The Only Batteries I would Install in a Skoolie, RV, or Van

if you were looking for the best battery to run your bus RV or van conversion this year or the next you have a ton of options too many in fact but after dozens of hours of research and 3 years living off grid in our 40ft school bus conversion I've narrowed it down to just one that I think is perfect for almost everybody W out here oh boy okay and here it is the signature solar eg4 24v 200 amp server rack battery this is the battery that I think will work best for most applications with a couple caveats at the end the video I've got two other options to consider for you in case you want to build a 12vt battery bank or if you don't want to touch any tools or be responsible for wiring or fusing your whole system correctly I've got something for you too welcome back to my channel my name is Justin if you're new here we make videos about building living in and touring homes on the road and I've got several awesome tours coming up for you soon but today we're going to talk about building and one of the most important elements of that is your off-grade battery bank it's expensive it's something you're going to purchase once and you want to get it right now real quick I want to talk about the state of the Li lithium battery market today 5 years ago when I was building this bus there were almost no options in the market and they were extremely expensive because of that I focused only on American backed companies with big 10-year warranties this narrowed me down to two products the battleborne 12vt 100 a lithium iron phosphate battery and the Lion energy 115 amp hour no 105 amp hour but they both cost about $900 to $1,000 each and it turns out these batteries have proven to be very reliable so having a 10-year warranty or an american-backed company to me at this point is much less important which opens us up to a ton of extremely affordable options if you were to buy this signature solar battery today it'll cost you $1,259 and it's equivalent to four battleborne batteries which still cost about $900 each that's $3,700 versus $159 and you would still have to wire it INF fuse it which is going to cost extra money it's really kind of a no-brainer those dinosaur companies forget about them forget about it forget about it now let's talk about form factor because in a bus rvr van there's only a few locations where we can put a battery Bank like this maybe in a couch maybe in a cabinet maybe underneath the bed but we need the size to be appropriate now this battery is 17 1/2 wide 18 and 1/2 long and 6 in tall and you can lay them on their back or you can stack them on top of each other so I think they're quite adaptable in a great size even though they're quite big to most the spaces that we would put them in at 24 volts with 200 amp hours of capacity we've got a bit over 5 KW hours of storage in just this one battery which is quite a lot now if you're wondering how much battery you need I recommend if you are a one person or possibly two living in a smaller rig like a van or a short bus you might be able to get by with one if you have a larger rig and up to four people living in your bus I think you definitely need to and if you want to be sure that you have plenty of storage because you've got an all El electric rig maybe a whole family living in there maybe you want to run too many split air conditioners and you want to get through like for example the winter in the Pacific Northwest where there's not a ton of sun then I definitely think you should get three batteries or maybe even four batteries now one of the great things about this server rack battery besides its form factor the fact that there's basically four batteries in this is it has its own breaker which means that you don't have to fuse it because the wires coming to it and from it are protected by that breaker and the breaker also serves as a shut off switch so you can shut off each individual battery to service them if that's something you end up needing to do you probably won't though now this 24volt battery has a 100 amp discharge rating and that means you can run 2400 WS continuous out of just one of these batteries so a 3000v multiplus by victron which is a really popular inverter will work with one but you want to bump up to two batteries at least if you're going to be doing any more than 2400 WTS like running a water heater and a mini split at the same time because that'll bring you up to a 200 amp discharge rating with two batteries in parallel and that will allow you to pull 4,800 Watts from your battery Bank additionally this battery's got all the safety features we need like a BMS that will shut it off before it gets completely depleted as well as a overcharge current limiter and a low temperature protection shut off this battery if frozen if you charge it with your solar power let's just say you're at like a ski resort and you're gone all day and your bus is out in the sun and your battery is froze Frozen it's going to damage it if you charge it and the battery doesn't know not to do that if it doesn't have a low temperature protection shut off so this one has that as well and it's something that you probably need by the way if you'd like help planning your electrical system check out our patreon schoy support.com where myself and Chuck Cassidy who's been building School Bus convs for over 10 years provide unlimited monthly Consulting for a fee you can also sign up for free I'm going to be updating members on great price batteries in the future so check out our patreon schooly support.com you can expect this battery to last at least 5,000 life cycles if you charge it down to just 5% which is what I recommend that you do because I want you to get the most out of this battery and 5,000 life cycles is going to take a really long time probably close to 10 years even after those 10 years it's still going to work the storage is just going to slowly degrade kind of like your phone but just way slower it comes with a 5-year warranty from signature solar and the only downside is that they have a $150 flat rate shipping fee so basically you got to add on 150 bucks for One battery 75 for 2 50 for 3 so on and so forth but they don't have free shipping like a lot of the other manufacturers and if you want to get something small smaller than this there's a more affordable option coming up soon now for years all we really had was those plastic cased group 24 group 31 batteries and you had to basically rip them apart to service them but with this server rack battery we've got this great metal case and you can just take off the lid to check it out make sure everything's okay so before you send it off for a warranty you can just figure out oh for some reason I have a lose connection boom this thing is really quite a monster so this right here if I had two of them which is what I would buy to replace my battery bank with it would be about a third more capacity than what I have down here and as you can see I had to wire all these together myself and fuse them and all this wiring and fusing probably cost back then at least $100 maybe more like 150 and these days would cost like 250 bucks we've come a long way since back when I built this bus and built that battery bank and these days this is really all that the bus Community is installing as long as they're building a big system I've installed a couple of these before I went out to Texas to help one of the schoolly support memories finish their build this battery is just a total Beast now if for some reason you want to build a 12vt system like for example you want to replace your RV's lead acid battery bank with lithium or you like to build a small camper or an Overland rake or something where you don't need a robust battery bank then signature solar is too much battery at too much of a price with too much shipping if that's the case I recommend you check out Li time this is a battery manufacturer and retailer that has proven to be very reliable still has a 5-year warranty and makes great batteries they have a 12vt 100 amp hour battery for just $310 with free shipping as well as a 12vt 230 amp battery for just $620 still free shipping both of these batteries have low temperature shut off protection but most of the batteries do not so be sure that you get these two and not the other ones if you need that links are of course below and from lie time I can offer you a 3% discount for buying through that link so check it out and if you don't even want to wire an off-grid battery bank at all because you're intimidated by the tools the wire sizes the fuses you don't want to put yourself in Jeopardy in the future by getting something wrong because improperly sized wires and poorly made connections can cause fires then we actually have something in the market now called a solar generator which I'm sure you've seen which could actually replace your whole offgrid system these days it's good to learn things I'm so happy that I made my own offgrade system I've installed several of them now but there's a lot of things to learn and it doesn't mean that you have to know how to do that most people don't and it's not going to be useful for you forever unless you're building things a lot like I seem to be and right here I've got a great example of high value solar generator and this one is called the Mega 2 and it's made by a company called oops they also make the three and the five and there's a couple key reasons why this is one of the best options in the market right now for your bus conversion RV or van now this one the Mega 2 is a great solution for a smaller rig it's 18 in Long 11 in deep and 12 in tall and it weighs 48.5 lb so this Mega 2 has a 2 KW hour battery bank which means it's a little bit less than half the size of one signature solar eg4 like I showed you before but it has a 2500 W invert built into it it also has a charge controller which can accommodate up to a class leading 2100 WTS of solar input it's a lot of input for such a small power bank and the three and five do that as well there's two key reasons why this works perfectly for mobile dwelling and one of them is it has a 30 amp RV hookup this means that you could take this and plug it in to your already built rig and it will be an additional 2 KW hours will also allow you to run AC appliances that you might not be able to with your camper your travel trailer these things are not often built with lithium battery Banks or big inverters and they have rooftop air conditioners and you can't run them unless you're plugged into a campground all you got to do is plug into the mega 23 and 5 and now all of a sudden it's like you're hooked up to a campground again the other thing you can do with this is you can take it and you can put it inside your rig and you can wire your AC distribution straight to it because it has a 30 amp RV plug we can run a ton of things with it at the same time the other key feature is this 30 amp Anderson DC connector you can buy a cable and I've linked one below that you can plug directly into the this Anderson port and attach it straight to your DC fuse blocks with ring terminal connectors and there's a fuse in line so it's all safe this means that you can plug in all of your DC fixtures in your rig and you can pull up to 30 amps at the same time with 30 amps you can do pretty much everything you could expect to do in an RV through that DC power port so if you need more power than 2 KW hours for about $11,000 you can double the capacity with their B2 battery which plugs straight into this and the cool thing about the B2 battery is it has a bunch of DC outputs as well so if you want to you can leave your off-grid solution in your rig take your battery out with you charge your phones run fans run lights if you're going to be using the battery elsewhere it basically has more utility than other batteries on the market but if you want to buy more than one expansion battery because you need more capacity I would definitely go to the mega 3 or the mega 5 that's because it becomes more cost effective to buy a larger unit now if you go to the mega 5 which I definitely recommend for a bus this size you can get an expansion battery pack that will double the size of your mega 5 up to 10 KW hours as well so you don't have to buy a bunch of these little batteries you buy the mega 5 you buy the expansion battery you've got a really robust offgrid system with 10 kwatt hours of battery storage all right let's get our little adapter should be right here and now we've got the bus running off the Mega 2 and you know what let's get some solar panels real quick so this is also from the same company so this is a mega 240 W solar panel pretty sick we've got the Mega 2 plugged into the bus we are pulling in only 40 WS solar got the panels up here we do have this excellent app that we can use to monitor everything and we can also monitor this remotely too you you connect this device to the Wi-Fi and you can pick this up wherever you are now we're going to use the bus to totally stress out this power bank let's go turn some things on we've got no inverter on right now so let's go use the power bank to power the bus we're pulling 1,600 WS of AC power from the water heater being on now I can turn on the induction cooktop which we'll use another 1800 watts we'll see if we can do that we'll start with the level four on the cooktop and see how many watts that is okay and just like that we're pulling another 1,000 Watts 2400 24 49 this can do 2500 so basically we can do induction cooking and electric water heating at the same time with this unit there's a final test for this power bank there's something we need this to be able to do we need it to be able to charge from solar charge from Shore power and run AC and DC circuits at the same time it's a lot to ask from a tiny little box like this in my bus I've got four big things that do that right now we're pulling in, 1500 WS of AC charging a little bit from the solar panels and let's see what happens when we run a heat gun which uses about 1,300 to 1500 [Music] WTS as you can see we're still charging from AC power what that means is that we can run everything at once we can charge this while we discharge it from a Shore power connection from solar power and that's what we need in this box I can't believe how small and capable this little generator is please use the links to check out the products mentioned in this video below we've got 5% off for the oops we've got $50 off your order for Signature solar and we've got 3% off for Li time and if you guys want to see a big rig in action I've got a really awesome tour for you there is a sweet bus with a roof cap extension that I tored a couple months ago love that bus totally gorgeous you're going to love it check it out right here right right there see you guys soon peace

Channel: Mobile Dwellings

Views: 5,796

Keywords: lifepo4, lithium batteries, signature solar, oupes, battle born, best lithium batteries, rv batteries, skoolie battery bank, lithium battery bank

Id: -4lYlKjY7kM

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023