RV Solar Panel & Rack Install | HUGE 1640 WATT ULTIMATE RV SOLAR SET UP! * Off Grid AC On Solar

today we are installing new panels onto the top of our rv we've already taken our old panels off and we have installed them on james's rv over here we just went ahead and sold them to him and uh got them up there today now thomas has come up with some elaborate system for us to get more solar he's taking the ac off of the roof and he's come up with some massive panels and he's about to demonstrate to me what exactly he's doing i have a feeling it's going to be a lot like the jeep lift i haven't seen any of these things i have no idea what the idea is um but you know thomas he's always a stretch stretching the boundaries of what's possible hey wrangler what are you doing boy [Music] so the way this is gonna work is we're gonna have these things called standoffs so these will be attached to the roof basically and then they will hold this rail [Applause] and will bolt in kind of like this and be in different locations but essentially like this and then the solar panel is going to sit in between so these are wider than the solar panels are so the solar panels will sit like this okay so these will run from back to front on the rv solar panels width wise you're gonna be basically from driver side to passenger side so the panels are set like this but the panels are sitting on top of this rail when there's two panels that are sitting beside each other we'll use this crazy contraption and so this slides into this channel like this when i loosen the nut properly to actually slide in there there we go so this will slide to wherever say those two panels come together here this will go like this and it will pinch the panels down and hold them onto this that's the whole point of this so that will hold the two panels on the ends since we're not using these on the ends we're going to use these like z brackets and so on the end of the panel this will go here and again we'll hold the panel on top of this these are a certain depth basically so i had to measure what size panels we have they come in certain standard sizes and these are for our panels essentially and what panels are we going with we are going to have 410 watt panels and we'll have four 410 watt panels so we'll have 1640 watts of solar on the roof of our lazy day so basically we'll have a little over double what we had prior and we'll be able to run our mini split basically anytime i want to and action [Laughter] james was nice enough to let us ship these panels to his rv site and so this is our rv way of getting them to our site that's right [Music] sketchy dang james you couldn't even keep our panels clean yeah you know 10-year flood all right you want to aim granny granny first or second granny first or second i i think second was fine [Music] well let's try first first yeah there you go and what does second feel [Music] like is that second that's not that bad okay we're gonna try to get as much of this done as we can we've prepped the surface we are now adhering the rails [Music] and hoping for the best so what we did was took took a lot of measurements figured things out and then essentially um we're putting these down where they're going to go and when they come back put the risers in and basically work our way from the front towards the back now we did find out that the panels are going to go basically from the edge of this all the way to the edge of this so it's going to cover the whole roof stacy is using some 3m 4000 uv marine grade adhesive into all the holes this is not something i'd recommend for most roofs but we have a aluminum roof and this is like stuff that's never supposed to be removed it's for like portholes on boats so it should be good to go but these have like a sticky roofing as well on top so we're sticking those down got them all stuck down and then now i'm going to anchor them in i'll have 84 holes watch me one 83 more to go we have the majority of the brackets down i think that's all we're going to be able to get done today um we're losing daylight as we speak so we're just gonna call it a day and we will pick back up tomorrow okay so we got all the racks up there we took one panel up there to kind of position where things are gonna go and the racks are done i just finished sealing those came down took a little break in the shade and now we're about to move on to doing the wires so this is our junction box up top we're going to basically be go ahead and making all the mc4 wire connections because all these panels are going to be in parallel and uh we're doing that now because once the panels are up there there's no room to really move around so i'm going to go ahead and do all the wires so then we're going to put the panels up it'll just be set the panels down plug them in a little bit of you know tightening up the extra wire from the panels themselves bolting them down and we will be done don't worry about what i'm doing here okay i'm just putting four wires into one cable gland you know stretching the rubber out so down [Music] well we have all four of the panels mounted i think it turned out pretty good we're super excited about it for those wondering these are seven inch risers so these poles are seven inches and total basically up to around where the glass starts it's right about nine inches total for reference our air conditioner was like 14 inches off the roof so we're still almost five inches shorter than we were so we're actually shorter as a coach now because we did this system even though we have a roof rack and it looks a little crazy we're still technically shorter in fact this is about the same height as our vent fan covers were before you know like the rain covers for your vent fan and that's how i kind of planned this out so the solar panels are now our vent fan covers for when it's raining um that's gonna turn out pretty good i'm just tidying pulling all the wire down here all the slack and i'm about to wire in all the panels into my bus bars up here so my junction box and this junction box lives inside of our roof um refrigerator vent so not too much more to do and we'll have 1600 watts of power don't you guys just love this thing we just got this thing right before we hit the road again so we've been staying at this rv park here is called granol opry rv park it's actually pretty big park they have over 100 sites it's nice they do live music every night the only downfall is the highway is literally right there and so it can be really really loud but overall we've really enjoyed this day here the weather has been superb anyways if you're interested in looking more into that tent i will put a link in the description i have been wanting one for so long i'm so happy that we got it this girl she has been doing so good usually i just tether her and hook her up on a lead and she just kind of walks around but today we're gonna go explore a little bit you're so crazy now since we are doubling the solar on the roof i had to change out our solar charge controller prior we had a victron mppt 100 30 and i just finished putting in the victron 100 50. so i was just getting some firmware updates done here on that and i got that installed i also had to swap out our breakers that were already in here up to larger breakers but the cool thing is whenever i originally did our install i ran larger gauge wire and so the wire that i ran prior was already good for this installation that we have now so that's pretty nice plus since we have a 24 volt battery bank i don't have to use quite as large of wire as we would if we had a 12 volt battery bank now if you want the rundown of our entire solar system because this video is just about us changing out our solar on the roof itself you want to know about like our battery bank our inverter all that good stuff we have a video on that to walk through i'll put a link in the description below and probably the first pinned comment um but in case you're ever wondering or you're trying to find a video of ours or information about ours in youtube in the search bar you can just type in our channel name and then what you're looking for and you can do that with any of your channels that you'd like to watch so if you're trying to see our solar walkthrough just type in on youtube i'm not lost marvin solar and it should give you all of our solar videos or solar walk through solar lazy days hit those keywords and it should uh pop right up for you of course you can always go right to our main youtube page because i have our stuff in playlist but gonna get this done then once this is complete and updated and all the charging parameters are correct i'm gonna go on the roof connect all the panels i've already got the junction box wired up and we'll be able to actually flip the pv breaker in here and have 1604 watts of solar on the earth which should power everything in our coach i already know y'all are going to be wondering what solar panels we're using what do we pay all those good things so let me go and show you right now these are trina 410 watt solar panels we paid right about 280 dollars we bought four panels and so we paid about 280 per panel which is way less than a dollar a watt so we got a good deal there and they have a 10 25 year warranty and the dimensions are just shy of 80 inches by 40 inches and they've worked really really well oh and the last thing that you might want to know is the rate efficiency the efficiency is 20.2 percent efficient so that is the solar panels themselves that we're using and we have four of these now to hold that down we have these risers i got from solaris right online and these are seven inch risers they're a little pricey they're about 20 bucks a piece but it's a seven inch riser it's called a standoff this is actually what's called right here dpw power rail seven inch standoff so that's the riser that we used and then i just picked up our strut channel from granger it was cheaper to do that that has aluminum and then these are the brackets in between the two panels they're about three bucks a piece we had to get a couple of those and then these are the z brackets on the end um they're about a dollar 20 a piece and these are for the ends where the there's not two panels now i want to go ahead and warn you that you see it has 35 millimeter top clamp and if also if you look at this one here in the information below it tells you what size panels they're for you need to know how thick your solar panel is so these are for 35 millimeter panels which is how thick the trino 410s are so that's going to be specific to our rv the other thing i wanted to mention is we have an aluminum roof on our rv that also has plywood underneath it so the type of system that we're using is a residential style solar mounting system it's a wind rated up to like 150 miles per hour so it should be just fine driving down the road at 65 or 70 even if we get some cross winds or head winds or anything like that they should be just fine and i know that you're probably going to have some questions about the roof and like a wind diffuser or anything like that so let's go outside and take a look at that real quick by the way how you like the new tan top on goldie we're loving it so here is the solar panels on the roof you can see they're all flat right along with the roof and also on our class c we have this front end so the air will come in get diverted up and essentially kind of push the panels down and on the front cap up there it is angled specifically to push the air up and over the front cab it's made that way so luckily our lazy days is pretty aerodynamic but since they're flat mounted and they're the same distance off the roof all the way across we're not going to create like any real lift that's going to rip them off we're going to get some minimal lift probably mainly on this back panel but they should be good to go because they're rated for really high winds listen to this mini split running back here so quiet people ask us how loud the outside unit is it's you can't really hear it and then over here on this side i might be able to see the wiring and i put it right along the rail as well and it goes right into our fridge vent so i know it's a little windy out here but let's go up on the roof and i'll show you the risers or the standoffs and uh give you a little bit a different look at that i know you've seen them prior to us mounting them but let's look at it again real quick so we have three panels at the front we have a little gap and then we have our fourth panel back here and they all have the strut channel underneath you can see this is the z bracket style and that's why i said you want to make sure it's to the right thickness because they're you know for certain frame widths and then this is the seven inch standoff it already had like a black tar underneath it and it came with screws that are way too long so i did have to get different screws and then we put 3m 4000 uv um sealant around these things i even put some on the thread before i tighten this part down so it's really in there but again we have an aluminum roof so you're going to make sure that the you know the tar or whatever type of backing was on this it's gonna be okay for your roof i knew that i was gonna be fine for ours um but you're gonna wanna check for yours and eventually i want to redo the whole roof with like that ceramic coating so to take the panels off it's just four bolts unclip the mc4s and i can set this panel on top of that one pretty easily so if i need to do any maintenance like work on a vent fan or anything like that it's actually pretty simple to get these off of here it's not too crazy to remove them so yesterday afternoon i got all the solar panels done on the roof and all the wire tidied up and all that is good to go i did a quick test run and to make sure everything was running i ran our mini split and our um refrigerator off of electric and the solar kept right up we were producing like 1100 watts and that's what we were making off the inverter so it was like perfect but we had other things to do so i shut everything off and this morning we're testing it again so today is really our first real test what i did was at 9 00 a.m i turned off our shore power since we're in rv park here in nashville it's about mid-80s outside i turned off our shore power at 9am and if we look here on our vrm you can see from 9am till now which is 137 right now the yellow is solar if we go over here you can see it and so our solar and then red is consumption so we've consumed as red and yellow is solar over here on the right you can see the full production of solar has been 2.8 kilowatt hours and we've consumed 2.7 kilowatt hours so what that means is we have no shore power coming in our ac loads our inverter is making about 800 watts and our solar is bringing in 1280 right now and we're still charging our battery so our batteries are just about full as always here on the channel as time goes on we'll keep you updated on how things are working but so far it is working exactly how i planned and it is working really really well i was pretty excited today and was like you know kind of giddy about it and stacy thinks i'm a goof ball but i knew it was going to work and you know power our mini split off of the solar but to actually see it in action is a totally different thing and it was just really cool to see that we basically have been powering our air conditioner for going on in 15 minutes from now will be five hours we've been running our air conditioner and our refrigerator off of our inverter all via solar and our battery is still 100 that's pretty cool now as time goes on we'll be able to give you more data it's supposed to rain this afternoon we're gonna get some afternoon showers might rain tomorrow as well so it's not really the best solar days to kind of let you know how things are going but so far we are loving the system the mini split and the upgraded solar has been amazing we had some questions about the heat on the mini split people asked about that it could work down to negative 13 degrees fahrenheit and we had a 28 degree night the other night and we've had a couple in the mid 30s since we've been here in nashville and we have not needed the furnace one time the heat pump has been more than enough to keep the whole coach um warm and our mini split is back on the back of the rv and our bed is up on the front overhead cab so it's the opposite side of our 27 foot coach so it's been it has been really really great our favorite thing probably about the main split other than how quiet it is is that it also dehumidifies the air it dries it out in here which is so nice you walk in here it's just nice and dry and cool and it's just amazing it's really nice to have condensation build up or anything like that and it just automatically drains the water right outside so we don't have to worry about dumping a dehumidifier or anything like that so we think mini splits are awesome we'll keep you all up to date as time goes on we hope you all enjoyed this video catch you next time thank you for sticking around to get the 1 000 mile update that's right we traveled over a thousand miles now the solar panels are still up there i did add a little self-tapping screw and a little piece of rubber on the end pieces like the little z bracket ones i did that to those because they slid over a tiny amount and they didn't do that until about four or five hundred miles in i continuously checked them but that's what i end up finding and so that's how i fixed it for now i may change that bracket out but not so sure as of yet and then the little ones in the middle being between the two panels those held up perfectly no problems with those at all just the end ones that i have to replace we're going to check out some historical data via our viktron vrm website here and this is for april 7th from 9am until april 8th at 1pm you can see we produced 8.1 kilowatt hours on our solar and we consumed 7.9 kilowatt hours you gotta remember there's some you know inefficiency on running things but um that's how much we produced and that's how much we consumed so we produced more power than we actually consumed if we look at this graph here you can see what was going on now this day we are running our air conditioner we were in nashville it was hot during the daytime the solar was keeping up no problem you can see our battery average was 100 98 97 so it kept up pretty much all day long until the sun went down when the sun went down you know we were obviously not producing any power off our solar panels and so we're going directly off of battery bank now it was a little you know cooler that evening so it was probably running on fan mode but we still had it on all night long and then the next day we woke up to about 61 battery bank and by around 1 pm our battery bank was completely full again this was running our air conditioner off of our solar and now let's look over at running our heat pump on the mini split for a 24 hour period so this was a few days later on the 12th we had moved over to a different location different state entirely and it was cold so this is from the 12th at 90 am until the 13th at 1 pm again you can see we produced 6.4 kilowatt hours and consumed only 5.1 so quite the difference here we produced way more um than we consumed and you can see that our battery was good and full throughout the day time it was just maintained it was cooler during the day so we didn't really have to use a whole lot of power and we were outside working then we got into the night we were running our mini split on heat pump mode we had it set at 62 and it kept it nice and warm here in the coach we got our battery bank all the way down to let's see 38 percent was the average here and this was between 8 and 9 a.m and i think it got down a little bit lower i guess about it about 38 percent so we got it down way lower running on heat because the heat is not as efficient but by one o'clock we are nice and full again just want to give you a little bit of information hope you all enjoyed that and we'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: I'm Not Lost I'm RVing

Views: 24,949

Rating: 4.9730134 out of 5

Keywords: rv solar, rv solar install, solar panel install, huge, ultimate, rv solar set up, solar, rv, mini split, off grid solar power system, solar power rv, ac on solar power, ac on solar, off grid, dry camping, off grid solar, solar panel installation, massive, motorhome, rv living, ac, air conditioning, air conditioner, ac on solar pwoer, air, a/c, diy, solar power, conditioner, how to, off the grid, off grid living, Rv air conditioning, Full time rv living, boondocking, rv life, Rv diy

Id: ZBLjC2gosm8

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021