OFF GRID DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC || Powering A 1985 VW Westfalia For Full-Time Living

[Music] [Music] so i wanted to take a moment to sort of talk about what it takes to keep our 1985 volkswagen van again powered on the road for full-time living and professional working as photographers and filmmakers and writers and general digital creatives we have a lot of power demands and needs and we like spending as much time outside of city centers as possible so we have to be able to power ourselves for several days without needing to head into town or find a power source so when we first got the van it came stock wired with a small auxiliary battery that's essentially a lead acid starter battery and we continued with that setup for several years just buying cheap walmart everstart starter batteries our thinking at the time was that they're incredibly cheap and they have pretty bulletproof warranties so if we killed one every six months no big deal we just go back and replace it well that was all well and good before the covet pandemic hit because most of our work was being done in public cafes where we would spend eight 10 hour work days when we had deadlines for projects using the power inside of say a starbucks or something like that and then on the off chance where we needed to get a couple of hours of work in here and there in the van at a campsite that battery was fine it didn't last very long but they were enough to get done what we needed to get done fast forward to the winner of 2020 and we're living full time on the road and suddenly public workspaces became far less hospitable and in many cases were completely shut down these starter lead acid batteries are meant to be drained just slightly by the amount it takes to turn over the starter and then to be immediately recharged by your alternator when you're drawing them down to below 50 percent which in terms of voltage might only be one volt down below 11 volts when starting at 12. it doesn't take long to kill one of these batteries and they stop being able to hold the charge for as long and often times just die completely and can't hold the charge at all [Music] so that was the case with the starter battery and when we were getting ready to replace it we sort of thought that it might be time for an upgrade so we're somewhat limited in terms of the space that we had to fit a battery we have our van just packed to the gills with all the other stuff that we like to use and do we've got a lot of hobbies so he didn't have any free space to add a larger battery so we're looking for something that would fit in the stock compartment that comes with the vanagon and in the world of all batteries really there isn't all that much that fits in there only certain lead acid batteries would fit under there to begin with but we knew we probably wanted to move on and after doing a bunch of research we decided that lithium iron phosphate life po4 would be the way to go for us and luckily our friends at go westie made it incredibly compact and relatively cheap lithium batteries so we decided to upgrade to that and the great thing about lithium batteries is that they can be drained down to near zero almost an infinite number of times infinite is a relative term but when you consider 10 years worth of life as quite a number of cycles they can go through without damaging the battery but unfortunately we got a defective battery right out of the package and to go westie's credit they had no problem replacing it but they were out of stock so it was going to take about a month for us to get a new one which at the time simply wasn't acceptable because we were charging our refrigerator off of that battery as well and food was spoiling faster than you could imagine and we live full time in here so it's not exactly like we could just go throw it in the fridge at home so we were losing money and when we couldn't keep cold storage in our refrigerator we're eating out more we're spending more money on that we're eating less healthy anyway it was something that we wanted to remedy quickly in the process of sort of researching other places we could get batteries and talking with a lot of our more knowledgeable friends it became apparent that probably the 50 amp hours that we were getting out of that battery really wasn't going to be enough as a long-term solution so we decided well if we have to get another battery from somewhere else i guess we might as well go all in and upgrade again and after lots of chats and lots of advice we ended up going with 200 amp hours of lithium from a great company called battleborn who we're now partnered with all right that's looking pretty good and while amy's been away for the last week visiting her parents back home in north carolina i've set about the task of figuring out how to wire this van for that much power we had to lose a little bit of storage underneath our bench seat because there's absolutely no way that these 200 amp hour lithium batteries are going to fit in the stock compartment so we've wired them to fit underneath our bench and with this newer better and smarter system came a lot of other accessories that we needed one of the most important of which is a battery monitor that is bluetooth connected and we can see in real time exactly what's going on with our battery when it's happy when it's not happy how much we're charging how much we're pulling it was a lot of work and i had to learn as i went well that was scary to do because i'm not an electrical wizard but i've got a lot of cool friends who know a lot about this stuff and were able to sort of talk me through the process and it feels really good to know that now for the first time since we've been living in here power is really a non-issue before with the smaller battery capacity and different battery types it was always a concern how long you could use it for you had to park in just the right spot to get just enough solar how long were you going to drive that day for alternator charging getting work done always felt like a challenge with lots of restrictions and now for the first time we're just not gonna have to think about it at all you know obviously we have the monitor to keep track of where our power levels are at but with the power needs that we have and the amount of power that we now have it'll be just like being in your home you just plug in and go so yeah take a look so here you have the two 100 amp hour piece lithium iron phosphate batteries the nice thing about these batteries is that because they don't have any fluid or liquid in them the orientation doesn't matter so as you can clearly see we have this one on its side and this one right side up we have them wired in parallel and i had to build some small wooden platforms underneath these to get them to fit just right because of the way our bench we have a weekender edition which has a slightly different taper [Music] than most westfalia benches and it was just too narrow at the bottom to fit um this battery here on its side so i had to elevate it slightly to get it in the pinch point right there and then we have it wired um to a fuse panel so that we can add more auxiliary devices um as the time comes currently we're not really running anything out of it um because we didn't have anything wired up because we didn't have that much power before but now we have power we have the option to be able to add lights and charging ports and this and that so that's ready for the future we also used a bus here for grounding which essentially is just a piece of steel that allows multiple grounds to be hooked up to a small area and you don't have to stack them all on top of each other which gets pretty messy and this here is the shunt that came with our battery monitor which allows it to get an accurate reading and you can see the cord that's running up behind the bench runs into our cabinetry and through the back and there we have our monitor on the front um we just had to use a hole saw to bore out the necessary diameter to fit that in there and that's a quite clean uh bezel finish and we have power here running from in from our alternator which is connected to our drive battery um over to this victron energy dc to dc charger which helps take that alternator voltage and transform it into a voltage that makes the lithium batteries happy because it's not quite right straight out of the alternator and here we have our victron energy smart controller for our solar which is bluetooth accessible it also gives us lots of great information and over here we have an inverter for running larger electronics off of it's a just a 500 watt pure sine inverter which is plenty for anything we'd need it for and because i used heavy gauge welding cable um four and six gauge for various applications to run power between our starter battery essentially our alternator system through our starter battery to our then auxiliary and then also where our whole ecosystem already existed for our solar charging and our inverter um i opted to drill holes and run out of the van you can see these wires going out there and then they come back up in here that choice could have gone either way but personally given the the size of the wires and looking at what i'd have to do to the paneling to get holes in the paneling to run it behind that i just opted to run it outside along the rail which is essentially the path that our alternator charging from the alternator to the starter battery was already taking so you can kind of see that there the wiring coming out and i've i've installed sheathing around it to help protect it and then it running along the chassis and then back up in through there and i installed some nice rubber grommets into the holes that i drilled out there to keep the wires from fraying from being damaged [Music] you

Channel: Tight Loops

Views: 39,267

Keywords: off grid, camping, overlanding, solar, lithium battery, solar panel, lifepo4, westy, gowesty, battleborn, van life, vw van, westfalia, tight loops, tightloopsfly, living on the road, car camping, roadtrip, travel, wilderness, self reliance, off grid power, truck, car, covid-19, pandemic

Id: bcc7JxHzF0c

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020