LED Puck Light Installation | VanBuild Ceiling

all right off we go this thing is so fun and i was terribly wrong so don't do that these are ready to rumble it's time to put the ceiling on in order to install them positive deposited of course right in the sky like a firefly [Applause] hey guys welcome back to the van build if you watched the video from last week you definitely heard me say this and if all goes well next week you will see my solar setup i am really excited for that and unfortunately this happened these are my solar panels this is all of the other stuff oh my gosh this is my charge controller shattered so we have a new plan this week i might need to return it oh ah that hurt my ear i'm a little bit nervous that since i purchased my solar setup as a kit i might have to return it as a kit i'm not sure yet i just emailed them yesterday so no solar for this week so in this video you will see me frame and install my ceiling as well as run all of my puck lights if you've been keeping up with the van build you know that these puck lights need to be run in parallel rather than in series and i'm hoping to show you guys exactly how i'm doing that because there aren't many resources out there that are step-by-step how to set up your puck lights for a van build right we couldn't find anything okay you know the plan i know the plan akilah knows the plan let's get to work all right first things first is i need to head to home depot my second home and pick up the framing pieces that i want to use for my ceiling all right off we go i just got my wood so i picked up one by threes i am now looking for a bit for my puck glides let's go over this really fast again so this is my rivnut tool what this will do is it will insert this into a piece of metal that you can't access the back of for instance my ceiling so this is a threaded nutsert this gets placed into a hole while my rivnut tool helps to crimp this little piece behind the metal making it super secure once this is inserted a bolt gets threaded through this adds a ton of strength in order to insert your rib nut correctly you want to open this all the way once this is opened all the way i don't know how to hold this you can thread on your nutsert inserting it struggling okay that was harder okay then this screws out and then this is what it looks like then i'll just drill the hole in the wood put that bolt through this thing so fun [Music] i need to use my drill bit and make that middle hole a little bit bigger so i can stick my rib nut in got my drill bit wow i'm really glad that didn't just grab some of my hair that would have been really bad i dislike doing this oh yeah [Music] all right they're in what i'm going to do now is measure out where i need each of my holes drilled if you watched my garage video you'll know that i eyeballed the um the drawers the drawers i eyeballed where i thought my nutserts were and i was terribly wrong so don't do that you say let's jump on the bus and take a ride downtown well i don't know about that all right we'll see how this goes me first to get these boxes all right we're figuring it out so yeah by the way i mean me so i was way high in the house or clear out some shells you said whichever you feel like doing first i said well i don't know how would you look at that because it's how flush that is not going anywhere wow that's really hot this was just sitting in the owl sun oh yeah all right basically i'm gonna do that same process for the next two so i'll catch you in a few and check it out all three are on now i'm going to move on to framing my fans so the way that this 1x3 sits here if i frame my fan using two by twos it'll be pretty perfect what i'm gonna do is liquid nail a two by two across here and then with my kreg jig i'll attach two by twos from here to here and then across and across so i need to go get some two by twos okay really good news uh reninji got back to me oh that's locked damned and it turns out that they are going to send me a brand new charge controller which means i can install my solar next week anyway back to the ceiling i got what i need for the rest of my framing so let's finish that up okay i'm not gonna lie two by two going across that was a really stupid idea definitely not gonna work because two by twos don't flex okay my new plan is this i cut a 1x3 in half and i'm going to try my very best to attach it with liquid nails i should probably do it not over my floor he's good to be drinking all of the honey [Music] this is where my two by two is going to sit that green sharpie line if you can see it i'm gonna take that much off creating a little bit of a tapered piece and then i'm gonna get this ready with the kreg jig these are ready to rumble i will paraglide across the sky let flowers and tiny hearts shaping the line in the cup of our so sweet like a honeybee can buzz around a honey tree i popped in a painted copper [Music] okay now we just have to do the back fan so i'm going to show you what i did do that was a stupid idea beautiful rivnuts um holes i did not have to drill what i'm going to do what i should have done from the start i'm going to use liquid nails like i did at the front and clamp them to this back metal okay this is what i got up up in a painted cup i would pour my love from a cloud above so bright i can see the light up and above the blue sky it tastes good i'm gonna leave the small gap here in case i do want that to be the home for mine like a firefly solid now i need to do this framing i'm going to do it the exact same way that i did the front one all right i'm going to take those clamps off hopefully everything stays in place so i can do my ceiling today [Music] that worked great highly recommend it's time to put the ceiling on so this is what i picked up what i'm gonna do now is take a few hours and stain and protect my shiplap i picked up some special walnut and i am going to put a little bit of my dark walnut stain in this stain and then i am going to do a top coat of this with me and akila living in the van we're going to be doing a lot of adventures a lot of outside time there will be moisture in the van i'm really making sure that everything is as protected as it can be shall we [Music] i'm going to make sure i measure everything out so that if i want to do the same stain if i run out i know exactly what i did this is a half a cup i like it i'm going with it i made sure that i picked out boards with a lot of unique knots and green and i love it so check it out in the misty bright moonlight i were told when the storm is raging in your [Music] all right i love love love love love this mix of stain now that this stuff is pretty dry i'm going to go over it with this oil-based clear satin the best part about this is that it seals out water and it's mold and mildew resistant [Music] hi was worthless so i wanted to wake up early because i knew that there was rain coming look at that shoot i brought akila out here because obviously it's much cooler than normal and she just decided to help herself to some bones that were in the front seat did you just get that or yourself just watch the corn grow in the fields i don't know what's on your mind but i know that it's something about you and me [Music] i made a little bit of a mistake i think here i'll show you if you notice this one is a lot longer because i started to recognize that when i put the final piece of my fan in that makes it look really nice and clean the edge of it might not actually cover these that are short i think it should be okay if not i'm gonna be extremely disappointed i think it should be okay it'll be very close [Music] so these are my puck lights they are 12 volt led specific for a dc system i will link these below in order to install them they're really easy these just have these springs that you lift up you'll slide them into the hole and then these springs come back down and just hold it into place which means that they're really easy to change out if you need that as well so this would go in first oh yeah check that out awesome and then if i need to replace it i can literally just pull it out how you doing aquila my arms are really [Music] [Music] tired okay this morning i finished putting in my lights i just got back from the dentist that's why i'm talking like this but i gotta keep moving on the van you know this is gonna be quite the video so the next step is to wire all of my lights [Music] okay so my mouth is no longer numb just hurts a little bit and i think i have some stuff figured out and i'm ready to finish the wiring but first what i want to do is go over how this is going to be connected so i have spent hours and hours and hours in the last few months understanding the electrical understanding solar how the power comes in what the inverter does all that stuff and one of the most challenging things for me was figuring out how to hook up the lights do not hook up your led puck lights in series if they are 12 volt dc led hooking them up in series will not work so what i'm going to do now is draw out the diagram of my specific lighting in the van hopefully after this it will make a little bit more sense here we go this is going to be the front this is where the headlights are i'm going to draw the lights that i have you guys know that i have one offset fan here and i have one more centered fan here here are my lights one two three and then i have four lights over here this is my sliding door this is from a top view looking down from the top of my van each of my puck lights are going to have a positive and a negative wire red represents positive black negative here's my puck light all of them have a red positive and a black negative this has two wires this is specifically for a dc system this right here near my back left wheel well just to make this easy we're gonna call that my power i know that i'm gonna have my switch right here that's going to represent my switch from my power i am running positive and negative oh god so i ran 14 gauge wire through my walls where i know my switch will be from there your positive wire is going to come around it's going to connect with your positive of your first puck light from there the positives will connect to the next puck light and so on negatives will also connect with each other this is what the connections look like but when i'm actually placing them in my van i'm gonna want a lot of the connections towards the outside of my van but i will show you all of that later this is going to be a three-way connection all of these that blue represents this piece so let's pretend that this wire right here represents this wire my positive and this is going to connect to my puck light here so i'm going to connect these two i'll show you what this connection looks like later but right now i want to show you how this three-way connector works so pretend that my puck light is already connected to my 14 gauge wire this first groove goes all the way through where the second a little bit farther in actually has like a stop in it it has an internal stop so you place your wire into this it's going to hang out in that first groove and then you're going to take the wire that you want to include and you don't want to strip any of this wire instead you're going to slip this in until it stops at that internal stop the next thing that needs to happen is this metal piece needs to be pressed down through both wires creating that connection so i'm going to hold these wires in place grab my pliers from there i'm going to press this metal piece down through both of those wires so it will look like this from there i'll close this cap protect that metal and there you have it this is what it'll look like in the van i do want to quickly explain why parallel is so important verse series this is energy okay energy is coming in now these electrons if they want to they can go this way and pass through this light or they can continue going through any of them which means also if this light goes to put the system is still going to work and you will know exactly which light to fix so even though this connection isn't happening the electrons have an option to continue going that is unlike a series setup where if one light goes out all of them go out that's like the the old time christmas lights now i'm going to get to showing you the real thing in my van as i do it i have my long wire that is essentially going to be running and connecting all the positives with this 14 gauge wire so right now what i'm doing is tucking this in my wall oh my gosh so like we talked about each of these puck lights has a negative and a positive wire this is 22 gauge wire so here i have two male connectors that are for 22 gauge wire you need to make a solid connection here and then take your crimper and crimp that metal down you can get some connectors like this that have heat shrink right here those are the ones i intended to get ended up not getting those so what i am going gonna do is add some electrical tape just to make sure okay so we've got that connector on here i now want to connect my puck light to my 14 gauge wire positive to positive of course so i now want to connect my 22 gauge wire to a piece of 14 gauge wire now the reason that i'm being a little bit generous with my wire i want to make it really easy on myself to change it so i can pop this out and have enough room to string some of my wire through change the connections and pop a new one back in on this end i'm going to put the female connector on first i'm going to strip this wire and you just want oh i don't know that much stripped oh yeah look at that so this is ready to be connected here but now i need to make this connection here so this is where that three-way connection comes in that we talked about here's my tap splice the main wire is going to go in here and then i'm going to add this wire in here and then while all these are nice and snug in there i'm going to grab my pliers like that so now all three are connected and i'll just close this little cap we have our 14 gauge wire over here connecting to our puck light just like that so now if this light goes out i can just take these apart and it'll be a really nice easy connection with a new puck light that took me so long to figure out and i mean so long just hope that when i actually have power everything works you know so i'm actually going to just focus on all of the positive right now and then i'm going to run and do my negative i've said it many times i know i would change my ways i know for sure when all the crows decide to eat they settle down beneath my feet you can see i've done all of my positive connections um and now i'm going to run all of my negative i did just want to do one at a time because it simplified things for me [Music] so i am going to go ahead and finish connecting all of my negatives in the same way that i did the positives [Music] i'm not an electrical expert i actually just learned all this stuff so keep that in mind [Music] wiring is all done so i have all the negatives connected and all the positives are connected each of those are then connected to their own positive and negative wires that run along the entire circuit now i'm just going to go back with all my wires and go through with some conduit and make sure everything is really secure and safe and then you will see me put up the rest of my ceiling [Music] [Applause] [Music] and i still remember parts of it i am officially done with my feeling and wow i feel so good it feels like it will happen to me i love it i love it love it look i'm gonna also cross my fingers but how i did the lighting works what should happen is my lights should turn on i have my fusion okay have not been this nervous in an extremely long time [Music] [Music] just begun my lights working up [Music] and then i messed with the dimmer [Music] what i want to express right now in this like really raw emotion state is that you guys can do anything that sounds so cliche but truly like if i am able to have working led lights that i wired all by myself like truly if you're willing just to put in the work and to learn stuff you can do whatever the hell you want i like i am so beside myself as you saw my lights work and everything has been going really well and now that the electrical stuff is getting figured out and things are working my videos will be back on track hopefully every sunday i will be posting this just took me a long time to figure out and like always let's talk about the price the cost of my van build so far up into this video is three thousand fourteen dollars and 86 cents if you found any piece of this video helpful or entertaining make sure to give it a like subscribe comment i think we'll just leave it at that huh so we will see you next [Music] and see the week side beside our faces all the good times

Channel: Linnea & Akela

Views: 149,076

Keywords: LED puck lights van build, how to install lights van build, framing ceiling of van, how to frame van, how to wire puck lights vanbuild, DIY LED puck lights van build, how to install ceiling van build, LED 12volt puck lights van build, how to wire lights in parallel van build, best lights for van build, how to connect lights in van build, ram promaster ceiling lights van build, 1500 136 promaster van build, how to frame maxaair fan, best panels for ceiling van build, DIY vanbuild

Id: 0g8-D-iYg-E

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020