A Simple Budget Solar Set Up for the Average Camper with Charles Moman

[Music] hi Charles moment here well I'm out in the scatter tuck National Wildlife Refuge for the beginning of this video this is about the solar setup I've got with this camper it's not so much a detailed how-to but if you want to go to that spot where I'm putting talking about putting the panel and how I put a hole in the floor to make this all work I'll put a time below so you can skip right to that thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] what I'm saying is that not everyone really needs solar I found that most people and the polls that I've done and I've checked online most people typically camp on weekends every now and then a long trip and a lot of people make dead sure that they're going to have shore power wherever they can and so a solar system really is not all that needed but there are times even for those people but especially for my wife and I wear some kind of solar system or at least a battery system really helps and so we built ours around a jakhary 500 the Jackie's are great and I have a solar panel that I can open up that's portable but I want to be able to protect that I don't want to leave that out in a campground where it might be taken so that's why you see a solar panel behind me it's a renergie 100 watt panel that I have wired going into my camper but I'm not having to install a charge controller and inverter and all that a fuse panel I don't need to do any of that because all of that is inside the jakhary batteries and so the 500 will serve my purposes there's a Jacky 1000 now it's really great as well but even for people like my wife and I we have shore power quite often but sometimes we're at a national park where we don't have shore power and so we need something there or if we're going from a campground to a campground that does have solar power we may stop somewhere to crack the barrel and I would like a way to run my max air fan and run some lights inside maybe you watch a movie on a laptop and so by using this system with jakhary lithium batteries and running everything 12-volt as much as possible I can accomplish that with this very simple system well I moved to the back of the Wildlife Refuge this is the old Meyers cabin and this is just a gorgeous place especially known for the the birds here just huge flocks migrate through here and if you ever get a chance it's just outside of Seymour Indiana well let me tell you about the two different ways I would charge up my Jack reactor there's three whenever we're driving we plug our jacker units into our car into the cigarette lighter outlets and so we're charging all the time we rarely let our batteries either the 160 or the 500 get down very far right now the 160 is running this wireless mic system so it's really really handy for me so in a typical situation we would be at a campground and we could plug in to shore power and charge that way but what if we don't have shore power well here's what we would do well if it's a pretty day at the campground it's sunny and there's no shore power but we are in the campground at our site then we could charge up our jakhary by getting out this jakhary Solar Saga 100 panel it's foldable very portable it's really well made and it's got some USB ports there a short cord that comes out of the back with an interesting connection connection so this connects and it's got an eight millimeter barrel and when I plug this in now if you can see but it's a blue light on here and that means it's it's throwing power into the jakhary it works great we'll charge this up but what if we're leaving the campground I really can't leave these out I really can't they would have legs and be gone I'm quite sure it'd be nice if we could trust everyone but we can't so that's why I changed my ideas about having a solar panel and now I have a permanent one up there that allows me to keep this safe but still charge it let me show you that next so let's say my wife and I are leaving the campground but we really need to get the jakhary recharged but we don't want to leave anything out so I'm just gonna do an overview when I get back home I'll show you more close-ups about this but we got our panel I've got the cords coming out there and what I've got are some extension cables I have an inline fuse and over here I've got an access port cut in the floor this is a cable that's plugged into the jakhary extension cords there this plugs in here and inside the jakhary will be locked and charging it's a safe system and it's going to work out great well let's take a look at my renergie it's a hundred watt solar panel this is a slim version and it's got black trim which I probably would have thought about painting a black and I don't have to it's less than four feet less than two feet across and down and here are the cables that are already plugged in some suitcase models have different controllers and things back here but we don't need to worry about that because we are going into the jakhary that's as I mentioned already got that charge controller in the inverter so we just want to be able to send the power in so I've just got these taped on here right now so then when I'm putting it up on the roof rack the courts will be getting in the way and it doesn't weigh much fourteen fifteen pounds I think but you only gonna have to live it up that lifts it up there once it's got here the various holes and it just depends I think these are spaced perfectly for some of the renergie mounts okay so I'm about to cut my accessport and small change of plans I was going to use this hole cutter and I did a couple sample holes and I found out that this doesn't quite fit these caps do but not this and I think it's three quarters of an inch very close but I don't want to like rough it with a saw or anything so I'm gonna go back to what I had originally you see a larger hole here and I bought this the other day and this was my original plan I think this is an inch it's got the cap here and then I don't have a slip cap to slide in but I do have this rubber stopper that goes in that works fine but I'll find a slip cap that works and so this fits in like 98% perfectly and it's actually fine if I would put in a lot of silicone which I actually want to seal the edges here but I've got some rubber gasket and I used this with some of the installs of the LED lights on the back of some runaway campers so I've got this piece that I'm going to be fitting in the hole here and it allows it to be snugged in type so I'm going to fill cut the hole put silicone in there and just let it set for a bit then I'll put this in and let it dry and then I'll but then I'll put in this PVC joint and it'll all be good and let it set and then I'll silicone above and below and we'll be all set so it's a little larger but you know maybe there'll be a reason why I wish I had more space so I think this worked great okay I'm underneath and here we go [Applause] almost through if I can make it let's see if they'll let me go through here there we go another hole in the fiberglass composite so that actually went pretty well I had to push that one last fraction to get all the way through so right now I cleaned out the hole I filled all of the sections of the fiberglass composite with a clear silicone and then now I put in this piece of rubber gasket I'm gonna let it set for a minute because I tried to push it in it just comes right out so after this dries a bit in there then I'll be pushing this in and then all I have left to do is just do some silicone especially around the bottom and then put the cap on and this part of the job is done so be real handy with the battery right here and I'll show you that later on so nothing fatal happened hmm so here's what it looks like kind of trimmed up and then here is the slip plug the drops yeah it's nice and flush let's go look underneath so underneath it's nice and sealed and I've got threads so this will go like that I'll tighten that all up when I'm uh when we are traveling well I'm sorry to tell you I did not record me installing this solar panel it's just a matter of for you bolts I had to drill some holes and I'll tell you about that in a second but it really would have made a very exciting time lapse here's the insulation and I really mean simple I have for you bolts and for this runaway camper with a runaway supplied roof racks I got two inch there quarter inch thick and three and a half inches long which is a little bit too long so I measured and I cut them off with a hacksaw and then you had to carefully get them going the first time I filed them and that all worked just fine and so I fit them under and it's a little tight but I got them all nice and tied with lock nuts so it's rock-solid on there and one warning when I was drilling new holes because these Renta G holes didn't line up perfectly with my you bowl so I got to use some them but I had to drill some new ones and so imagine that I take you're seeing me take it over to the deck I laid a blanket down its flipped over so the solar panel is down and so I'm drilling through here just be careful because it's not very thick aluminum so you're drilling through and also in you're through it and you could so easily damage the solar panel so I put two or three little pieces of wood kind of thins underneath where I was drilling every time because every time I drill I went through and hit that would just barely and you think you'd control it but while you're through so make sure you protect the the solar panel so you don't kill it before you've ever used it so that's really all there was to it there's actually room up there for a second panel just like this right now I don't think I will need that we just really don't do off-grid stuff and for the kind of camping that we do in between places where we have shore power or we're at a national park as I mentioned there we would need to have a way to charge up the battery a lithium battery and so between this and the jakhary foldable panel and just driving and charging it that way we'll be fine with our power needs with the lithium battery let me get the camera up closer and I'll just show you close-up close-ups up here of what I did so here you can see the cords coming out from the solar panel and you can see the u-bolts they're just that simple not a lot to it as I said be really careful with the insulation well let me show you how I would hook up the solar panel to the jakhary remember I've got an access port down there I've got these two cords coming from the solar panel and I think out the right future I had a drape down here but I think a better solution is I'm gonna have it coming down the front and I found on Amazon some two inch black looms split black loom that you can fit wires in I use this with LED installs underneath the camper so I've got some two-inch that I'm gonna be ordering and I'm going to kind of gather these wires in that black loom and so it'll be kind of a lot neater coming down and so there are male and female and there's just no way to mess that up you just plug things in so I've got my fuse here it's a 10 amp fuse and so I'm gonna plug that in first you want it close to the solar panels what my friends have told me to do so now I'm going to plug this in get this one plugged in and that's all there is up here and so like I said there'll be black loom when we're traveling and not using this the the cables that are connected to the panel I'm gonna have them wrapped and cable tied up there and all these others will just stay in my storage box so that's going to make it quite handy so I now will have them draped down and then let me go down there anything and I'll show you what happens next so all that's left to do is get these plugged into the extension cables now this is what's going to feed underneath so here is a 8 millimeter barrel connector that's what you need for the jakhary and I bought this some people make their own but I got this online there's a guy that I watch on YouTube he goes by hobo tech and he really knows the Jack Reese and so if you get one of those and want to know anything about the wiring or if you want to put two panels together I'm not going to give advice on that but he'll tell you the cautions that what you need to do and not do when you're running more than one panel so I've got my access port and I've got it again it has a cap that's threaded so water's not going to get up there it's all silicone to you so here's my jakhary this is coming through and again I have a cap here that's a slip that will fit in there and cover it I cut a hole in the foam flooring that my wife put in so I plug it in right there and then as soon as you plug it in if you're getting any kind of light on that solar panel a blue light comes on and you're charging so we're going to go say my wife and I we're going to go off and go hiking doing photography we'll just lock this up and yes you'll see the wires but that panels not going anywhere and neither said Jack we 500 unless they really want it badly I guess so this is our our Plan B when we're charging the jakhary so again why I like this system so much is I don't have to install inside here a fuse panel a charge controller an inverter nothing wrong with that a friend of Mines got a beautiful system and I'll pop up a picture and let you see what his looks like but he's a definitely more of an off-grid person than I am and so he's got different lithium batteries whereas I've got the the jakhary or other brands that have everything inside it's all there so it's nice and neat I don't have to mess with all that and with these panels they're great there's a green light back here and it shows that it's already it's getting in the Sun what's nice about these solar Saga they do cost more like three times as much that one that renergie I think cost me 110 and this cost I believe this normal price is $2.99 less you can catch a sale but boy they are really handy they fold up to have magnetic enclosures that it helps it shut tight it's got USB ports built in so you can actually have this out and charge a phone or an iPad or something it's got a USB C as well it's got a little door back here and so I plug this in and plug this into the jack ring just like before and there you go and so this is what we would do to charge it when we are in camp it's not keep mentioning you know things can walk away at a campground we've never had anything stolen but it certainly can happen and so we've got this easy panel to use and you really don't want this sitting in the Sun so it's possible that I would keep this in the camper or in the shade somewhere and get this position this has got kick stands in the back so you can angle it just right and it's already taking in power right now if I wanted to have the jakhary inside because it's really hot and I could actually just hook up extension cables to this cable and have this position so it's out in the Sun and then it's they were there all day long we're editing or we're doing whatever we one day we've had a long travel day or something and we're just staying in the campground I could be moving this during the day to get it to line up yeah it would be nice if I could angle that as well but that's kind of a pain yet we turn the camper all the time and people big rigs obviously can't do that so we get what we get out of that panel but this one is more moveable obviously and so we could position it to bring in the maximum amount of power so that's the system right there next what I'd like to do is show you just inside and talk about just how we put all this system in use inside we can switch easily easily between Shore power and our lithium battery so we'll go in and I'll show you that next well now I've got the camper plugged into an outlet in the garage so I can run the air conditioner which I prefer not to run in this small of a box that we're sleeping in and it seemed to always be either too cold or hot but we run if we need if we can and really need to but that's why I'm excited about the new tin speed 12-volt fan that I put in with the vent and it really pulls air through you can look and see a video of that and you can also find a video that I did where I completely did the rewiring and I put in new power strips smaller with USB ports and I put in a ground fault outlet here and an outlet this cord here is going out so I can plug in things outside if I want to so I've got the LED lights running and that's plugged in here with this cord the fan is 12 volt but I found on Amazon this adaptor I can plug this in so I can run the fan with regular power I don't have to plug it into the jakhary and I won't if we have Shore power there's no reason not to plug it in and run it this way so let me turn that off so we can have the best of both worlds and really about anything that we would run with Shore power will be running just fine with this Jack Reed 500 without any issues at all so we've got to cover both ways well the powers turned off and so what am I going to do now well if I at a campground without power or were at a Cracker Barrel one thing I'm not going to do is run the AC if you are someone that absolutely has to have the air conditioning or you've got a CPAP machine that takes so much power you may need to consider carrying a generator with you we've got a Honda 2000 but we don't take it with us anymore because we just simply don't need it I really don't like using the air conditioner it's such a small space I see that I either fell to cold or hot not much in between the same like so if you've got those issues then you may have to consider always camping with Shore power and have the generator as backup so let's say we're at a campground or we're at a Cracker Barrel what do I want to run well I want to run that fan for sure and so I've got a couple of options actually I've got a small lithium battery this is a Mac so blue Eddy and it's unusual because it's got a regular outlet so the I showed you that I could power this max fan by plugging it in with that adapter but I could actually have this setting up there and this would run that fan for quite a while for sure but it's a 12 volt fan and so that's where the jakhary comes into play and so I've got some conduit coming across and actually if I try to reach it here won't reach if I turn this sideways it'll fit but I've actually got this adapter the smaller jakhary doesn't have a cigarette plug in so it comes with this so actually if I wanted to just I could plug this in here push the DC button plug this in you heard a beep there goes the fan and there's the fan running so I can turn this and make it fit so that will take care of of that fan let me turn that off but what about the LED line is I can plug it in directly to the front of this and run my LED light so let me turn this and I'll turn my lights on there they go and so I can run it that way and if I have more things plugged into this outlet I can actually just take this plug coming from this surge protector and whatever is plugged into here except for the AC would run I could plug this in directly or I can just use an extension cord if this is down below I could plug this into this I made a short cord and I could plug this into the jakhary and I can run everything that's not a huge power-hungry device and we we won't be using much of anything like that so that's how it works so we can just plug in directly this way or like I said whatever is plugged in here like say a laptop or a phone's charging we can power it by plugging this in and this will be underneath and off we go so a super handy system it's going to take care of our needs and most everything that we would be running in here you just won't use that much power I would say what would use the most power would be laptops or if I brought a screen with me to do editing or to maybe just see a movie a little bit more easily but other than that this is how our system works we can switch easily from shore power to lithium batteries well before I go outside and do my final bit on this video I did want to just say a little bit about these lithium battery packs they're great as I mentioned several times everything's inside there you've got the charge controller you've got the inverter everything is in the package and it's very handy unless you are more of an off-grid person and you can you know build something that'll work great for you so if you're a van lifer or someone who's long-term out there or really goes off-grid what I'm showing you probably won't be enough so you may have to beef it up or come up with the system that will work for you but what I'm going to mention about these we plug 12-volt devices in here and you've got to watch out because some of these lithium units not jakhary but there are some brands out there that look the same and you go I found something even cheaper well they are cheaper because they probably don't have what's called a regulated 12-volt port and what that means is if it's regulated if I've got especially a refrigerator that's probably the most important thing refrigerator probably some CPAP machines as well when you plug that refrigerator in here and that's what we would do our refrigerator stays in our band we don't keep it in here so likely I would have our small Jack rerun that and it can run all night long easily more than one night but I'm running the refrigerator in the van with the jakhary but if you have a unit like this but it's not 12-volt regulated that what that means is it goes from a hundred percent to ninety to eighty as it drops down use these around fifty or sixty percent most 12-volt refrigerators will shut off because that particular lithium battery except for the jakhary and a couple others the power coming out of this port drops as well and so they are not tolerant of the power dropping those refrigerators and so a friend of mine has one and he had a different lithium battery when it got down to 50 percent refrigerator went off that could be bad news couldn't it you're gone all day for example and you're trusting that your refrigerator is staying cold and you could possibly have things ruined hopefully your refrigerator would keep things cold for a while without the power so just that's my warning make sure when you buy one of these batteries make sure it has a 12 volt regulated porch because refrigerators and other devices will stop working as the power goes down so just be aware of that well there you go this is our simple solar system when we're off shore power we've got it covered and I hope that you've learned something to have any questions leave it in the comments below and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Charles Moman

Views: 82,542

Rating: 4.8990293 out of 5

Keywords: Charles Moman, Runaway Campers, Mini camper, teardrop camper, cheap solar, budget solar system, Jackery 500, Renogy 100w panel, plug and play solar, Jackery 1000, off grid, off grid camping, boondocking, rv solar, minimal camping, Jackery, BLM camping, rv portable power, survivalist camping, bug out, survivalist, jeeping, jeep of grid, Runaway Venturist, Hiker Trailer, Wee Roll, off road, BLM, RV solar install, solar install, lithium battery, Battle Borne, Jackery saga

Id: TUrZMk9cBow

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020