Solar Power Kit Explained for a Van Build - Off Grid

goes in here we've got positive and negative it's fused on the positive solar input comes down to your charge controller positive and negative so it comes into the solar charge controller back out again a fuse on the positive comes over here into the positive distribution block battery one with its own breaker battery two with its own breaker all into the positive distribution block follows in through the distribution block through a nice fat wire through a giant fuse into another fat wire into the positive of the inverter each battery has its own equal length negative wire tell me this thing's fired up and running good so we're going to give it a test what's going on guys as you guys probably see i have a whole bunch of solar equipment behind me i am doing a really cool video with miles from the owner of light harvest solar i actually don't think you've ever been on my channel now that i'm thinking about it you have not no no just your uh your manager john yeah so his manager john that runs light harvest solar here but he is the owner and operator and all of this goodies behind us are all his products that he sells that's what we're doing that's what we're doing installing a sprinter right now in a customer's rig and the customer's right actually it's right here and that's my tripod for the camera so we are going to show all this off there's going to be a lot of information in this video all right guys so i do have my gopro handy and when miles is going to be going over something i'm going to try and get a little bit closer so i can have actually two cameras running which i this is going to be an editing nightmare for me but this is what i want to do for you guys we have here a two battery system two battery two lithium batteries uh 105 amp hours each so 210 amp hours of lithium batteries and like you said this is already for a client the client actually agreed for us to do all of this we are showing there's a lot going on here buddy so really kind of break it down from all the way from what you're putting on the roof which is this big mama jammer back here to what the heck all of this stuff is because i really feel that this is probably the most important part of a vandals which is power don't have much of that electricity right we all think that electricity is so just whatever in a house because you flick a switch on and you plug in a hook top or whatever this is like this is what powers all of that in an off-grid vehicle let's start with the solar panel sure okay so uh this particular solar panel is a celeria power xt 370 that just came out in my opinion this is the best panel made in the world there's a few reasons why when they first came out they kind of revolutionized the the panel world and everybody's kind of trying to copy them the biggest reason why is because it's got parallel strings right they've all come down right here and then they all meet right in here all the energy comes through so if you have partial shading normally in a panel it'll cut the whole panel off in kind of the older style panels when this came out what it does is if you block this one it'll really only block this section and the rest of the panel will produce and that ends up in real world being quite a big deal the production of these is quite a lot higher than just about anything this is a single panel 370 watts there's a lot of advantage to doing um one panel as opposed to like four 100 watt panels i do want to say by the way for everybody right now miles and i are going over the entire system we are going to sit down with miles again in a very future video actually two or maybe even three we're gonna literally talk only solar panels we're not gonna talk about the rest and then in a completely another video we're gonna talk about just batteries what are the differences between agm gel lithium and then there's like three or four different types of lithium so we're gonna go into that in a different video this video is just about the entire setup itself just be patient please because we can't fit everything into one video so this one is again about all of the systems so you do sell uh a bunch of different commercial grade panels yeah they're all big they're all powerful you don't sell the 100 waters no because there's no reason to have them the only reason why they even exist is to be shippable through the mail let me tell you the downside of these i have to buy a full pallet of them that's 30 panels i have to have a forklift sometimes i have to have a business license to even get a hold of them they're too big to ship via ups that's the really the only reasons why everybody doesn't run these so the ones that you buy off amazon are not these no they're not they're not you can't ship them that way you can't not really that's going to do an industrial uh array solar array is going to put a thousand 100 watt panels when they could put it would be about the equivalent of you know 300 200 250 of these right is this what you see on somebody's house oh yeah okay that's all there okay oh yeah and they're the best technology biggest manufacturers lower price ul rated almost none of those little panels are unrated there's a whole bunch of advantages and that is exactly why we're doing a video on solar panels themselves we might not want to go into detail with that the only disadvantage to these is they're hard to get they're not hard to get if you go through it they're not hard to get that's what i do that's my business model is i buy a lot of them and i sell them in kits yeah one panel your business is really focused on van life boat life uh the end of the video we're going to show this actually all put together right i mean this is going to be crazy the function absolutely yeah batteries what the heck these things are why you have different wires and sizes sure like breakers and i just gave you a whole bunch of information but yeah let's get into that let's switch over to this and we're going to talk to you probably the biggest thing that we do for people is figure out the real specific that's sometimes not easy to do it took us a fair amount of time but let me just go over the components here real quick we got the batteries that's going to be like equivalent to your gas tank so this is going to be like your gas pump the batteries are going to be your gas tank this particular one has two uh lithium batteries uh the practical limit for doing it this way is about four sometimes with people really want to be high performance top end stuff they'll do six in general it's it tends to be between two and four two tends to be the practical minimum even a one battery system is quite effective and quite powerful uh the reason why we use these line energy batteries there's a few reasons they're the best on the market right now but the biggest a number one reason is because it's got 150 amp discharge each that's like 1.8 kilowatt and compared to most of them are 100 100 amp hours that's 1.2 kilowatts you generally need about eight 1500 watts minimum to really do the job that you need to do and so you know if you're doing a one battery system this is the only battery i would get and again even beyond that that's the only battery i would get for a bunch of reasons it's small it's light it's a little less expensive it's got a lifetime warranty to 3 500 cycles 150 amp discharge rate which is absolutely top notch we have our solar charge controller which will take the power from the solar panel it turns it into the battery power uh this an mppt what it does is it takes a high voltage and this is a much higher voltage than these little 100 watt panels 50 and uh 50 volts and then this of course is the uh dc dc charger to charge from the alternator you basically hook it up to the car battery and it will charge while you're driving so they look very similar but they do very different things i mean in reality inside they do they kind of do the similar things they change the voltage they change the voltage from one to another um and then they regulate it this is in between the solar panel and the batteries this is between the car alternator and the battery awesome and they both basically regulate charge the 130 100 volts maximum okay okay so in other words if this is 50 volts i could put two of these in series and make it 100 volts perfect 30 amps maximum is the discharge the the output and and i've seen these do over 30 amps so um this is the charge controller you uh you want you could go with a 42 bit but a 30 is just fine if you were written read in 30 and you said this can put out more than 30 sometimes is that okay yeah it just turns off these all have i mean no i'm sorry it doesn't turn out if it regulates it to 30. okay so it won't go higher than three and and when i see 30 it's few and far between a couple of times a year but you can get like i believe you sell a 150 the 50 uh yeah you get 50 amp ones uh and and but it's more expensive and there's really not a reason to do it okay so there's no we're not going to sell you something that's 200 more for um a case that's going to come into play once a year i mean bringing 30 amps into your batteries is plenty it's a lot of power it is a lot of power yeah for sure and you can charge your your two battery system very quickly off at 30 amps uh yeah i mean that's a fairly decent capacity so 30 amps let me just do a little bit of math here it's 105. i mean it would take like uh in general solar is varying a lot depending on the length of the days and how much sun you have so the amount of time it's going to take to charge those is going to vary a lot you know in the worst of the oregon winters it might take you know like four or five days in the best of the oregon summers or anywhere else it's going to take three quarters of a day okay something like that i love that answer because question people ask me all the time it depends on where you are in the country where you're in the world angle of the sun time of year everything yeah the two biggest factors and there's a bunch of factors uh but the two biggest ones are the time of the year which which means the length of the day the cloud cover yep right how much sun there is and then there's smaller factors like you said the angle of the sun etcetera etcetera etcetera if you're under trees and things like that yeah the orion um dc to dc charger wow this thing is beefy huh it is beefy um the orion dc to dc charge here uh that 30 again that's 30 amps i presume okay and the 12 to 12 is 12 the dc to dc yeah essentially 12 volts to 12 volts now lithium batteries are about a volt higher than lead acid batteries which is what you have in your starting battery so this needs to go from your starting battery bump it up about a volt or something like that and then charge these and it's all regulated so it'll turn off when you need to turn off when the batteries are full etc etc between the solar panel you could get up to 30 amps and then this would be another 30 amp so so you could conceivably have 60 amps going into the batteries this is your mpb or excuse me your uh mc4 cable that's right this is that goes from there to there oh yeah okay so mc4 is what's on the back of this it's a standard solar connector any good solar panel is gonna have those um here's the tie through to go through the roof okay okay it's gonna come down into your charge controller now it's going to go through a fuse and these are the fuse we used again one of the things that we do is we've tried every fuse we have been able to dial into what we really like we just pick what we think is the very best and go with it and that's really all we do is really difficult for people is fusing because you don't you know how do you even know that what size this is right you get what are you gonna do order a bunch of things you don't know jeez man you have so many different sizes and it all has to be perfect too you can't mess any of this stuff up and the fuse has to match how much electricity you're anticipating to move so basically you can see right here is a number 10 wire right high voltage in through a fuse it's a high quality fuse this is a called a midi fuse with a lug that fits this wire and then as it's coming out you're going to get a low voltage with high amps so now you need to move to a bigger wire you can see how much bigger it is you need what is this one a 10 no uh this is a 10. oh this is an eight okay okay so you're capable of moving uh maximum i think of 45 amps this should be about 30. uh but you then you have to have number eight right then you have to have a bigger a bigger fuse for it and everything so if there's a million details that have to be right and that's what we really do because it's a major pain all of these are fused on the positive so basically you've got an input in from the solar panel through a fuse on the positive wire into the charge controller a wire coming out through another fuse on the positive and then that's going to go to the distribution essentially you've got a positive and a negative right so this is going to be the same as your batteries everything comes in everything goes out you can see i can put eight small things in okay just a wire goes in there and it clamps down and i got two big ones out these are not you don't see a lot of these in other people's power boxes why do you carry these why are these different than or what are these really yeah okay so those took me a long time to find um they were a major headache uh they're by far the best out there for a couple reasons essentially a bus bar okay it's the same as a bus bar the what makes these ones better is one they'll do 310 amps and we're moving a lot with these modern lithium systems you can move a lot of power around and that's a huge um problem with a lot of these systems is they'll use bus bars that are not rated to move this much power around okay so that's the first thing is you can move a lot of power around the second thing is is that you can see there's no open terminals most people will do bus bars and then they'll you know make another crimp put it on the bus bar and you've got a whole bunch of live open terminals inside your thing which is really super dangerous to do this keeps it so you don't have to use one of these terminals and you you just strip the wire stick it in call it good so the two major advantages are of over a traditional bus bar is there's no exposed terminals which is that's the safety thing and it's an e they're very easy to use because you just put the wire in and clamp it down sorry about that lots of details no this is great i think everybody's gonna love it yeah and of course i'd love to talk too do you have some really thick wire here buddy what the heck is going on absolutely super duper important okay you have to size the wire for the amount of electricity that is going in and out essentially it's like this you can't feel a lake through a straw some of these times we're trying to trying to fill a lake and there's a elect the amount of electricity that's being moved around is different everywhere you know we got 30 amps here we got 30 amps here but right here this is going to your inverter right here we have a 2000 watt inverter so while we might have 30 amps here this is going to be more like 170 180 amps right okay so tons of power we're going through we need to have tons of wire again that's what we can do that is really hard for other people to do because they just don't have the skill set to know how to do it to size the wires big wires big inverter run between the essentially the batteries fuse big fuse holy crap that's a 300 amp fuse fuse yeah and then of course it's got to be beefy it's got to be quality this particular fuse is a really nice one i've had tons of problems with the standard amazon ones they'll get all hot i've had a melt i haven't had one catch on fire yet but i absolutely have had to melt so the problem is is people don't know which fusion which views you're going to buy you look at the ratings and then you read and you know but you don't know really what you're getting until it's in your hands right and you really don't know if it's going to work until you install it and once you install it if it's not working good it's a big bummer because it's a big problem and all of these things have to be perfect all the crimps have to be perfect all the fuses have to be high quality everything has to work or you don't have a working system so the inverter this is for the client it's a 2001 inverter however this is not an inverter charger that's right you have an inverter charger right here for us that's right what is the difference between these two sure again per client that's what they wanted that's what they wanted right and they're cheaper they are cheaper so the difference is is that this is an inverter this is going to turn battery power dc into house power ac so it's 12 volts dc to 120 volts alternating current which is the main thing you need because you can plug in and you can get your alternating current power you can charge computers laptops you can do whatever you can production yeah everything cooking wise microwaves coffee bots toaster ovens vacuum cleaners big drills big sauce big whatever that's what this is for that's what this will do gotcha this does exactly the same thing and in addition to that if you uh plug it in to the outside world that means shore power at a campsite a generator your house anything it will also charge the batteries and it will power your alternate all your plugs in your rig okay right so the difference is is this will take battery power to house power yep this will take battery power to house power and it will charge your batteries when you uh are plugged in from the outside world so it's just an additional feature tends to be you know four or five hundred dollars depending on the brand and what kind of meters you need to run it super picky with what i'll even sell because inverters are the traditionally the absolute least reliable component of the entire system the least reliable oh yeah horrible right and so when you have something that works and works good that's what you go with the worst thing you could do is get something off of like amazon or something like that that has the features but it's a lot less expensive you got one month if it breaks you're out 400 bucks or 500 or 600 something which and they can so i've seen them last a month i've seen them last six months you want something longevity-wise the quality is highly variable yeah and i just don't have time to mess around and dink around with nonsense right so i just go straight to the good stuff i only use it i'm super loyal to the brands that i like uh you have a distribution box i believe right right so basically this these are going to be your distribution for your really high power stuff okay um and then it's going to go through a wire to this and this has alternating current and direct current so this is your small stuff like your lights your fridge your pumps all your small dc stuff you know and then this is also going to have your alternating current which is your house power and you've got a breaker breaker breaker breaker breaker and it's flush mounted so you know you cut a hole in your cabinet you'll be able to see it you have easy access to all your breaker all your fuses on the dc side all your breakers on the ac side and then you can you know write what they are for you need that in one way or another that particular component is again what we think is the best this is so much happening right here right biggest question is can somebody get all of this off of you oh that's hot really i mean it's not the only way we do things but by far the most common way because most people don't want to deal with any of this my i guess yeah my question is is can they just call you up or email you and say hey i want exactly all of this and they can purchase it all through absolutely it's it's a it's a fairly easy process at this point they call and we have a conversation about what kind of vehicle or what their application is and then we decide a few things we decide what panel they want um or panels they want depending on the application we decide what batteries that how many batteries they want okay okay we decide how big of an inverter they want yep okay typically it's a 2000 or 3000 there's not much of a reason to go less than two there's not much of a reason to go above three we find out if they want an inverter or an inverter charger right by the way that's a three thousand guys that's a three thousand inverter charger we find out if they want alternator charging right which i think is essential yeah and then most people just need that and there's and then beyond that that's the only information we need to know to do everything we need to do right from there we just jot it down get your email get your name and send you an estimate with everything you need and then all the stuff that nobody wants to figure out is already figured out you get all the all the wiring sized right all the lug sized right you get a drawing uh schematic you do get a drawing which is right down there yeah that matches this system we give you a little bit of extra hardware just in case you mess up some extra lugs some extra fuses and then we send it out of course we offer free tech support if you buy it from us and thank you again for laying all this out for us um sure all right so miles you have all this stuff here right um you're now selling a product that i am infatuated with uh and i actually want one myself and you are really up in your game with it but if somebody doesn't want to deal with all of this they now can get something like like again the reason why i want it because i want an overland rig can you show me what this is yeah sure so basically we have this right here which is an all-in-one power unit that is all basically everything in here except for maybe the alternator charger because you just do it a different way is in here we've got a 1.8 kilowatt hour uh lithium battery which is just a little bit smaller than those two uh we've got a thousand watt inverter which is again just a little bit smaller than that so it's inverter solar charge controller and lithium battery and then a few small things like usb ports cigarette lighter and things like that so you can see the plugs are right up here yeah and it just is super easy you don't have to put all this uh all this together this is really the first product on the market that has nails all of it hi you know really reliable small light powerful and you just plug the solar in and you're ready to go they're portable which is really nice because it makes it so you can you know if i've got a saw over there i want to do but i don't want to search through my house for a extension cord i just pick that up and draw it take it over there i take it camping all the time the reason one of the reasons why you like this particular configuration and what's on the inside of this the panels you sell that's right are a higher voltage right and can actually charge this that's right and this is one of the first a you know absolutely critical in my world i just never use the small panels there's no unless unless there's a space consideration on the roof unless i have to but if you use your panel with another portable power station that it won't charge or will it or some people are getting their head in the game okay it's a very competitive thing there's people getting their head in the game but um but a lot most of them don't it's even worse than that a lot of them will make it so that you have to buy their product and then their product is quadruple market price so anything with an mc4 cable can hook up to this um well yeah yeah sure anything they can but that's not the that's not the determining factor the determining factor is the panel voltage gotcha right this will take a high panel voltage and has an mppt controller priced on something like this all in one thousand watt inverter what would it be uh 1150 on that 1150 you have another one that's uh similar looking um it's slightly more expensive but it's bigger yeah it's exactly the same in every respect except for it's got a bigger battery in it so it's physically a little bit longer it's a little bit heavier it's got a bigger battery which is equates to a bigger gas tank price on that uh 1850 okay kilowatt hour lithium battery same 1001 inverter 1000 watt inverter 500 watt mppt charge controller and then hopefully in about a month month and a half a couple months a couple months you're going to get another version of this that is a 2001 inverter 2000 watt inverter should have a 2 kilowatt hour battery lithium it should have a 700 watt mppt charge controller a bunch of plugs 25 amp dc output for say your fridges or your lights or whatever you got on dc and what is that gonna run about two grand about two grand okay and then just in comparison what is all of this run give or take a ballpark four four thousand like if they were to buy it and then if they were to put it together it's about four grand even with even with this bad larry uh that's gonna maybe be 45 45. okay so okay cool and that's including panel yeah okay so that's wow you have a really good price there you said this was roughly four to five thousand depending on components and battery if you add another battery looking at another thousand dollars easily if somebody was to do it themselves great if somebody was to hire miles or nomadic customs builds them or other people build them jason whoever um how much does the labor vary so it's another four grand on top of that okay put it on top right okay uh and again that's gonna be soon one of the advantages using these smaller ones is because then i don't have to use my hours to build this right how many hours does this take um it takes us this system uh all the way in all the way tested all the way programmed all the way functioning is gonna i think i quoted in 42 hours 42 hours and that's usually i think you have two guys usually working on it yeah so it's really it's like 20 hours worth of time but it's two guys working so 40 something hours right so that's why people don't have to understand this there's a lot of details that have to be perfect have to be perfect okay guys we are now with miles and the entire kit is assembled and the solar panels on the roof so we're just going to show pretty much all that all done so here is miles we are up on top of that green van we're just pulling this project together here and i wanted to do a quick uh rundown of everything that is important to know for you uh so the first thing to know is the mounting brackets this is how we mounted it on to the van we actually went through we've got six of those uh we did vhp double-sided tape uh the solar panel wires is a positive and a negative with an mc4 wire goes into the um the strain relief is what this is called it goes down into there we cut a hole in the roof and now we have um solar power down in there and this is the 370 watt celeria power xt you see it fits really nicely up there it's very stealth once you um get down from below and look at it so let's go into the van and we'll show you okay so now we're going to go inside this will be explained in a minute on why we even have that quick overview um wire through this this is called a snap ring i believe make sure that we use p clamps to secure our wires everywhere any sharp edges right here we're going to avoid and we're going to bend the wire to avoid them and we're also going to use what's called split loom comes down here and goes around a sharp edge there's a nice sharp edge there we had to put loom and and we zip tie it so we make sure that it's away from that sharp edge comes down here same thing sharp edge goes in here we've got positive and negative it's fused on the positive okay here's your solar input comes down to your charge controller positive and negative you can see here i had to cut this um sheathing back without cutting the black wire then i had to fabricate these so it comes into the solar charge controller back out again a fuse on the positive comes over here into the positive distribution block here's battery one with its own breaker battery two with its own breaker all into the positive distribution block follows in through the distribution block through a nice fat wire through a giant fuse into another fat wire into the positive of the inverter each battery has its own equal length negative wires every single one of these wires this positive positive positive positive has to be the same equal length in this design comes up uh negative into your inverter this is going to take battery power turn it into house power 12 volt dc to 120 volt ac um and uh they tell me this thing's fired up and running good so we're going to give it a test big test with our gigantic dewalt saw the one thing i didn't see miles was actually the breaker panel where are you going to be installing oh uh that's um going to be right here so you haven't this is going to be in the closed box we left it open for you guys so we can actually give you that quick demonstration of it all at the end correct correct okay when this is enclosed that's where the breaker panel will be yeah which will be accessible to the client for them to switch off fuses or for whatever that case yep ac breakers and dc breakers awesome rdz fuses right okay so you want to try and give this a whirl see if we can run this i haven't even had it going yet so we're gonna do it let's grab some wood and of course it has to work perfect right off the bat so we'll see i hope this works so miles that was great thank you for demonstrating that for us buddy that was um that's a big old miter saw that your inverter handles quite easily i don't think you guys really understand um what his and his team have done um for us today i know that this was a serious crash course in everything that we are talking about this is really just a a drop in the bucket and this is the beginning um we i want to show more about this but it's hard it's hard to pack it into one video our attention spans are just not there in regards to just life hopefully you guys really saw what you needed so far um again we are going to see miles really really soon to find him before we cut the video uh best way to get in contact with you is lighthearted uh yeah website uh liveharvestsolar.com and your emails are on the website and everything like that yeah i mean miles at lightharvestsolar.com yeah john lightharvestsolar.com you keep up with times i know you do well you got to stay on the forefront because it's changing by the day yeah so any new products that are going to be hitting market in regards to whatever he actually buys them you test them blow them out you blow them up it's kind of crazy all the time all right guys uh please uh give them a follow check them out light over solar miles thank you again if you're going to see a heck of a lot more of this guy because i need them i need them all right [Music]

Channel: Tocci Tiny Tours

Views: 98,992

Keywords: van life, sprinter van conversion, solar power, van conversion, solar system, off grid solar, van life build, off grid, van life vlog, van life solar setup, van life solar, van life solar system, van life solar install, how to install solar in a van, victron, jarrod tocci, ghost van, how to set up solar power, how to set up solar power for camper, how to set up solar power system, portable power station, diy solar panel system, diy solar power

Id: 6uJZvjOswAE

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020