CHEAP EASY 12V Camper Van ELECTRICS (REUPLOAD) - How To

welcome back my diy nomads um just a quick little side note yes i know this is a re-upload the reason being for the re-upload is that in the video i discussed voltage-sensing relays as a way to charge off of your on van your van starter battery or from the alternator um voltage sensing relays work fine with any van that doesn't have a smart alternator but a lot of vans these days are getting them so the way you charge if you have one of these smart alternators is to use a dc to dtc charger and because obviously i want to try and push as much good knowledge as possible through this channel i'm going to be taking down the previous video re-uploading it with this information i'll also do a little tweak later down in the video and it just makes it easier for everyone and no one's gonna have any nasty surprises in the future one thing i'd like to say before we get into this video is that if you are unsure about electronics i mean even if you are sure about electronics i would definitely consult a qualified electrician all the information on this video is coming from me um i'm not a qualified electrician so obviously this i would take this with a pinch of salt and i would advise that you get advice from a qualified electrician anyway let's get into the video welcome back my diy nomads we are back again for another episode um in today's episode i wanted to revisit 12 volt electrics um it's been one of my most if not the most popular video that i've done a couple times now on the channel and i want to revisit it let's look behind me here at this very very i'm going to take you through the most basic basic 12-volt system and explain a few things along the way so yeah let's look at what we've got lined up here right below me here is an 85 amp power battery it's actually got there's quite a lot of detail about batteries i'm not going to be able to cover it at all in this video but this is rated at 80 amp hours for a 20 hour discharge or an 85 amp hours 100 hour discharge and that is a whole nother video to talk about um you can find plenty of those online as well but for ease of use we're going to say this is an 80 amp hour battery this is lead acid um and what we have is we've got the positive off of that battery going to a shut off switch here that you can shut off in the case of an emergency or anything really and just to isolate the battery completely from the system off of this comes the positive to the 12 volt distribution board you can have plenty of things coming out of this isolator switch but for this very simple system we've got this 12 volt distribution board so this one has 12 ports so you can attach 12 different electronics to this and fuse them all separately the reason i like these is because they do just take a lot of work and messiness out of a system simplify it and keep everything in one place so that if fuse does go you can find them all in one location so we've got the positive going to this board this one actually has two separate ports here this one side here is powered separately to this side here if you want to join these together you could join these two terminals up and then the one battery source that you have the one power source you have could power all 12. at the top here we've got two fuses they are of different amp ratings the top one is three the bottom one is 25 and i'll explain that in a second um at the very very top is the negative terminal to the battery this literally just links back to the negative terminal on the battery we've got the negative attached to the top that means that on this 12 volt distribution board all of these screw terminals at the top here these are all the negative terminals so this is where all your negative ports will come back to the nice thing about this distribution board or something like this is it comes with this plastic cover there so that nothing can touch it and short anything out but it also keeps everything housed in and avoids it from getting bashed or even maybe even a splash of water or dust now off of this i have got two cables that seem an odd color to go for in a 12 volt system they're white and brown i wanted to show you this because sometimes you will get a kit and the colors of the and the colors of the cable can be different from the usual red and black it's nothing really to worry about at all but i do know this can get a bit confusing when you go to shore power like 240 volt like plug into the wall because brown in shore power world is live um you've got your the brown is your live the blue is your neutral and the green yellow is your ground or your earth um anyway back to 12 volts so we've got the white here is the white here is the positive and the brown is the negative going up to a switch here i kept it all on show to hopefully try and simplify this but literally that switch just allows me to switch the led strip on and off this really is pretty much as simple as it comes i'll show you one of these switches up close with these rock switches the top gold terminal that is the negative of the earth the middle is the uh the load or the appliance you're powering and the bottom one is the supply so if we look at this switch here what you want to do is actually have all of these sheathed or have a heat shrink around the metals of the terminal so there's no chance of them arcing across but i've left these out and exposed to um basically make this easier to see we have from the positive of the battery going through the distribution board which goes through a fuse and up this white cable that's going to the supply terminal on the switch the bottom silver one then in the middle the red connector here that is going to the positive of our appliance in this case it's an led strip and then on the top there with a gold one we actually have the negative of the led strip and a negative cable in the same connector going to the top gold connector and then that comes down and goes into the negative point on the distribution board and then back to the battery completing the circuit another thing you can do is make something like a control panel like this very basic control panel here this literally just has a switch that turns on a cigarette lighter port and a volt meter that shows me the percentage of the battery and the voltage battery so if i switch that on light comes on this comes on and now i can get power to my cigarette or 12 volt port this has a little button that allows me to switch between off the battery percentage and the battery voltage you might have noticed this little bus bar up here these are called bus bars um they're very useful to have like near the back of a control panel um because you can connect one of the terminals to the negative that goes back to the negative on your distribution board or the negative on your battery and then instead of running loads and loads and loads of cables um negative cables all the way back to your battery or your distribution board you can just run them all to this point and then they will eventually get back to the battery and that saves you having to use loads and loads more cable so here we've seen how you can have an independent switch powering something in a completely different area to where your control panel is and from your control panel it also shows you how to power multiple objects you can also off the back of that switch like the led strip you could have a couple more switches in the control panel and you could power anything like a fridge or the electric clicker for a propane hob or anything like that you just have to follow a similar wiring setup as the led strip up here but you just obviously have the switch on your control panel from there you can also run the negative of your fridge or whatever it is either back to your bus bar the negative port on the distribution board or even just straight back to the battery if it's actually closer to show you how this is wired up obviously the power coming through the distribution board through a 25 amp fuse along this cable which then goes into the supply port of the switch so this this is the supply port from the power then i have the positive from both the cigarette port and the voltmeter connected into one connector that goes onto the center of that switch i then have the negative of the voltmeter and the cigarette port going to this terminal which actually has three cables in because we've got the negative on the cigarette port negative from the voltmeter that goes up to the bus bar which then ends up going to the negative on the distribution board and then down to the battery so let's say i wanted to add this switch to the control panel um that turned on a fridge i take the switch and i would mount it somewhere on the control panel i would then have it mounted with the terminal stuck at the back i would run a positive cable off of a separate fuse port on here and fuse it to the correct amperage of the fridge that would run all the way along and i would attach it to the supply terminal on the switch then the positive in the center would go straight to the positive on the fridge and the negative terminal will connect to the negative of the fridge and then off to the bus bar or the negative terminals on the negative terminals on the distribution board that will then go back to the battery that still might not be very clear to everyone so if you are still confused please ask a question in the comments below and there is one major problem with this system as is right now and that's nowhere to charge it and so we can go about multiple ways to charge a leisure battery in a camper van ice cream ice cream ice cream so as i was saying there's no way to charge the battery so let's add a system there are multiple ways to do that two of the best are obviously solar and using a voltage sensing relay some things i'm going to come back to on this video are wire gauge and a few other details of different appliances so make sure you watch to the end to see some very important details let's start with voltage sensing relays this is a voltage sensing relay here and basically what it does is in the simplest way for in the simplest way possible once you start driving this detects the alternator kick in as the voltage spikes to charge the starter battery and then this allows that power to also be siphoned off and charge your leisure battery in the kit you can get loads of kits this kit costs about 70 to 80 pounds and it came with absolutely everything except for obviously tools to sort of do stuff like terminal crimping i have these meaty boys to do that you can get away with like sort of your basic crimpers in like terminal tools as well these are actually wire strippers that come with them as well but there's quite a few ways to do it obviously the more specialized tools is going to give you a better result the way this works is the power comes in through a well this is actually a 60 amp fuse into the vsr here and then comes back out from the other terminal through another 60 amp fuse and off to the well we've got it put into our cut-off switch here so you've got two terminals at the back of the cut-off switch one terminal that goes to the battery and the other terminal that connects to everything else like the distribution board the solar that i'll show you in a second and obviously the voltage sensing relay on the back of this voltage signaling relay there are two terminals one that is for the starter battery and one that goes off to the leisure battery as i just mentioned but then there's also this black cable now this black cable just needs to be earthed so you can attach it to somewhere in the van chassis you can also attach it to the earth if you if you put this near your starter battery you can put this onto the earthing point on the starter battery you can also attach this to the negative on the leisure battery which needs to be earth as well which i'll show you in a second so you've got the positive from your starter battery throw a fuse into the vulture sensing relay then back out through another fuse to what is technically your leisure battery positive you do also need to have a cable coming off the negative port on your leisure battery and attaching to the van chassis in some way like basically the bare metal of the van to earth this battery smart alternators a lot more vans these days are getting smart alternators and if you have one then a voltage sensing relay won't be able to work with it um so you're going to have to get yourself a dc to dc charger but how do you even know if you have one well usually you can search online in forums because people have already asked this question or if you have a multimeter you can turn the van engine on make sure that all of the radios off the lights are off all that sort of stuff take a reading across the battery wait five or ten minutes and then take another reading if the voltage is coming out at around 14.4 volts then you probably don't have a smart alternator if the reading if the readings coming out about 12 and a half to 13 and a half then you probably do have a smart alternator and you'll probably have to go for well you will sorry you will have to go for a dc to dc charger now there's a few options on the market on screen right now is a very nice victron orion looks and works in a very similar way to a solar mppt charger where you have your positive and negative wires coming in and then the positive and negative wires going out here's a wiring diagram from victim themselves you will also have to fuse those positives in and positive outs so that you protect your system another good alternative is the ctek d250 range i can personally rate these really well i had the first one the dt50 then i had the d250s i needed a dt50s and then i had the d250sa and i think we're on now on to the d250se um they're great they are your solar charger and your alternator charger all in one box it has four larger terminals on the top and then a small dual cable like positive negative cable will come out and that connect up to a fuse point on your van and these will handle both vans with and without smart alternators a very good easy all-in-one system now on the other side you can also charge your leisure battery using solar and the actually the electronics part of this is actually really simple what i did was i had a few parts from a kit lying over this is actually a pwm controller but i would say you're going to do much better if you use an mppt charger and the mppt chargers just seem to charge at a higher efficiency it's down to the way they work if you want to learn more about that check it out online but yeah basically mppt is probably going to do you a lot better on all these solar charge controllers you're going to have basically these six ports on the bottom usually there's a positive and a negative from the solar panel there's a positive and negative that go to your leisure battery and then there's a positive negative that's called like a it's like a load so basically it has like this little light bulb and that can provide power straight out of the charge controller you don't really need to worry about those two so really we're going to focus on these four we've got the positive from the solar panel that goes through one of the fuses out into the positive terminal on the charge controller and then the negative from the solar panel that goes to the negative terminal on the charge controller and then out of that you have the battery so we've got the positive that goes yet again through another fuse and then off to the leisure battery and then we have the negative that comes out and also goes off to the battery one other thing you can also add between the vsr and the isolator switch and also the solar charge controller and the isolator switch is a further isolator switch so that you can individually shut down each system um it's less of a worry on the voltage sensing relay but because while you have sunlight you will be put passing current into the leisure battery unless you trip one of these trip switches um you might actually have a pretty good reason for wanting to isolate off the solar um so i would advise you actually whack an isolator switch on the positive from the fuse to the leisure battery if you can't afford that then you can literally just trip the fuse and then no power will be able to get to the leisure battery from your solar so connect to the solar panel um and if i flick this switch on it will allow power from the solar panel to get to the solar charge controller and as you can see all the lights have come on and that is actually happening right now and then if i switch this other one that now allows power to go from the solar panel all the way to the leisure battery so we are now charging the leisure battery using solar they usually have a series of lights to show you what's happening and usually they come with a handy guide to tell you what each like flashing light or solid light means but really other than actually that i mean fitting solar can be quite tricky like depending on where you have to feed the cables through and stuff like that but really the actual electronics of solar stuff is very basic along with the vulture sensing relay another way i forgot to mention that you can charge up your leisure battery and also get 240 volt into your van is to use a 240 volt hookup kit um these kits i've mounted one on the wall behind me so i'll show you how that works but these kits usually just come and they supply you with 240 volts from shore power to your van if you want to charge your ledger battery you will also have to add an ac to dc charger um one that works for your plug and your region in your country um but i'll show you how this little kit fits up the one really annoyingly stupid thing about this kit is i don't know if they've got this wrong but actually they supplied me with the female one and usually you'd want the male uh connector so i'm just gonna have to wire this up to a standard uk plug and plug it into extension cable so i can show you guys yeah i don't know why they've given me that connector but i thought i'd just show you visually as an example other than your shore power plug um you'll have most likely you'll have two plugs that come in here i haven't wired this up yet because i want to show you it getting wired up and then you'll get like this little mini consumer box and all of the cables and everything you need usually in the kit one thing i want to say at this point is yet again i'm not qualified electrician so i would advise you get an electrician to fit all this take everything i say with a pinch of salt i'm literally just showing you this kit i've installed this as the fitting instructions say right so some of these are actually these little consume units are structured differently in some like between different companies um but what you'll usually get is a neutral bar an earthing bar space like a din rail like a little rail behind here that you can attach all of your fuses etc to your circuit breakers and everything too um and yeah that's really it with these little tiny consumer units they are great because they are very compact and a neat little system and basically you have your rcd here and two little circuit breakers uh you'll see on here it's rated like b6 b10 that's six amps and 10 amps the letters also correspond to different sort of types of circuit breakers that perform in different ways but we don't need to get into that um you'll basically get everything you need in the kit so yeah we have at the bottom of this box right here we have three cables going out obviously the cable to this plug which i'll explain in a little bit um the shore power and the earthing cable this earthing cable goes to the earthing point like your leisure battery to the earthing point on your van and then you have your power in i'm going to say right now nothing is plugged in there is no power going to this unit at all so yeah remember that whenever you work on electronics make sure everything's turned off so there's no chance you can get a shock this little arctic blue cable that comes in this is our power in so that is supplying the whole of this 240 volt kit so that comes in and it is a three core cable so on the inside it will have the same as the white cable here it will have a blue or neutral cable a brown which is called a live cable and a green and yellow which is an earth cable that is literally coming in and the earth cable is going to the earth bar and then the other two cables are feeding up the back behind this little din rail at the top so we've got the live from the shore power going into the live point on the rcd and then the neutral going into the neutral point and then out the bottom we have this very chunky neutral cable that goes up the back again and into your neutral bar on the actual supply side though so you've got the live coming in and then coming out that you usually get them in the kit it's a copper bar that has a bunch of teeth on it and that allows you to connect from the supply out and then supply all of your fuses because you might these bars do get quite long you can apply all your fuses off of this one little connector and now these fuses when the power comes in these fuses now have power to supply out the top if you wanted to add a plug which come in the kit you would then take your three core cable which is in there and wide to the back of that plug it also comes out the other side comes up through and the earth goes to the earthing point they live in the neutral feed up the back here and the neutral now goes to this neutral bar at the top and then the live just goes into the live feed of the top of the circuit breaker i'm using the six amp fuse in this kit they usually come with a 10 and a 6. the six amp is going to go to this plug and this is the plug that i would plug in my ac to dc charger um because i don't need more than six amps and then the 10 amp will go to this plug which i would use for instance for something in the van like a microwave or a kettle something uses a lot of watts to power now if you wanted to add another plug to your system and you have a free circuit breaker do that you can fit your your back box your plug or wherever it needs to be and then you take the front point and in the back here you'll see that of the back of the plug there's going to be a live a earth and a neutral point and the live taking the brown cable the earth taking the green yellow cable and the neutral taking the blue cable um i've actually got this secondary cable coming out here because i'm going to also earth it to the little earthing point in the back of the box here so now that providing you've pre-fed the other cable you could just basically close that box up screw the top on and you've got a wired up plug the other end of your cable from your plug you're going to have the same three cables i'm gonna feed those up as i said the live and the neutral are going to feed up the back here and come out the top the earth is going to go into the earthing bar just at the bottom here the neutral is going to go into the neutral bar at the top here and then the live is going to go into the top of my other circuit breaker the 10 amp one right so if you follow the kit and it's all gone well or an electrician is fitted for you you should have your your power supply you should have your power supply in your earthing cable mounted and your two plugs wired up ready to rock and roll um to show you that this is all working and i'm not just taking you for a ride um we've got everything closed up so before you turn anything electronic back on on this make sure that it's all closed up it's all safe and i'm gonna make sure they're all off to start with right so i've just plugged the system into the mains and i'm just going to switch on the six amp plug for now we don't need to switch on the 10 amp and i'm going to plug something in to see it's all working actually got a little heat gun here so it's quite a demanding little device so there you go that is a fully working 240 volt hookup kit but we're not charging our ledger battery so how do you do that easiest way to do that is to just simply get an ac to dc charger a power charger the one that will convert your plug at home into the voltage and current needed to charge up your ledger battery but all that would do is simply plug into your plug here you'd mount it on the wall and then you take the the black and the red usually the positive and negative cables and you would attach them to the negative terminal of your leisure battery and then the positive will go into the um side of your shut off switch here so you can keep everything shut off if you need to but really is that basic so once the 240 volt kit is in it's really basic to take that and then convert it to charge up your leisure battery it's just one little uh unit um that does all the work it's already fused in there as well so i don't have one here to give you an example but i've just actually recently used it on another project so i don't have it here to show you so now we've basically got a full-fledged system it charges when the van is driving it charges from the solar and you're powering some of your gadgets a couple of other things that we need to mention though stuff like wire gauges cable fixings fuse sizes etc so let's get into that side of things there's a couple different options you can use for cable fixings um i prefer the sort of like these plastic nylons you can also get metal versions basically ones that screw down and hold your cable in place just because they are way more secure way more permanent um but sometimes it's not always an option you can't always screw in something because either the material isn't good to screw into it's too thin or you might not have metal tapping screws you can use um adhesive mountings as well so i've have these ones which are like they're square and they have like a grid system in them and what you do is you stick those in and you feed a cable tie through the holes there and you can attach the cables to the top this up here that is one of those adhesive ones and actually they also do come with two holes there that you can use to screw down with if you really need to but you have to use very small screws i prefer these sort of style like i showed you before the nylon style ones these are much more permanent much more secure and just a better optional round so so next wire gauge really really important thing to talk about all the wires on this system are varying thicknesses because they need to handle certain amounts of amperage at the workshop we have a few different spools of cable here so this is just a spool of red cable this cable is rated [Music] and a half amps it doesn't really matter what length that is within reason doesn't really matter what length of cable that is it's going to handle 17 and a half amps but if it goes really long you might experience a voltage drop i get all of my cable from auto electric supplies i'm they aren't sponsoring this video but that's just where i get this cable from and yeah we have loads of different sizes so we can use it for all the different applications that we need to now you may be wondering how do i find out what cable gauge that i need to use for my system now there's a couple ways to do that usually the best way is to look at the bottom or where the information label of your appliance is the thing that you're using and find out either what amps it draws or what what's it draws if i know what amps it draws it that's great you know sort of roughly what cable to you know what cable to buy you know cable to use so with this 17 and a half amp cable if i had an appliance that drawed that drawed 15 amps worth of current i can get away with this cable quite happily because it's got a little bit of a buffer to it but if you for instance look on the bottom quite a lot of time it might see the watts the easiest thing to do is just go online and use a conversion table there's plenty of them online and then you can use those to find out what amperage your device is drawing and therefore what cable you need to use so off of the battery to the isolator switch we have a very thick cable this cable can handle around 170 amps that's going to handle way more than what you're ever going to need in this sort of system um hey everyone here from the future here just a couple of points i want to add in here when you choose your cable try and choose a cable well preferably copper as well but choose a cable that has a higher strand or core count um you want it to be as flexible as possible because in a vehicle you're going to be driving around there's going to be vibration there's going to be movement and anything that is has fewer or much less cause it's gonna um could end up being bent so much that it actually ends up fracturing inside the cable and that's a nightmare um so choose a higher strand count because then it'll be able to flex much better and last a lot longer in a vehicle environment the only negative about having more strands is that it carries less amps than a cable of the same size with fewer strands so if you had like the 170 amp cable i used in there it was a 322 strand cable so it has 322 strands of copper um inside that pvc uh coating um but if i had something that was like three core it would handle a lot more amps um but it would be super rigid and i wouldn't want to use it in the van because i won't be able to really bend it without uh very much without it breaking and then basically the cable off of the isolate switch to the control panel you really sort of have to think about what's going to go into your van so if you have a fridge and a fan and all this sort of stuff everything that's going to come off of there and through this distribution board you've got to think about the all the amps that are going to go through and this cable has to be able to handle all of those so you need to choose the right rating and then same thing for all of your applications so this cable that comes off to the control panel that powers the cigarette port and the voltmeter i wanted to provide a thickness of cable that would be able to handle 25 amps because i've used a 25 amp fuse so this cable is rated for 27.5 amps because you always want to give it a little bit of a buffer there isn't many reasonable things that you would use through this cigarette port here that would end up over using this cable and if it did that's what the fuse is there for it'll blow the fuse and you know you've tried something too power hungry for that port with a control panel here just something i quickly wanted to mention i chose the sort of like more traditional cigarette port style connector because i think they're just more functionality to them you can get the ones that are they use the the same connection the back they're basically the same shape but they're already made into usb ports and that's fine you know you've always got usb ports in there but it's very limiting there's two ports on here one's one amp one's 2.1 amp but as technology gets better and better you actually notice that this gets completely outdated the advantage of having just the normal port like this is you can keep changing up your um your app you can keep changing up your application that goes in there but also you can change up your usb ports as well to keep up with the technology that's going out there with led strip though you can go to very small fuse sizes this is only three amp obviously the longer length of led you use uh the more the more the higher the wattage and what amps it's going to draw in the end but you can also get different types of led next thing i just want to quickly cover is led strip a lot of us use it in our camper vans a lot of us use it in many situations and you can get quite a few different types um you might have heard numbers like 3528 or 50505050 and you can also get led tape that that looks like this it's just sort of like bare or you can even get it with like what looks like a sort of silicon coating over the top this sort of stuff is like waterproof and this stuff isn't um so i usually still go for waterproof stuff in a van just for you know so i don't have to really worry at all but really you can definitely get away with having the unwaterproof stuff because it's cheaper and it's less likely to overheat as well um but yeah let's talk about the numbers so you can get stuff like three five two eight or five zero five zero there's a few different numbers they basically correspond to the size of the led and um how powerful they are uh you can also get sort of like within that category you can also get how many are in per meters you might end up with 30 per meter or 60 per meter so there's like loads of different ways to go down the led strip route you can choose what yeah as i said you can choose what waterproofing level how bright and powerful they are how dense they are you can also choose colors so for instance this stuff here that i bought this is actually a warm it's a warm color you might see it called like k rating so like a 2800 would be quite warm whereas you go up to like 8 k or 4k that's like more of a bluey white color you can also get rgb and even rgbw or rgbw so rgb is your like i guess your classic uh led strip the one that has multiple colors the ones that change color and can do loads of different like sort of different effects and they've also brought out now the more newer style of things is rgb w or rgb ww and that literally stands for rgb leds in and also white leds in there so so you can get the full spectrum in one strip which is pretty cool um the the one that's rgbw just means red green blue white and then the rgb ww is red green blue warm white so you get like a warmer white which is the one i'm actually going to look at putting into the peugeot boxer the only thing i would say against rgb and like all those ones that are multiple colors is you do have to use a driver with them the driver allows it to sort of use the driver allows something like a controller to control the different colors and brightnesses and so they're a bit more complex whereas if you just go for a solid color um like white should we say like one color like red you just need to connect them up to the positive and negative the rgb stuff usually has four cables and that allows it to control all the different colors in the strip now to any eagle eye viewer you may have noticed that some some of these connections i haven't actually put connectors on the end of the wire i've just put the actual frayed edges into the sort of ports and screw them down that's not advisable i wouldn't recommend you do that i did this because i'm trying to save i don't have like loads and loads of connectors just lying around that i can waste on this video but you can get yourself like connector boxes and they can come with like loads and loads of different shapes sizes and types of connected heads um you basically need to grab one of those [Applause] and a crimping tool that's specified towards these sort of types of connectors you can then take your cable i'm using this wire stripping tool but you can just use normal pliers this just makes it way quicker and easier strip the end twist it and i'm just going to use a standard uh blade connector here just because i have a lot of them and i don't need to worry about wasting too many of these and you just sort of slot it in and on this crimping tool i have the yellow blue and red that correspond to the different colors this one's a yellow and then that is that connector all done ready to rock and roll and you can use it for whatever you need to use it one thing to also consider is in most scenarios these connectors would be fine in sort of a 12 volt system but if you are drawing a lot of amps you might need to check what the actual max amp rating of these connectors are because if you go too high they might be too thin you might actually end up melting the connector heads before you melt the wire or blow a fuse hopefully that won't happen another little thing to think about is like terminal connectors sometimes you might need to join two ends of a cable together and i quite like to use this stuff um it's quite standardized in the electrical world i can't remember the name of it off the top of my head i'll put it on the screen right now and that's sort of like quite a good strong fix uh you basically there's screws in there and you can screw the cable in from the top and the bottom and then so you'd have like for instance the positive coming in and the positive going out and then negative negative going out less permanent options you could choose stuff like these connectors as male and female on the bottom there has the positive negatives that you put into and this gives you a chance to connect and disconnect in your own leisure and probably another semi permanent connection is stuff like these weigo connectors which are pretty cool uh you would connect two of the same colors so positive and positive you need to connect two positive ends you'd put them in there you would sort of lift up these two tabs you put the two positives in there the holes there and then you'd close it down and that would connect those two bits of cable right so we've covered a basic 12 volt system quite a few different bits of information so sorry if this video is a bit overwhelming the last thing i really want to do in this video is to from this system right here just add in an appliance to show you the whole process um wiring it in so that you can find it a bit easier to add your own applications down the road now with the control panels you can definitely go ahead and build one yourself like i've done here but you can also find and buy ones like i've got pictured on screen right now these are also pretty good um they're quite they're pretty affordable um they look right um depending on what your taste is and all the fuses are actually in the back so all you need to do is run one semi hefty uh positive cable to the back and then connect it up and that will power all of them off that one cable and then you just run the negative back to the battery that's pretty cool because it means that you just need to run sort of two cables to whatever that control panel is and then you can power loads of stuff off the back of that um yet again i'd advise you use a bus bar because then you can connect all the negatives in one area and then just take one cable back to the battery but if you're going down this route you might want a little bit more than just one cigarette port so i'll show you how to wire in an extra button that powers something else one thing i should also add is that these little rock switches they are rated for uh 25 amps at 12 volts actually these are actually a little bit harder than usual it's usually 20 amps at 12 volts but i managed to find these ones and the more amps you can get out of it the better really and so make sure you don't overdo the amps for the switch as well right so let's add i'm just going to add some more led strip but this could really be anything um if this could be the positive and negative for a fridge um or the positive negative for a fan you just need to make sure that you're not going to overdo it on the amps for the cabling the switching or the fusing we're just going to actually light up this whole reel of led so i'd say we're just gonna try and put in probably about a five amp fuse for this because of that i've got this uh two core positive and negative wire and that could easily handle this amperage so i'm gonna use this to wire it all up so i've now stripped all the ends and i'm just going to twist them so they go from being frayed like the positive is too twisted like the negative is so for this bit of cable i've got the positive and the negative that are going to be attached to the distribution board um with my connectors because the size the gauge of the cable i can use these smaller red connectors right so i've left the negative bear with the the negative which is going to connect to the switch end i've left that bare for the moment because i also want to connect it with the negative of the appliance or the led strip in this case and so i've had to go for a connector that has a larger sort of cable gauge requirement and crimped it down so we've got this set up now and all i need to do is add one final connector for the positive on the led strip or the appliance now as i mentioned before you don't really want to have bare terminals for the switches because they could bend touch and short out so you can either wrap them in electrical tape or the best option is heat shrink tubing as i don't really want to waste all my heat shrink tubing just for this example i'm going to use just some electrical tape and i like to have red and black so that i can sort of color code it not the neatest job but it just means that the metal is covered up so it's not going to short out so we've now got this situation where we have the positive and negative coming off the led strip and going to this terminal which is a positive from the led strip of the appliance and then the negative going into this terminal with the negative from the cable and then the positive of the end of that cable with the terminal on and then at the very other end the one the two ends that go into the distribution board we've got those connectors there so let's attach it to our system the most important thing to remember is if you're working on your electric system turn the power off so there's no more power going to the system but as i mentioned before there isn't an isolator switch on this cable which i would advise for the sailor so currently there is still power going to the system so make sure you trip that switch and now there's no power in the system so you're not going to get a shock so now we have the negative of the cable going to the negative port on the distribution board positive going to the positive there isn't any fuse in there just yet um but i'm going to connect up this to the switch so i've got the switch here as i said before we've got the golden terminal which is going to be our earth or our negative the middle which is going to be our load and then the bottom one which is going to be our supply so the supply is the positive of the battery the negative is the negative of the battery and the load is the led strip or the appliance so i'm just going to choose a 5 amp fuse turn the system back on well guys moment of truth hey never doubted myself for a second um jesus actually they're really bright one thing to also add about adding this other appliance is that as i mentioned before this negative can either come to the negative of the distribution board or the negative of the battery or even onto this bus bar that's near the control panel um to save lots of wires going back and forth well i hope that pretty much covered most things 12 volt electrics wise and i would like to do some more follow-up stuff on this so if there is stuff that i've missed let me know in the comments below and i'll try and do like a second video to follow up with this a few cheeky honorable mentions um this this stuff here that holds the led strip um it basically makes it look nice but also sort of diffuses the glow basically comes in two parts it's sort of like a plasticy lens and then the aluminium extrusion backing and you can either double side sticky tape it to a surface or screw it down for the purposes of this demonstration i just double sided sticky taped it you can find that stuff for pretty good price on i think it was amazon so uh giving jeff bezos even more money there also some tools i think you really should have 100 i'd definitely recommend getting like a cheap easy multimeter like this um makes the world of difference it can help you can use it to find faults and where that fault happened so really valuable bit of kit um other things that you don't necessarily need but make your life a lot easier wire strippers these things are great i can't live without these now it has a little cutter in there and some crimping tools i don't really use the crimping tools but cut the wire and then ready to rock and roll great little tool as i showed you before the little terminal um crimper for those smaller ones this is a big beefy boy of that really and that really deals with connectors like this terminal connectors like this um and it has all the different sizes you can go to great little bit of kit and of course a little cheeky flat head screwdriver because you always need one of those with electrical stuff um that and also that and also a small phillips but um yeah a few little tools here that will make a world of difference some further things to add about this system is this system doesn't include an inverter a lot of people need an inverter or use an inverter and they can be really simple to connect to a system like this and providing you have a big enough battery and it can support that sort of power usage you usually get an inverter with a positive and negative cable that will connect directly to the terminals on the battery and they'll go off into the positive and negative terminals of the inverter but you do want to put a fuse in line on that inverter and the size of the fuse usually depends on how many watts that inverter will provide and then on the bottom of that inverter it just had the plugs ready to rock and roll and you can you know maybe make an extension cable that would lead somewhere else in the van and have plugs throughout the van so another little easy addition to add to your system i just didn't have one lying around at the workshop so i couldn't show it in this layout another honorable mention would be conduit tubing you're probably going to see quite a lot of this if you need to feed cable through tricky spaces that otherwise might damage the cable while the vans moving around you're going to need probably tubing similar to this so if i was trying to feed my cable through this hole here um or even a freshly cut hole that might have sharp edges even if you have deburred it you can basically just feed the tubing through the hole to bypass the sharp edges and then this will allow you to feed that cable through that bit of tubing all the way around and avoid it getting shredded on the sharp metal also on the solar front as i mentioned before mppt charges there are so many different types of solar charges you can have ones as basic as this uh it's basically this pwm one or you can get like really nice ones stuff like victron uh that have like bluetooth capability and that allows you to use an app to log into them and see the sort of what's coming in and see how much power is coming from your solar panel so you can sort of maybe help gauge and regulate how much power you're using and you can also get stuff like um shunts that will go between then all of the negative cables coming into your battery and the negative terminal and that will give you like a readout of the absolute complete power usage in and out of your whole system so that you can see how many watts you're using at any one time and that's a great little thing to add on as well if you can afford it there are so many different gadgets and things that you can keep adding to your system out there i have nowhere near enough time to list all those different things but the things i have mentioned in this video are there to basically get you started and give you a working system and a few different options on how to approach it and how to keep it running and keep it simple and keep off grid i'd like to thank all my diy memoirs so much for watching if you're not subscribed please subscribe it really does help out the channel i'll catch all you guys next time

Channel: HughTube

Views: 243,037

Keywords: peugeot boxer camper van, DIY, transit custom campervan, van conversion camper, campervan conversion, camper van tour, campervan uk, camper van build, Vanlife, van, van conversion, living in a van, how to, van trip, hughtube, vanlife series, camper van electrical system, campervan electrics, 12v electrics, cheap electrics

Id: lS9Jv8T5t0E

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020