got. I tried to the move the
insulation out of the way. You can see it's just wood. This is the ducting, I think. And we've got so looks like probably some DC control cabling here. I'll be careful of that. And it looks like there's also, I think there's a blue
piece of packs there. I'm not really sure where that goes. This packs is supposedly my
conduit to run lines through. Like I need to go inside and see exactly where this might come out because I'm literally right
over our bedroom right now. So I'm not sure where this line goes. The trouble I ran into is the
little sticky piece of thing that says solar goes
here inside the basement was about that far off. And not only that, our conduit came down
straight over the top of our furnace ducting. This actually took a couple
of days to figure out 'cause when I first went up there and tried to figure out
where the thing was going, I couldn't find it. I couldn't figure out where
this thing was terminating. I was trying to drill holes
and do all kinds of stuff. I went online to the
397 forum on Facebook, got some feedback there and everything that I saw looked like it must be
terminating above the furnace duct but I eventually went with it and I had to cut a flap into our duct. (upbeat music) So I'm sure you can see here. There's my conduit hole right there. Opened it up and sure
enough, there it was. That was a day just figuring that out. The next day I decided to wire it. Here's this tape right down. You get a couple of runs of this 10/2. 10/2 just means it's 10 gauge two wires, attach it to the fish tape
it and run it back up. (upbeat music) So I disconnected this
side of the run here. That way that circuit is open and it will provide voltage I'm gonna get my multimeter
though and double check. Day eight, was all
about getting the wiring from the roof to the front bay. Now a lot of RV solar installers you will see a junction box on the roof or some people will put
actual bus bars in there and bridge them in panels are in series and they wire them together in
parallel in the junction box. We couldn't do that because we just have too many panels to wire all into one bundle whether it's any combination
of series parallel, we were gonna end up with too much voltage or too much amperage so
we had to split it out. So my wiring from the junction
box down is just splices and it's straight in
straight to the front Bay. The top wiring is done. This is it I've got negative
positive, into black and red, negative positive like
red double strain relief on these are nice and snug. I'll just put the cap on here. Reconnect my wires up here then go test my voltage down stairs. What I ended up doing
was since that ducting from the roof terminated
underneath the furnace vent I just ran the remainder
of the cable forward into the furnace vent, that
just terminates there anyway. And then I just cut a hole through that went out and then through the wall that goes into the front bay. Day nine, time for the final wiring, I used the same tactic
that I did on the roof, which is to cut out some
pieces of cardboard, I cut out some for the controllers, I cut out some for the fuse boxes and everything I wanted to put in there, stuck them to the wall, using that two sided magic tape got everything laid out figured out where I was gonna put everything. And that leaves this space here for my DC wiring for the inverter. And then it was just a matter of screwing them into the
walls mounting and wiring. (upbeat music) You can see now I have
all of the wiring done from the charge controllers. The negatives go down to the bus bars, positives go through
two different breakers into the positive side, and then I'm going to power
on the charge controllers to see if I can see them in the app. PV cables coming from the roof through two separate 15 amp breakers. The breakers are sized for
the wire not the panels, the panels only put out about 10 amps. But those are the shut offs. Those come down and into each
controller to the PV input. So everything switched off right now. All I've got left is to
put on my busbar covers and connect to the solar up top and turn them on see what happens. Also, while I was in there,
I wired in a new shunt. Why did they change shunts? Because I busted the crap
out of the first one. If you watched our
battery management video, you know we used to have a BMV 712 that is a shunted battery monitor and a shunted battery monitor is the only way to truly manage and monitor your state
of charge on batteries. Everything else uses voltage
and it's very inaccurate. You will see these
charts have this voltage equals this percent, this voltage equals this percent
for this type of battery. Well that's all great as long as you're measuring
the voltage with no load. As soon as you apply a load to the system, the voltage drops and all
that's out the window. So it's really difficult. A shuttered battery
monitor is the way to go. So when I ordered a
replacement for our BMV 712 Victron had it come out with a new thing called a smart shunt. It's just like the 712
except all of the logic and everything is built right into it. And Bluetooth is built right into it also so the disadvantage is I don't
have my functioning monitor in my cabinet up here anymore. The upside is I can use my phone. The smart controllers also have Bluetooth so that's one of the
reasons I liked Victron I went with Victron is
connecting to them over Bluetooth with the app is super easy. Upgrading the firmware on the things through the app over
Bluetooth, super easy. In fact, it requires you to do
it when you first install it. The other reason I liked it is because they are all considered smart. They use the new VE. Smart Networking, which means they can
all talk to each other and get data and act appropriately. The reason that's
important is particularly when you have two charge controllers, they need to know about each other, they need to know that oh hey, I'm reading a lot of voltage on here but that's coming from
this charge controller. So I either do or don't need
to supply some wattage there. There is need to talk to each
other so they communicate. They also talk to the smart shunt. So the two controllers and the smart shunt all work together as a harmonious system. So you might wonder about the inverter and the inverter charging along with the controllers charging and you're right that
can cause not problems, but it might just confuse things. What I do is I just let solar charge the batteries now completely I turned our charger on our inverter off because we're always
getting plenty of voltage from the sun to charge the batteries and I don't need those
two things competing. I do you plan on upgrading
to a Victron inverter soon. We'll talk about that in a minute. But once I got everything wired up, I was pretty impressed
with how easy it was I fired up the Victron Connect app, it found the controllers
as soon as I clicked on it said you got to upgrade
the firmware it did it. Then I was able to plug in my
parameters from Battle Born whenever you're configuring something that charges batteries and you wanna know what settings to use, go to the battery manufacturer, not the manufacturer of the
thing that's doing the charging. It's the same thing for
the inverter charger charging the batteries, it's the same thing for
the charge controllers charging the batteries. So I plugged in all the
settings and it just worked. I was amazed super excited. Alright zero watts but
let me flip my breakers for the PV while we
still got some sunlight. Now I'm seeing 114 volts on the solar. And here goes, here it
goes, it is cranking it up. With that all said and done
and everything running, I just kind of want to
cover this wiring diagram just a little bit. So you can see what the current state is, how it's all wired together and how all these pieces work together. So we're gonna start down
here in the bottom right, and this is our DC system. I have a one Battle Born
battery sitting here in the picture, but it's really 10. So we have 10 times 100
amp hours of Battle Born as a battery bank that
connects to bus bars. Bus bars make it super simple to get everything off of
your battery terminals, which you need to do if you're ever gonna use a shunt anyway. For a shunt to work, everything has to go through it, that means nothing can bypass it and connect directly to your batteries. bus bars are a great
way to accomplish that. And also give you the added
lugs and things to connect to. So you can see right here,
this is the smart shunt. That is the thing that watches all traffic in and out of the battery bank to give me a true state of charge, it'll actually tell me you've
used this many amp hours and you have this many amp hours left. And based on how much you're using this is how long your
batteries are gonna last which is super helpful. Over here, you'll see I
have a master cut off, this is a master cut off or
the battery is completely to the entire RV, the
inverter, the lights, everything if I wanna shut off DC power, I have that master cut off. Now your RV might have
a master switch also, but I will bet it doesn't
shut off everything. So if you're gonna be storing your RV, it's a good idea to have a master cut off or just remove your positive
battery lead from your battery. Up here, in the top right is this solar, you'll notice that it wires
into these same bus bars right here, just like the inverter, just like the batteries, it's just one more source of DC power. But let's talk about
that source of DC power. Up on the roof, we have 10 panels, two strings of five panels, each of 200 watts for a total
of 1000 watts per string. Those come straight
down into the front bay, go through some 15 amp breakers again I sized the breakers to the wire. Even though this panels are
only gonna supply about 10 amps. The big thing was I couldn't
find 10 amp breakers, I knew the wire could handle 15 amps. And that's the main thing is
you wanna protect the wiring. So right here, I've got 100 volts coming
in to each controller at about 10 amps coming
out of the controller. Again through another breaker because we're changing
the size of our wires, we're changing the size of that circuit, every circuit needs its own breaker. And that's it. Those things supply DC
power to the bus bars which supplies power to our system and to the inverter to the batteries. And that's where a lot of
confusion comes in on solar is what can I run on solar? Well, nothing technically runs on solar, but it does kind of it's a bit confusing. So let's look at a scenario here. Let's say we're drawing 200
amps, let's just use wattage. So let's say we're drawing 2000 watts, that 2000 watts is gonna be a mixture of power from the batteries and
power from the solar panels. They're both supplying juice, they're both supplying potential energy in the form of voltage to this DC system. And then the DC system
is just gonna take it wherever it can get it. Now the solar panels again, they talk to each other they know about how much is being drawn, they know how much they're providing. The biggest thing is they
know the voltage of the system and whether or not they even
need to provide anything. Right now we're sitting
here on shore power, the solar panels are getting juice, but it's not really supplying
a lot of energy to our system because we just don't need it. That's what the controllers do. If I were to unplug shore power and start using the inverter, the charge controllers
would ramp up if they can if the sun's there and
supply that extra power. A quick note on our inverter 'cause a lot of you have asked about the new Victron MultiPlus-II 2x 120, it's a long name, but there is a new inverter by Victron that is much like its previous MultiPlus but this one has the full 50 amp passer meaning it's got two
hots in and two hots out just like our go power, supposedly the new Victron
MultiPlus-II 2x 120, will actually do power
share on both lines. I'm not really sure about that. But the main reason I wanna go with it is because of its interoperability with the other systems
in the VE. Smart Network and the fact that the controllers
can talk to each other and the shunt, and now
the inverter can also. So if we do that, we'll have a separate video
we'll talk all about that the pros and cons. We'll make separate videos
on the usage of the system and boondocking and how well they work. But a few quick observations from just the short time that
we've had the solar install, we'd like to run our
fridge off of AC power versus propane when we travel, you know, there's a
whole nother discussion about whether or not you should
run your fridge on propane. Sometimes it's your only
option to keep your food safe. So we'd like to run our
fridge over the inverter while we travel. That problem, we had his
those three batteries just couldn't last long enough, they would last about five hours with the draw from the fridge because these aren't real efficient. Now that meant that when
we would stop for lunch, we would run the generator, which is good, you wanna exercise a generator anyway, we would use that to charge
the batteries back up and turn the AC on and things like that, so that we could continue our travel day and not have to turn on propane. Now we don't have to worry
about that for two reasons. A, we've got 1000 amp hours, we can go for days now and not have to really worry about it. Also, with the solar while
we're driving down the road, the batteries never get discharged. I mean, they just don't. So really, we could
have solved that problem with just solar or just batteries. But our goal is to be able to run the AC and things like that for boondocking. But we have been able to
now stop for our lunches and things like that, and run our AC, run the
microwave, run the fridge. We do all this now without
even starting our generator, which is really super cool. The other thing we've been doing is in the heat of the summer, we used to stop in a
rest area maybe an hour before destination and
turn on the generator and turn on the ACs. No need for that now we just
turn on the AC and let it run. Granted, we can only run one AC, it's a 3000 watt inverter
and a 1600 watt AC unit. So you can see why, you know, when we've got 15 or 1600 watt loads, you can only run one of them. There are gonna be other
draws on the system from the microwave, our computers,
our networking equipment, and things like that. If we wanted to run two ACs
we would need two inverters, which is doable, you can put an inverter on
each line and your 50 amp legs, we do have some plans this
summer to go boondocking in places that aren't 110 degrees, we'd like to be able to get by on one AC when we boondock because now
we can run it via the inverter. So that's the whole point
of this whole upgrade was to have that power
to be able to boondock for several days or weeks without having to use
any kind of generator. We will try that. We will let you know how it goes. We don't know yet 'cause
we haven't done it. But be sure to stay tuned
and be sure to subscribe. Click the like button
if you haven't already. And that's it. If you have any questions, put them down below and
we'll try to get to them. (upbeat music)
