I couldn’t believe the difference this made

hi folks and welcome back to the channel and in this video I'm going to talk about this little Gadget I've got in my hand and it's quite revolutionized my electrical setup moreover it's allowed me to well not bother about things that need plugs in my van anymore and I'm not talking about an inverter so this story is going to go back to somewhere around about the New Year where my diesel heat packed up and you know me pulled it apart and got it all going again but ever since then I've been searching searching for the reason why and I think I found it in fact I've definitely found it so this affects quite a few things that I've had problems with and I've actually readdressed some of those things and found that the problem with my devices that didn't work or failed is actually the voltage of a lithium battery and there's not a lot way around that other than to rectify the voltage so most devices are 12 volts that are made for sort of like you know recreational vehicles Camper vans cars you know anything like that you can either get 12vt version or 24volt version which is mainly for Trucks hdvs and Things um I think more things are going to probably come in at 48 volts because that's the native voltage of um like an EV however for my scenario my electrical setup is traditional so it's a 12v system however it's not 12 volts so let me explain a little bit by showing you my app right at the bottom there you'll see battery cell voltages so my 12vt single battery that I've got uh which is a lithium battery um has little tiny batteries in them and those are made up into cells um to sort of like increase their capacity there are lots of parallel cells of these little batteries which are then connected in series to make up 12 volts however each cell showing here is 3.6 volts so 3.6 Vols doesn't equal 12 VTS so when you actually look at it 3.6 * 4 is 14.4 which we all recognize is probably around about the charging voltage 14.4 4 to 14.6 of a lithium battery um that we traditionally use now in our camper van SL motome cuz we get a lot more power out of them however some of these devices that we sort of want to install in our vans or motor homes or whatever are 12vt and they come with one of these and on the back there it says 12 volts and you go no way I can just chop the end off and plug it in and hey Presto it'll work natively without me using an inverter and and things do work either okay or for a while or maybe not at all and stepping back to the diesel heater thing is I found my diesel heater did work in fact it's worked for months and months and months it worked after I fixed it again for months and months and months and then I noticed on one particular day and this is what made me think back to sort of like um about Christmas time New Year time uh which is when the engine's running um it's obviously producing a charge voltage which goes back to my electrical system um the electrical system then distributes the slightly higher charge voltage to every device around the van which means that your devic is that you know if it's a lithium battery sat at standard it could be 13.2 volts or whatever um would be then pushed up to what it's showing now which is 14.2 solar's charging the van at the moment so that's probably it but the difference between 13.2 and 14.2 and 12 volts is big enough to make a difference which could be big enough to be over 20% which means that some of these devices are sensitive enough to not like that 20% extra voltage and they cause problems and I noticed this driving around one day in my van around about like I say New Year Christmas time and I had my diesel heater on while I was driving I just set off driving away and after about 20 minutes I was thinking it's got really smelly and quiet so I looked over at the diesel heater and it was showing E2 which is uh an error in voltage which actually shut down the diesel heater now for those who don't know exactly about diesel heaters uh the diesel heater chamber gets to about 190° inside and then there's a fan on the back of it which blows just air straight past that chamber um so the combustion chamber exhaust outside but that chamber gets very hot and there's an internal fan that blows air past that chamber and then out through the duct in in the van which not only cools the chamber down from overheating but obviously then blows that hot air from the chamber um around your van so very simple process but without that fan working the chamber gets hotter and hot now fair enough because of this over voltage error um the diesel heater system had decided to shut down so it wasn't actually burning anymore it wasn't firing anymore but the chamber had no way to cool down so for example going back again if you switch your diesel heater off after a few hours or few minutes or whatever you'll notice it's got an overrun so that it actually has the fan running for quite a few minutes to cool that chamber down to something it considers to be a safe kind of limit which is usually around about 50 to 60° and then naturally that heat will dissipate out as it cools down so my diesel heater had this error E2 over voltage which shut it down uh I had the heater on in the van too blowing down on my feet as well uh which meant the diesel heater wasn't actually cooling down at all so it's sitting there around 190° um and then slightly getting warmer possibly or not cooling down as much because I had the actual van he system on and I think that's what caused it anyway that was my initial thought that that's basically you know things haven't worked very well just like an engine which will blow a head gasket if things get too warm inside CU metal services start to warp slightly they don't touch each other as firmly as they should um you know like one will change shape because it got too warm um and therefore you start to get leaks and things like that and I think that's what caused the demise of my diesel heater around about that time of year um and since then I've been kind of looking into it and you know things have taken over recently um so it's not been as important but I've still been kind of trying to spend time looking at it and this is where the idea came to me I wonder if a voltage regulator would do the job a lot of people probably call these book converters and you might normally get them to convert 12 volts into something like I don't know um 24 volts or 48 volts or even 19 volts or whatever usually to maybe power a TV that's not natively 12 volts or maybe moreover some people have used them for uh starlink conversions as well because starlink runs around about 48 volts so um yeah you can upscale the voltage you have an input side of voltage and an output side of voltage however I want to make sure that my output voltage is exactly 12 volts so it's regulated to be 12 volts and that's what this is so this actually takes an input of between 9 volts and 36 volts and outputs exactly 12 volts up to a maximum of 12 amps and you can get different versions so this one 12 amps is more than enough for running my diesel liter which on Startup with the glow plug running etc etc can take round about sort of 10 11 amps so I installed one of these on my diesel heater um Supply feed so they input for 12 volts so I basically chopped the cable going to my diesel heater voltage um and put this end the input going back to the battery and this end the output going to my diesel heater so my diesel heater display shows a voltage and normally if I'm getting a bit of solar or if the engine's running and the batteries aren't fully topped up that will show 14 volts now if I'm not getting any solar um and the engine's not running it shows 13 volts but it never shows 12 volts and it's a 12vt diesel heater you get them in 12vt or 24v so I was thinking then right okay so when my engine runs and the battery gets fully topped up there's obviously a slight Peak that it doesn't like I mentioned there have tolerances like 20% or whatever difference so when my engine is running or the solar is absolutely sort of like fully charging the batteries the batteries will slightly go above 14.2 volts they may get to 14.4 or even 14.6 volts to absolutely make sure my batteries are getting the absolute full charge they can now if that voltage is just like a fraction out of the tolerances the input voltage tolerances of the diesel hereat then yeah it's coment with this code that's E2 over voltage with this on board connected and I can run the engine everything can be topped up it just runs perfectly in fact the diesel heater runs far better than it did without the regulator it runs quieter it's more efficient it actually feels slightly warmer so yeah I was thinking what else in my van might benefit from running exactly 12 volts so I got some more like I said I got a few six amp versions and the 12 amp versions so I tried my fridge which is a 12vt compressor fridge on the 6amp version so I've now done exactly the same as I've done with the diesel heater uh to my fridge as well so that is a 6 amp version cu the fridge is about 4 and 1/2 amps my fridge runs much quieter now I don't hear it at all when I'm sleeping at night and everything Still's working fine inside the freezer still gets to - 18 the fridge is about - 4 most of the time and everything is working perfectly I then got the 12 amp version to run both of my Max fans which now work so much better they're quieter there's no vibration at all in them and the mechanism to open the motor to open it seems much stronger now before it seem to ah like it was going over like over speed or whatever whereas now it seems to operate perfectly so yeah these aren't exactly sort of expensive around about 12 to £18 depends on which version you get so I've start Ed to install them everywhere and thinking that something might benefit from being exactly 12 Vols which took me back to a few things that I've tried in the past um Gadget wise that I've had problems with and then I've dismiss them and one of them is my U mobile broadband connection my Wi-Fi my internet connection but that's another [Music] video because I'm made a video all about it and I've made a discovery basically it's a video where John's going to say I cocked up but like I said that's for another video I just wanted to share this video with you guys to show what a difference the exact correct voltage makes and I know a few of you are probably going to scream in a comment I told you some time ago to make sure that you get a regulated voltage for your max fans yeah yes she did so anyway I'm telling you all now um what I've actually found from that because um seeing is believing right then thanks for watching folks um if you do want any of these they're in the video description down below and um yeah go try it yourself it's worthwhile take care see you again bye

Channel: Gadget John

Views: 52,755

Keywords: product reviews, gadget john, tech advice, van life, van conversion, vanlife, solo travel, 12v electrical setup, off grid electrics, living off grid, full time vanlife, campervan adventures, lithium-ion battery, lithium battery, voltage regulator

Id: XBNRCeW6u6M

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2024