Solar Breakdown for Van Life or Tiny Living

what is up everybody today is a very very special video that I feel like I've been waiting to do for a very long time it is not of my van which I'm standing in right now it is actually with a company called light harvest solar I've been waiting to do a video with them for so long because we're gonna go over everything possible in electric this is not just a tour of an electrical shop this is more of an informational video of like just batteries solar panels inverters charge controllers DC to DC chargers we are going to get into some nitty-gritty things about solar and solar equipment where to get it how to put it together we're gonna go over all of that in this video so I odd odd is why I'm excited because there are so many things out there that a lot of people don't realize they're just uneducated about and that is what I'm here to do I'm here to educate people properly with professionals so here we go so behind me right now and now I just flip the camera around is like Harvard Solar what is the super cool thing they don't like to be braggadocious about this so I'm gonna brag for them what is super cool about this thing right here is it's a container but it is an off-grid container are completely powered off of the batteries that they sell as well as the solar panels that are charging those batteries I get so many questions about what kind of system how big of a system etc and so forth we're gonna go over all of that with this guy right here my buddy John from light harvest solar John is extremely knowledgeable so let's flip the camera off get him on what's up buddy I wanna I wanted to get everything in shot here yeah there's a lot there is but you have other storage containers too they all route into a couple of batteries and then that powers my lights what is it you do here first so what I do is mainly a system design okay so we also do some installation but for the most part my function is to find out what a customer needs and get it to them so you come in and tell me hey I want to be able to cook in my van or I want to be able to go out for the weekend and charge all my devices my job is to figure out exactly what you mean do that okay I'll spending way too much money on stuff you don't need okay give you the information to get it give you all the parts selection and send out with it Awesome's not only can they come into the shop here in Portland but they can also call you over the phone so absolutely you don't give us a phone number but how is the best way to get a hold of you guys just email pretty quick is it all through the website cool we'll have another one coming up in the near future we'll hopefully get you the information on that okay well that one we also in the description below once I get it from Myles we're gonna start pretty much from like the panels down into the box itself or what is involved in the power system that's all the power flow okay I didn't even think of it that way there you go you guys have an assortment of panels that are not sold at like and I don't want to bad-mouth anybody but like a renergie company yes it is really hard to get individual amounts of these panels these are the ones that they use for large-scale solar installs so big commercial array your household system the the larger stuff why is that panel better than like a hundred watt panel at like a renergie they make a lot more of them so the production it's kind of the economy of scale sorry oh so they make so many of them the engineering is really refined on them and the production process is very good so you end up getting a much lower price per watt okay holder that you're getting so if you go with one of these like a 300 watt panel versus 300 watt panels yeah you might be paying half as much for the 300 obviously with your wall of panels right here I see different cell arraignment yeah you can actually this is kind of like a little time machine right here okay on the far right down at the end there we have the kind of top-of-the-line for about five or six years ago okay so that's one long series string it's all the cells are wired together ends up happening is if you cover one of the cells pretty much the whole panel comes out interesting though you get a tree branch over you're parked van you're getting no power okay a lot of people like I hear people talking about all the time but now that makes sense yeah and that was five or six years ago yes okay then technology is improved but the middle two panels are a split cell design so there they're still kind of a long series string but they split it up a little bit more parallel okay you end up covering part you only maybe cut out half so they do a little bit better than you oh so this right here is the split yeah I knew this one is like the mack daddy of them all these are 2018 like top top-of-the-line pant really what they do is you can kind of see there's little sections here yeah each one of these sections is its own serious drink okay so they paralyze all them together which means you cover that part it cuts out that section and leaves all the rest operator which is obviously very functional if you are half in the shade or you have a tree branch like you said one tree branch instead of killing your whole panel it just kills maybe 10% I have a walkable deck on my on my van that's the 500 do you have walkable panels here yes like the old school commercial not old school but like yeah the walkable panels the other walk yeah for the most part you can walk on these I don't usually recommend it okay so it's definitely doable there the the tempered glass yeah ill rated okay it should be able to stand up to like this one or are you talking about another one you saw all of these oh wow these are all the industrial grade rated for 25 plus years you're not gonna break them just right just willy-nilly you'd have to try their tale rated yep you guys sell them like you said the 292 3 and change range why is it important to have about 300 Watts upon us on a vamper set 300 watts is kind of enough to really recharge your batteries from the daily amount of electricity you use from standard daily living sure so once you get into the like 3 60 watt range okay you can really kind of keep up with your needs so you know your boiling water you're cooking with a hot plate you can kind of get away entirely propane at that point let's move down the system before we go through charge control and inverter let's go with batteries batteries are critical they are so I am also another advocate of lithium over AGM urge absolutely do you guys sell a jam or gel we do not and then why is that that is because on this type of systems that we build where you're moving a lot of power around okay let acid just can't do it it would need 600 pounds of big lead acid batteries just to keep up with what one of these Lian energy batteries that were selling nowadays yeah your dealer for Lian and rely on yeah Lian rely on we're dealer for battleborn or a dealer for pretty much all the big names if you have lithium connection do you have it like a new view oh yeah it's any good we've probably tried it out well that actually brings up another good point I know I've seen miles like run tests on all these batteries run tests on all the inverters that you have yeah so before you put it on your shelves miles goes through a rigorous testing with all this product so in fact the shop is being run off one of the lion Energy's 9 amp hour battery one one just one just one so back to the batteries you have the lines in the realizing you guys focus the most on yeah they're the ones that we've had the most consistent behavior fewest problems you know anything a lot of the lithium batteries have problems with after they go through a low voltage disconnect coming back on line okay I do the lines on the role islands have that problem they do not have that problem okay the reliance to my memory just come back on pretty straightforward do you see the Lions you have to do a little push button reset okay it's pretty easy straightforward no problems there I have reliance in my van and I thoroughly thoroughly in love with them oh yeah and ever since the Lions have come out I'm like oh my goodness these are great freaking batteries they are slightly smaller than the rely on yeah footprint wise reliance at least a hundred amp our reliance yeah are a group 31 footprint so fits with your standard commercial truck battery about yay long yeah big I actually think the dimensions are 14 by 7 if you want to get technical the lion energy is the golf cart battery group size okay but it's not a six volt it's a 12 volt 12 okay 12 150 amp discharge capability right out of the box cool so right there that'll give you 1500 plus watts no problem winter to about 1800 okay I see you can run an induction cook stove with a single battery you can run a heater or AC with a single battery not for very long right but you can do it I'm glad you brought that up cuz like I feel like I get so many questions about hey how many solar panels do I need to run my air conditioner it's not about the solar panels it's about what about the battery yeah yeah you got to have the capacity you got to have the ability to output the power and circling back that is why we go lithium over lead acid almost entirely is when you start getting to those high currents and let acid can't keep up your actual capacity drops to a fraction of what the battery is rated lithium that's not the case hundred amp hours at a hundred amps is the same as it wanting a little bit let's say you have a discharge that you can dial from zero to ten at zero you're rated for it'll run it for well it's zero it Symphony at one it'll run it for a hundred hour okay if you crank it up to ten it'll run it for ten hours okay that's lifting now with lead acid at one it'll do that hundred at ten it'll maybe only do two to five they really said they can't put out enough power interesting I so it just struggles you get voltage drops you get weird behavior it's just it's not something that we enjoy work all of our lithium batteries are rated for 10 plus years of daily use okay so you're looking at you know you'd have to replace your led ads system like three or four times now you guys are good friends with tiny watt solar as I saw my I remember when he was putting in my system he was saying that my batters should last thirteen years I believe it yeah that sounds about right to me that's crazy yes poor easy to me heavily cycling up a hundred percent depth of discharge every day you know might be a little less yeah which I'm not obviously yeah for most people's use you're not Oh below not even so not just 13 years my solar panel is rated for 25 years so I have a good amount of time on just my my system alone oh yeah and that's what's the difference between going a commercial-grade system over a lower-end company and I don't want to say who they would who that would be but there's a lot there's a lot of names out there and that's why people spend the money on you know panels like this batteries that are behind me etc and so forth panels are important batteries are important yes you know if you want to talk about really what like a heart of a system is I'm a believer in the charge controller is one of the most important things super critical and why is that well that's what's doing all the power transformation yeah figure these solar panels are operating at about forty to sixty volts mm your batteries twelve volts or maybe twenty four volts if you're a 24 volt system if you give it that 40 volt power and you're gonna fry your batteries so what this charge controller is doing is it's not only converting from that 40 volts down of that 12 it's also paying attention to how the actual silicon solar cells are performing okay there's a relationship between the voltage and amperage where you can kind of hit the max amount of power if you balance them just right so what these charge controllers are doing is constantly tracking where that point is based on the Sun conditions adjusting what they're doing to that so it's important to have a really good charge controller with one of your high-end panels yes and the company that you would recommend the most that you would go like that you guys have who do you guys carry for charge we use s are any I'm sorry a Chinese brand a lot of other brands are just rebranded versions of them so we just introduced right to the source they work really well they're really really good they're kind of hard to find okay unbranded once you see them you learn to recognize them in other brands if somebody contacts you through your website and it was like hey I want Victor on such a such reality you have them we're a dealer for all the main companies again Victor on we actually stock we're very very much a fan of their charge controllers they're kind of a premium option right come in at a little higher price point but with integrator Bluetooth and a bunch of other handy features that is pretty nice they they have some nice features tools so yeah they are regulating the power they have their various modes so you know if you set it to let acid and you have just a huge amount of solar coming in it's not gonna overcharge the battery so after the charge controller we have inverters and inverter Chargers yep but importantly between those you want fuses on the line alright so I was gonna go to to wiser fuses after every good that's okay because we're gonna go it's just not just wise with sizes yes I think that's a great extremely important that people just don't understand ya know it's hard to understand then after all of this by the way guys we were gonna go outside with John and he's gonna show us what he's been working on for the last couple days inverter and inverter charger there's two different types why is one better than the other they're all of a sudden that the price makes a massive jump it does yeah there are two main technologies there's modified sine-wave and pure sine your sine wave is the the kind of like nice curve like you're used to seeing sure it's very very nice complex electronics need that nice curve in order to know exactly what the ground voltage is there's a couple other reasons too but that's one of them a super nice smooth curve yeah is hard to do with DC power transformation okay modified sine wave instead of generating that really nice smooth curve kind of takes some shortcuts and it provides like more of a stepped curve okay what do you prefer pure sine by pure sound iPhone okay modified in practice what you end up getting is if you run any you know if you're running in computers or anything with a transformer in it or any audio equipment audio equipments a really good example my use case example is I was out at a festival I had a battery-powered sound system that I wanted and I had cheaped out and I bought a modified sine wave inverter for probably like 150 bucks yeah it worked great for charging devices for running lights when I plugged in that sound system so much static I'd really I didn't ask what an inverter does ah so the inverter it takes 12-volt DC or 24 whatever voltage but your DC power from your batteries yep and converts that into AC you like in your wall okay so it's a hundred 20 volt total range that's why it's 120 volt AC okay or 110 is also pretty common yeah but it's yeah it's obviously the otherworld AC all right okay that's pretty much Edison versus Tesla back in the day really important difference there is DC's just power moving in the circuit whereas AC is more of a vibration why did Edison win this battle when I say by the way when I when I you guys know I'm a Tesla fan obviously anybody that works with batteries is it now when we say Tesla we're not talking about the company we're talking about Nikola Tesla yes and that's what the company was named after everybody Nikola Tesla developed DC power yeah they they both worked with both kinds of power okay but Edison had more more skin in the AC game he won he won the battle behind it really really strong PR interesting fact a lot of the reason use AC nowadays is it's really efficient or longer range transmission oh yeah if DC you need really really thick wire to transmit a lot of power a long distance okay however there are a few extra like super super high voltage DC power transmission lines and we're talking like grid level country-to-country power transmission interesting so I find that stuff super neat I'm the kind of guy that you're you know nerd we people drive has to feel the cows and Moo yeah I Drive past a power substation and buzzes yeah there you go so back to the inverters DC power to AC power the pure sign modified sign we've gone over that okay yeah a little bit enough that I can't be bored you can be more into it there's a lot of guys online that'll make it really really clear what the differences he would talk in a technical term for everybody but I can guarantee you that it would make everybody's head explode because it's making - oh he is talkies I think you're trying to talk more - laughs I'm trying to talk to the land yeah just you know because we're all including myself it's not educated as well as like you or miles or tiny muscle or other big companies are we have a inverter and inverter charger yes what why is one three hundred dollars more five hundred more so the base inverter that just takes your DC and converts a day so you've got the inverter Chargers are bi-directional so you can say you have a burner charger in your van you go pull up to the the campsite it's got a local plug in you plug in charge of batteries that way that's what the ax murder charger is used for is you can literally chart you can you can plug in a grid yes okay you can plug into the grid you can plug into a generator could plug into really any source of that 110 120 volt AC generators or if you want to go off grid for a while generators are important if you want to use that my dad's a big RV here so he does he uses a lot of generating power and you know if you get enough solar on there you should never have to touch the generator particular you're right but I like to see Oh exactly there's always those backup plans and also like I think the old school our viewers they're just they just know about that that's what they do yeah they're used to the tack they're used to the rhythm of refueling and they are okay with that it is what it is we did you guys a crash course so we did solar panels we got batteries inverter you got the charge controller I feel one of the most important things I mean everything is freaking important at this point but your DC to DC charger yes so that we use the Sterling's for right we have 30 and 60 amp models yep what those do is they're fully programmable they're really smart they detect when your engine is on and the alternator's charging your main battery then they will funnel current over to your house power battery right your lithium bank right important thing that they do they're more older tech doesn't do is they convert voltage as well so sterling stuff yes okay so when you hook up a lead-acid battery to a lithium battery that's a big no-no lithium battery operates about a volt higher just happening is the lead acid battery just draws all the power to it turns it into heat and you just wasted all your power so with the DC of DC converter it separates those batteries and knows which is which and what's dead what's charged and keeps everything in line carries Stirling which I actually have in my van which I think are fantastic they're handy yeah you're about to start carrying the new victor ons yes which Victor on has an excellent model I haven't personally tested them yet but we've been hearing good things I feel that you're gonna have them on your shelf soon enough it is such a new product we'll see the only reason I bring that up is because the sterlings are a little bit of a pain to program they can be a pain once you get the hang of it it's not too bad but you know for our customers you're gonna be doing it the first time you're not gonna be doing it 10 times yeah once you program but one time you're good yeah did you have your set when Wes did mine he was like don't talk to me okay focus yeah you have to poke like you press it you know hold the button for 28 seconds yo let's switch or hold this button for 13 seconds let the pain yeah it's a pain to say the least you guys have connections with a bunch of different companies you have access to commercial grade panels you have access to other commercial grade products your other inverters that you have are not just Victor ons you have Co Texas which I also like a lot yeah we didn't talk much about Co tech but we stalk a ton of their products all other inverters we virtually have no issues with them okay burgers are one of the most problematic components they are I have an Outback which is also Mexican good they're a little bit more of a draw than let's say in in Bamako Texas or uh come on it's a really low I know consumption yes yeah idle consumption because that that is important and people don't realize when you do turn your inverter on you are draining your batteries with without running any other product yeah some of them on the market I've seen you can be drawn for amps just by having that inverter on Josie inverter yeah our goal is really getting the best okay so the main problem that people tend to have is part selection figuring out you know you go on Amazon there's 50 million types of the same item how do you know what's the right thing to get so our real function and purpose here is to know all of that stuff and have already done the legwork there so you come in you say I want to do this and I tell you well you this this this this this here you go can someone like myself that is not really well educated in the electrical field or renewable energy can I put my own system together absolutely do you guys offer consultations that help put together absolutely with no resale of course we want to make sure you can do what we're asking you to do okay so I will make sure you have an understanding exactly what you need to do and more than that you understand what's going on under the surface it's not just getting these products which you can help with it's getting the right wire sizes which we talked about it's getting the right connections to each of the products and like you said earlier it's having those inline fuses or breakers that are proper yes you can get those kind of components so people don't understand it's not just buying the five hundred and fifty dollar panel however much an inverter is you know a thousand dollar battery it's not about putting those it's you're also buying a bunch of wire yeah true true it's a lot of columns it does really click and like why is it so critical to have a certain size wire for like your battery to your charge controller why is it important to have a certain size wire and you can't go too big or too small maybe love well you can't go too big that's that's okay you go too big you're really just wasting money okay no it's not a safety hazard but if I can save you have fifty bucks by tightening up the wire size right the opposite what happens if your wire is too small is either you won't get enough power to where you need it let's go the wire it's helpful melt and you'll have a fire and that's what a lot of people go through like honestly I've seen it I've seen it to it happen and if you're living in your van with your power system and something's not sized right you have a fire that's not just your vehicle that might be your livelihood your home your everything so so we we are not gonna allow that do you hook people up with the wires and the connectors and while you're doing it you know you might have a wire that's rated for 45 amps okay and if you if you give it 9 TD amps you know maybe it won't melt immediately but it will melt and it we'll probably start a fire okay so what the breakers do is you know you set your breaker to maybe 55 60 amps and when it starts going above what the wire is rated for the breaker pops and cuts the circuit right so that protects your wire it protects your devices and it protects you yeah like will the system work without breakers and fuses absolutely will it be safe yeah yeah so that's why it's a safety precaution yeah it's a safety precaution awesome even choosing the right breaker is important yes if you have a line that's gonna carry 15 ounces yeah put a hundred and fifty amp breaker in there is that breaker gonna trip when you need it to probably not and you know it always fascinates me people always complain about oh you know that power box costs so much money and it's not like I said it's not just the panel's it's not just the inverter it's these breakers cuz these breakers are not cheap oh yeah the lot of the ones we use are about 50 bucks apiece apiece and you're putting 12 to 18 breakers and sometimes uh yeah one for each battery usually then maybe one or two for a couple of the other systems we tend to use fuses for the stuff that's a little less likely to blow let's say I add a fifth battery do I have to add another breaker absolutely Wow I do not know this yeah okay yeah okay so we like to have every line individually breaker diffused so you add another battery and it kind of depends how you're doing it but the way we do everything is we use combiner blocks and run lines individually huge batteries okay it's that way we can fuse or breaker each line and guarantee that all the batteries are being drawn from equally okay the side note but once you start having a large parallel bank where they're all just connected together mm-hm you connect to the outside corners usually but it'll still predominantly use the end batteries shirt over the center battery's silver you know in with lithium you have your 10-year lifespan over ten years of doing that the outside batteries are gonna get trashed way faster than the inside wall also mentioned running your battery bank parallel yes so you do run it parallel typically okay and then you run your panels series or parallel kinds on the side commonly we'll go up to two series a lot of the time well typically you guys you guys have one panel so you typically will only have one panel on but we're actually about the show okay a little while ago I did a box truck for a gentleman and that had eight panels on the roof there you go five kilowatt hour battery in there that was a big beefy system now if your panels at sixty volts and your charge controller can only do a hundred volts mm-hmm then you have to put them in parallel you can't do 120 volts a panel well maybe explain just quickly a series of pants a series in parallel or what great thing to explain yeah that'd be a while to really get in my brain okay series is when you kind of snake them together okay so you connect your positive of one panel to your negative of the next panel and you just make like a whole line for the circuit through all quick shortcut kind of thought there is series multiplier increases your voltage very well increases your capacity okay so if I have two 12-volt hundred amp hour battery you know if I put them in series I have a hundred amp hours at 24 volts if I put them in parallel I have two hundred amp hours of 12 volts thanks everybody this is why you hire professionals to build your electrical boxes because if you screw up wiring you can cause issues oh yeah I'm a huge advocate of people hiring people like yourself offering solutions PDX no matter customs I can keep going down the list of these people that I trust building power boxes over a DIY or trying to do it themselves oh yeah yeah quick look here but you guys have four containers we're not gonna go into each one of them yeah but this is your kind of suitable set up yeah our showroom I've got a couple of our battery options here and a couple of our combiner boxes as well one thing I want to point out these blocks here are sort of the core of a lot of our designs they take the place of busbars most people are familiar with the function of those yeah so instead of having you know a long exposed metal bar with a bunch of holes and it the underwire is sticking out of it looks all ugly you can use one of these interests the same function but they're rated for much higher amperage than most are do about 300 amps with those eight and one blocks yes so eight inputs one at one different outputs and I say in and out but it's really just it's all one thing dangerous odd but what does allow us to do is really bring all the individual systems together mmm and really cut down on stacking terminals use an extra wire it makes it so much nicer interest time so we love those these are more for your RV style breakouts so you might yeah go ahead and pop that open that's pretty cool yeah individually fuse DC lines and also some breaker desi lines that's okay so this as well as a built-in lithium charger so you can just plug it in to outside power and it'll charge your batteries automatically I think this was the one I have it's just a very simple distribution no it's this - that's just the charger aspect right that was a really popular I sell a lot of those yeah they're simple they're easy yeah this is like your your breakers for your AC and then this is your DC yep fuses exactly cool we were talking about it's my favorite battery they are super sweet oh you know I forgot all about these these are all that I mean we're gonna go outside but like these are all your your charge controllers and rubião EP ever right there that was our prior popular one till we found the SRM e which is this one right here huh looks that looks familiar to a company that I know they just got a branded it themselves I get it that's super common a lot of those out there a lot of different brands you know I go on Amazon I look at charge controllers I'm gonna see probably 10 different versions yeah right and then we also have the remote meters put into that and by the way this is super important for anybody that wants to get a charge controller at the MPPT yes and absolutely is so much better than the PWM yes you got me on pulse width modulated as that one and then happy is maximum power point tracking and no that's just super important that have the MPPT yeah I was talking about where it kind of constantly keeps track okay an optimal standpoint PWM a doesn't do that but the B only goes up to about twenty volts most of the times so our panels he can't even use it and just hit in a direct comparison MPPT is about 30% more efficient most of the cases nice so you really are getting more power out of it this project is are these together accurate these are together okay so this is the power system that's gonna be charged by these two panels which sha which panels are these these are the 290s so they are the kind of older tech but they are really really good bang for your buck okay price per watt is the lowest on these out of anything I didn't show what the price is what what do these go these are two 45 for the panel 140 that's actually not bad at all I think the price went up a little bit okay to hundreds for the panel around the upper 400s for the kit nice the kit includes the charge controller wiring fuses breakers you know yeah everything you would need to get the power from the Sun into your batteries awesome and now you've been putting this together it's not complete yeah no this is not complete I'm actually kind of early on in it most of what I'm doing here is the part placement and wire flow or any of these mounted and nothing nothing's mounted yet so kind of in flux but this is for the most part final design Wow you put four liens on this thing oh wow and he's putting it all in a truck yes so it's going to be mounted in the truck bed but I believe he is planning to do sort of a winch system so we can winch it up into the cab after when he wants to take the cap off and kind of keep the system all together that is so awesome it's gonna be a neat little piece of equipment so we've got the breakers their fuses fuses you know every lines protected you really just want to make sure in a accidental scenario you know something you can't predict you know I trip and fall and yank on the wire what if that contacts something yeah you want to be prepared to make sure that even in the worst case scenario nothing explodes you know you don't think of it Zack numbers but what is something like this cost for you to do for for clients this system something like this is probably in the 5 to 10 grand rainy ok once you're factoring in the install especially yeah parts alone I mean these are roughly eleven or twelve hundred cows DeMarco says not cheap charge controllers I think 250 or 300 Sterling's 300 I mean this is probably about a five grand setup right here yeah plus your install your labor is not cheap like unfortunately guys like we have to pay for labor yeah but again it takes the headache out of me doing it and having somebody professional doing it that's my biggest thing about it I do not want to worry about my power system I would rather pay someone who'd labor to do it it is on a forklift oh yeah that is solar powered forklift way of doing things because the battery is a 48 or I believe it's a 48 volt battery yeah but the panel is a 20 volt panel we have to use a step-up converter okay so it's stepping the voltage up from 12 volts do you mind getting in and just kind of doing a little small demonstration because like normally when you start a forklift up you hear the motor start on and everything else I'm gonna shut up and you're gonna listen to this that's it that's it it's on you can lower that don't drop your box obviously we are getting a special treatment right now it is an extension for the video I am with somebody that works directly with miles Jason from off-grid solutions PDX and he's very very good at he's a DI wires dream pretty much but why is he important right now into this video his background is our renewable energy his background is building solar kits and he's like hey man I have a kit that I just finished so you're now going to see a fully wired professional wired kit and Jason gonna talk a little bit about that right now you wired up this gem you know we've been playing with a little over the wheel well systems for a while and trying to make them as compact as possible and that's pretty compact this is kind of our standard gift that we like to call our band life package the same thing miles would sell is kind of what we determine is kind of a good weekend or package maybe add a battery or two if you want to live in a full time type thing but do you cover this up this will all be covered up okay most the people would build like a separate kind of like an l-shaped box is kinda what I recommend that would go either to the front and around it or to the bed or wherever you want to write it and then cover it back up this way follow if you guys hear some noise it's because these guys are actually working outside and I just bother Jason but anyways you have to this is a weekender kind of like you said so it's 200 amp hours or I guess 210 yeah 105 and power so pretty cool you see little batteries there they're really compact and they do a really good job beautiful inverter this is one of the cleanest wiring jobs [Music] super duper clean components so it's easy to diagnose what's going on and get to everything so speechless oh it's very very very very very well done I've already talked to John about this a little bit from white harvest why is it so important to hire somebody to do all of this instead of me as a DIY are doing it myself well I mean if you're paying the money and you don't really know what you're doing you're risk you know messing up the components or just having issues in the future and don't know how to troubleshoot that it could cost you a lot of time and make you feel like you didn't spend your money well so you know it's one little itty bitty crimp for a small connection can cause so many heartaches along the way especially driving down the road and that's the biggest thing that we determine is it's a moving earthquake pretty much what we yeah send the bands down so and John and I talked on a little bit it's like it's super important like this size wire it has to be important and this size wire has to be important you know just in your entire setup and obviously with your background you know all of that yeah I mean it's it's definitely all math Dan today what it comes down to and we don't want to be using any bigger wire than we have to because flat out it's expensive the good OFC wire is very expensive up to four or five dollars a foot for some of the bigger stuff so you know you want to use the correct size wire we don't waste a bunch of money on stuff you don't need either cheese - you did such a great job we're gonna have Jason on I think as a follow-up to the electrical wizard but if you are interested in either having John build a system Jason building system or any of the other people I have on my channel Jason can be reached at off-grid solutions PDX comm right on you're in the van building Central Community in Portland we are this is like yes if Jason's booked we have other people but I guarantee you how longs it take you to build something like this Jeff put together and put in the van and why not we're also doing Peter forum - so somewhere around you know what are you doing like an air cop yeah cool that you solved that's your do I've dream you can install either you can install systems you can go in and put in wall panels if you need anything we can do we try to do it more Alucard not here here's an empty van build the whole thing and give it back to us all right thank thing but uh hello car I like that somebody needs a roof vent put in yep itemized everything out and they can think what they want me to do and what they think they can do themselves a step on budget and time and all those sort of things so you are a dear wise dream John thank you very very much for kind of giving us a show around light harvest solar thanks to Miles for allowing me to do this as well again check them out at light harvest solar calm and if you are in the Portland area and you want to set up an appointment with John I'm sure he'd be more than happy right yeah come on by and if you have other other questions you can either email them or give them a call again they do like all of these containers are off-grid and you'll power them and obviously your entire setup here is off grid you like to live what we sell oh there you go look at that you guys yeah I'd love that so I'm really you get back to work funny I'm sorry for taking you away from all right guys later thank you [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jarrod Tocci

Views: 116,416

Rating: 4.8843122 out of 5

Keywords: van life solar power, tiny watts solar, how to install solar power, how to do van solar, where to find solar products, victron energy, relion battery, battle born battery, solar power, vanlife solar, lion battery, how to make a solar kit, van life solar kit, lithium battery, digital nomad, jarrod tocci, van life vlog, van life ideas, vanlife, how to live vanlife, how to build a van, how to design a van conversion, how to design a camper van, how to design a van build

Id: gsNaLQkbhKs

Length: 38min 54sec (2334 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020