RV Lithium Battery Install Mistakes (DIY, Beginners & Pros Still Make)

that is not good I have got a melted cable but looking over here there's no power so hi there I was wondering what happened to the power the power went out according to the power guy I talked to something lightning thing tripped or something he doesn't think it sent any surge through and that probably wouldn't impact that but this morning it was cold I was running a couple of electric heaters um in a big draw and I don't normally do that on batteries I didn't even know the power had tripped scary I'm Tom and I'm Sheree and we're enjoy the journey.live [Music] hey guys camping season is here and we have Harrison from Enduro Power Batteries back to explain what happened to this cable and our RV Batteries Plus he's gonna share the common RV battery install mistakes that both di wires and even professionals make that can cause issues like this or Worse you're going to want to watch this video till the very end because some of the biggest mistakes will be near the end of the video now let's jump into our conversation with Harrison this little problem right here that I just experienced uh right here yeah what would you make of that well we were you know we were talking about you know the the connections at the ends here which obviously is a point for resistance but what you have here is an undersized cable okay so this was out of your battery Bank connecting one of the batteries to the other batteries um and what we'll see later on is you have a very large large 3000 watt inverter in your system and we'll see the cable coming off that is very thick in diameter and then by the time we get to the battery Bank you have these smaller gauge wires so there this diameter of the wire got reduced down so much that then when that inverter when you're running your air conditioners heavy load you know you had a big cable coming from your inverter carry the current just fine and once you get to the battery Bank this was not big enough to to carry that current and so it overheated it melted and luckily you caught this before it got any further okay um what is the danger of something like that so danger of an undersized wire not properly sized wire is this is a great example overheating uh right here the the sheathing has melted off ultimately this could create a fire you know wow if if this was left unattended and the condition you were under continued to go on so again um I guess the word of advice for all you diyers out there or anybody you're working with installer if you hear somebody say hey we can do this size cable but I can upsize you know to oversize the cable you know may it be a little bit extra expense up front but oversizing is never going to hurt you right and uh we did have a regular RV uh repair shop I should say that did put this in but they weren't like solar and Battery experts so I so again people that are regular installers still may not know everything they need to know about doing it properly yeah you say regular installers that also say DIY that's a big piece of our uh you know customer base and many of you out there just trying to do a lot of research on YouTube to understand exactly how to put some together you have a lot of great skills I would just say that you know one of the big things in the DC environment is just make sure your cable sizes are sized properly to add application you're doing there's many 12 volt DC amperage charts current charts out on the web Blue C makes a phenomenal chart I would use that as a kind of a good standard to start with to figure out not only is it the size of cable from point A to point e but it's also length so you could have a cable that works the right size for three feet but if you're going 15 feet you may have to do a larger size cable to go that extra distance right I've heard that because every what foot you add increases the resistance right that's correct okay exactly so that's what you're doing there well I I guess we should let you see what I've got right yeah me too a little bit uh I've seen photos I think what we're suspecting with this as we have this melted wire here that we've got the wrong gauge wiring between the batteries and what's strange about that is like every RV Tech that I have I always ask like lots of questions and uh they've looked at the wiring and they've all said it's great it's fine and I think again there's that not every RV Tech is that experienced with you know batteries and wiring and all of that right yeah sure I mean you know there's a lot of great techs out there and um I would say that the lithium battery Banks the larger off-grid systems that's kind of newer into the RV space so a lot of great techs out there but uh many many people are still getting up to speed you know um these extensive expansives or expansive lithium battery Banks and making sure those things are Wi-Fi it's no longer just one or two basic lead acid batteries they have this big you know lithium battery Bank bigger inverters you know you're running air conditioners um so uh just a little learning curve there most of the techs that we've seen definitely understand what they're doing here we are with uh Tom's existing battery bank system and I think it's just a great opportunity to talk about some of the common mistakes or also maintenance things that uh you should be looking at to keep a healthy and happy uh battery bank and one of those is loose connections two is wire size and then three is the proper wiring your battery Bank in a parallel connection and also talk about a series connection for you as well so first on your uh connections it's important that you look at the spec um the torque spec for your connections to make sure all your your connections are Fasteners are tightly fastened out down to spec a loose connection keeps creates resistance which can create heat and can create a thermal event that we don't want so making sure that these are torqued to spec is is proper and from maintenance standpoint every couple months you should just check them out you know you are bouncing down the road like an earthquake on the road um just make sure everything is nice and snug is always a great practice there um the other thing we want to talk about is wire size so as Tom and I were talking about in his current system it's been great for him there was one mistake that happened in the install and it was actually out of the gate wasn't the you know issue of the installer itself Tom had a 2 000 watt inverter all the wiring was set up for 2000 watts and at the very last minute they made a change to 3000 watt inverter which requires a much higher uh demand of the cables and so therefore it needs a larger diameter cable size to safely carry that current if he was to use all 3000 watts of that inverter capability so most the time literally probably like 98 of the time most people aren't coming close to using all their inverted power they might be using 1500 watts at a time one high load device or a couple of things around 2000 Watts which is cabling was uh spec to so I guess it was about a month and a half ago Tom the power went out at the park he was in um he had to run off his battery power it was a cold day turned on the fireplace and also turned on a space heater both of those are about 1500 watts of energy and so basically his 3000 watt inverter was running full out which means it had a heavy Demand on his cabling as we said before the cabling was sized for 2000 watts and so this cable right here has been replaced as a temp uh temp PC it's black all this cabling was color-coded red and black this one's black because he replaced it and that's because this cable which was in this position when he was running that at 3000 Watts for a couple of hours this was the first it's battery number one here this was taking the heavy load from that inverter heated up as you can see the the sheathing on the the cable has melted through luckily Tom found this early enough shut down a system replaced the cable but this is a great example of why uh proper uh wire sizing is very important in your system uh there are a lot of resources out there for you to understand what size diameter cable you need to use depending on this voltage you're using the size of equipment you have and also don't forget about the length that your cable is going to run so if you only need to go six inches you might be able to use a smaller diameter cable versus if you want to go 15 feet you're going to have to upgrade the diameter of that cable to properly carry that current so just think that through in your process and I guess that goes to you probably hear a lot of people talk about make your cables as short as possible and that's why that theory exists it's not that you can't go a little bit further you're just going to have to upsize your cable to do so we have a whole series of videos planned about all things RV batteries so make sure you hit that subscribe button so you catch all of these Harrison's going to be talking about what are the three major considerations when you're going to be doing an RV battery upgrade how big of batteries do you need some more DIY installation hacks and so much more so make sure you click on the QR code right over here that will get you subscribed to the channel or you can follow the link both in the description and the pin comment let's get back into the video parallel connections versus series connections so Tom has a 12 volt system he has multiple batteries needs to keep it at 12 volts so parallel connection is what he is using that is positive to positive and negative to negative when you put positive positive negative negative that's a parallel connection your 12 volt stays the same but your amp hours increase they double so if you had two 12 volt 100s it would be a 12 volt 200 after you do a parallel Connection in a series connection um for somebody that is looking to do a 24 volt or sometimes a 48 volt system they would do a series connection serious connection which is positive to negative between the two batteries will increase your voltage from 12 volts up to 24 volts while the amp power stays the same so 24 volt 100 amp hour you it sounds like it's a little different like oh there's less energy but the math all works out you still have the same amount of energy but you now have a 24 volt system you may ask why do you need a 24 volt system anybody that's looking to do a sizable off-grid system it all depends uh usually that thresholds around 1200 watts of solar sometimes in the 1500 watts of solar it starts to become advantageous to consider a 24 volt system for your solar array off the roof your equipment uh downsizing the amount of diameter of the wire as your voltage goes up you can use smaller diameter cabling so there's lots of advantages there but I would say the general thumb for a higher voltage system is somebody that's doing off-grid system and going to have a pretty large solar array have very high demands on their equipment off grid that's somebody that's looking at a 24 or 48 volt system but for for most of us out there your RV is built for 12 volts you want to keep your system in 12 volt you're just upgrading to lithium the basic upgrade or you're putting in some basic inverters um even a even a 2000 or 3000 watt inverter can run fine off of a 12 volt system the nice thing about that is you don't have to do any other conversions to go from 24 back down to 12 to work with all your 12 volts that are already in your RV so when you parallel connect um batteries the best practice is to put the your loads from your RV the positive negative for the cables from the RV to if you had two batteries the positive would come to battery one and the negative will come to battery two and then they're parallel connected positive negative negative what that'll allowed to do is for the battery to charge and discharge evenly because the energy is flowing through the battery as opposed to if you had two batteries and the first battery had both your load cables that battery is going to work harder over time than the second battery behind it so by putting the low cables on the ends in battery one and Battery two we allow the energy to move smoothly through the battery bank and as you add more batteries three four five six in the case of this six it becomes even more important the other thing I would say is if you are getting a battery Bank over three and starting it to four batteries one of two things I'd be looking at using the bus Bar Method for wiring your bet your batteries in parallel or better yet increase the size of the battery itself so you have fewer physical batteries in the battery bank here at Enduro power we have 12 volt 200s and 12 volt 300 amp hour batteries so for example Tom has a 600 amp hour battery today with six individual batteries um he could use two uh 12 volt 300 amp hour batteries to get the same results um especially where he's going to a larger battery Bank of 1200 amp hours at 12 volt he now will have four batteries um at 12 volt 300s to get to the 12 to 1200 uh which would be better than 12 individual Batteries Not only from all the connections but you can imagine all the cabling that goes on that you have to manage and put when you have those many batteries involved so that's the number one thing in parallel connecting the other thing you want to keep in consideration uh this is kind of complex a lot of wires going on here when you do have multiple batteries in your parallel connection so in this case Tom has six batteries and he he does probably have his you know positive on his battery one and is negative coming down over here is on battery number six so that energy is Flowing properly through the battery bank but then he has other load cables from the RV that are landing generator negatives Landing here he's got another negative Landing over here um then he's got two positives here um kind of Landing in different spots in the battery Bank um one of two things we'd like those to generally land uh where the load cables do on the ends of the battery bank so again the energy is Flowing uh evenly through the battery and another thing is when you do add a battery monitor with a shunt to your system to accurately monitor the state of charge to the lithium battery Bank from a negative standpoint you want all your negative cables to land on the load side of the shut and the reason for that is we want all that energy to flow across the shunt um to accurately measure that and so then you only have one cable on the negative side landing on your battery bank so that is important versus having multiple negatives all throughout the battery bank so with this setup here uh some batteries get drained faster than other others right so it's not it has definitely it has the potential to do it it's nothing you're going to see um you know within a couple months or even a year usage when you start getting down the road two and three years that's when it's going to have an effect and ultimately what can happen is you can have a battery uh drop out um you discharge lower than the others and therefore the voltage drops because it's out of energy and then your whole whole battery Banks voltage drops your system will still work but it's going to not have as long of a run time because not all the batteries are well balanced within the battery bank and then if you have another one do the same thing eventually the battery bank will shut down so just the proper wiring techniques one way to avoid that as I said before is use fewer physical batteries so instead of six here if you had two 12 300s very easy to keep those two balanced versus having six or more batteries in a parallel connection and the other thing too is if moving batteries around up in here is keeping the length between the cables all the same too right yeah great great great question so when you are parallel connecting let's just say this is a roughly uh 12 inches here into parallel connection you want this cable and the next cable and the next cable to all be 12 inches in length so there's good balance uh between all your connections so um we are going to modify this we'll have two batters here and two batteries up here in this install and all the cables leaving the battery and where their connection Point are all going to be the exact same length in that parallel connection that's just a little bit of the some of the most common things that we see in a battery Bank just wanted to go through those again one make sure your connections are tight two make sure your cabling and wiring is properly sized for your system and three make sure you uh wire your batteries properly in parallel as far as positive positive negative negative thanks to Harrison and Enduro Power Batteries is giving all of you guys five percent off your RV lithium batteries so if you've been dreaming of a lithium battery upgrade or you've got to upgrade them just to even get out this camping season make sure you scan this QR code right over here or there will be a link in the description and the pinned comment let's get back into the video so I think as we were talking before Harrison uh I'm missing something that you would see in a pretty basic uh install right well it basically installed with lithium um you know you have a great system a go power IC 3000 works really well for you um but you're lacking a battery monitor with a shunt and we'll show you that later what that's going to allow you to do is to uh pretty accurately see the stated charge of the battery so right now you really don't have a good way to know where's where's the level of this battery one way to do that is add this battery monitor with shunt it's going to keep track of what I call the plus and minuses going in and out of the battery from charge and discharging looks at voltage and it also knows what size your battery bank is and so it says hey I'm at 100 I'm at 92 I'm at 88 and it's going down and when you charge back up I'm back to 100 so you just take a quick look you head out for the day you're like oh I'm 85 I'm good to go knowing kind of exactly where you're at versus guessing um one other thing I would say is when you switch to lithium we'll do this on the Whiteboard so you can see as well the voltage profile of a lithium battery is is pretty flat over time and then drops off everybody think about your power tools that you use today they're going like full out and then boom they stop and that's because the voltage profile is very flat and then it drops off a led acid in AGM battery the voltage drops over time and so since it drops over time we could use voltage to tell what the state of the charges of a lead acid ATM was but with lithium it's hard because that line is pretty flat between 13.2 and 13.1 volts 60 percent of the time so you look at it but from a voltage standpoint you're like wow this battery is still doing great but you actually may have discharged 30 or 40 percent so this battery monitor installed in is going to really help you out yeah I like you said kind of guessing and that's what I have experienced over this last year uh is yeah kind of guessing at what the battery bank is at and then all of a sudden they're drained yeah so yeah so there's a we're gonna put in the victron energy BMV 712 um it's you know fully featured one in the market it's got an app that goes with it which is great monitoring from your phone from the couch inside campfire outside um there are other options on the market uh that don't have that or a little bit lower cost but for the system you have the user interface of that victron unit really like that product uh highly recommend it we love the 712 because it has about a 70 to 80 foot Bluetooth range on that specific model works for any fifth wheel and um or any other RV on the market as well so yeah you've got uh just for everybody here this is the gopower IC 3000 which is a 3000 watt inverter charger so this is allowing Tom to basically run anything that's AC Appliance when you're off grid off your battery bank it's a 3000 watt inverter so he can run his air conditioner he can run his microwave now you're not going to run your air conditioner forever you're going to drain the battery Bank pretty quickly I know that you've had some experiences with your 600 amp hours where you sit you say you've gone all night with air conditioner I would say that you've gone all night in a fairly mild climate with your air conditioner so you're like your your AC was cycling on and off um less than if you were in a really hot environment because right 600 amp hours full out middle of the day trying to keep up you're going to be dead in four hours over 600 amp hours so just to kind of even your new 1200 amp hour battery bank would be eight hours unless you're recharging from solar or other sources so um it all there's so many variables that go into sizing a battery Bank based on you uh your charge sources and your needs but yeah so your inverter charger here uh Beyond it here it looks like you have two go power UH 60 amp mppt solar charge controllers these are running your 1100 watts of solar on top again these are already here um everything there just the first glance looks good from the the cable sizing but uh we are going to on this uh ic3000 you have two OT cable here we are going to upgrade this to 4 ought cable which is bigger diameter it'll carry the current so when you are maxing this out running 3000 Watts running your air conditioner for multiple hours pop on a microwave you'll have the proper cable size uh carrying the the power from the battery Bank yeah like you were mentioning running the air conditioning we typically run with the uh AC and the fan on so the fan keeps going and right the AC is not going all night you know running but the fan is exactly at least so that's going to be a little less power draw you know what you're gonna be able to do uh is you're going to become very well educated once you get this battery monitor shunt in because you'll be able to see uh the actual current draw that your system is using from the battery Bank just by opening up your app looking at the battery monitor you're going to see that you're not pulling 140 to 150 amps you know cycling the AC but you might only as you said just the blowers going at that point in time using 10 amps an hour so you'll educate yourself with that battery monitor as well okay good deal so less mistakes right here [Laughter] yep yep no I think it's overall it's uh you know really great install um we just as we get into this bigger battery Bank your your your goal spending more time off grid which means you're going to rely more on your inverter charger um just want to make sure that those batteries and all the wiring in between here and the batteries is the right size so we'll get that taken care of good all right we got two more tips for you on the wiring side of things uh one is uh some Basics on fusing and the second one is some Basics on grounding if you add any uh larger equipment into your system so on the grounding side of things your RV all your 12 volts are grounded to your chassis in various spots you'll see some locations where a couple wires come together uh in one spotting RV um one thing to note is if you're adding larger equipment for in this case Tom had the 3000 watt inverter um he you know we've talked about before he had two out cable he should add four out cables so we're gonna upgrade the wiring but in addition to that when you increase your wiring over a stock system we need to make sure that that larger wire also has a path to uh the chassis the ground source and so for example here we have a two out wire that was hooked up in his original system coming off his inverter it comes down and it ties into the battery bank here which is right from electrical standpoint but we also need to make sure that then that has a attachment to the chassis as a chassis around so we will add that into his new system you'll see that come off of the uh Big Bus bar and that'll tie right to the ground so it gives that larger cable a path to the ground or the chassis Source the second thing we'll talk about is fusing um the one one thing I think that's uh not understood fully is the reason for fusing is to actually protect your wiring of course it'll help but protect some equipment too but the main reason for fuses is to protect your wiring in the system and Tom asked a great question we talked about before this wire in his battery bank is the one it overheated and fried earlier and we've talked about all of his wiring is actually undersized for his 3000 watt inverter which we're going to switch out but the question is well wouldn't the fuse take care of this and it would if the fuse is sized properly to this size wire that he had in the system so for example he has a 300 amp fuse for his um 2000 or even a 3000 watt inverter is sized properly but then the wiring past it is undersized so in this case the weak link was the cable here that fried um it's about a six gauge wire and it just can't handle um the amperage that that inverter was asking for and again the fuse didn't blow because it's rated at 300 amps so as long as all the wire is properly sized a proper sized fuse and your system will protect the wiring but if you have undersized wiring your fuse is not going to protect you from that so General thumb is make sure you size your wires properly or oversize your wires or better yet if you're not comfortable with any of this always seek out a professional installer to help you with this part of your system install so that would be another uh install mistake is not grounding the negative to the chassis yes definitely when you're adding a larger equipment again your toilet system's already grounded your chassis but when you're adding big inverters uh things that weren't in your system that is a common mistake because a lot of people forget to ground that equipment that goes for inverters that goes for solo charge controller other devices like that you might be adding in and again make sure you hit that subscribe button because this is just one of a series of videos about all things RV battery upgrade Harrison's going to be back to talk about more DIY installation hacks should you hire a professional to install your RV batteries how many RV batteries do you need and so much more and you guys can click right here to watch the next video

Channel: EnjoyTheJourney.Life

Views: 44,570

Keywords: RV, RV living, RV life, RV living full time, Travel full time, RV newbie, how to RV, RV upgrade, RVing, lithium battery, rv battery, rv battery upgrade, rv battery maintenance, RV battery mistakes, RV mistakes, rv mistakes to avoid, rv lithium battery upgrade, RV battery install, RV upgrades, rv upgrades and mods, diy rv lithium battery bank, enduro power lithium batteries, lithium battery for rv, Tom & Cheri, enjoy the journey.life, rv boondocking, rv solar power

Id: Xf70RNj1j7k

Length: 28min 28sec (1708 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023