Seat Base Electric + EHU + Solar Install + Charger + DC-DC -- How We Done it --

[Stay Frosty]

Got my panels on the roof finally, not a lot of room left up there as what I need and what I could actually squeeze up there were two different parameters and me being a little bloke had to compensate.
Anyway they're running, I think and possibly producing between 50 and 70 watts on a pretty dull day on the north side of the house in the shade.
I'm a little bit confused as due to my Luddite acceptance of apps and Blueteeth the only indication of charging I've got is from the Renogy shunt which I've included here and while it has the slow strobing of the display to indicate "stuff" is going on the arrows are facing up as if charge was leaving the battery however the indicated battery content has increased by 2Ah in the last hour.
Panels are 175 watt Renogy and I've had to shave about 9mm off of one side and overlap the original margin down the centreline of the roof, the butchery leaves about 10mm blank before the conductor tracks and actual cells and this new edge has been sealed with clear window grade solvent based sealant so might last at least one winter.
The joint boxes are a bit fugly but the panels had to be connected in parallel to keep below the upper voltage limit on the MPPT part of the Renogy DCC50S of 20 ish volts DC.
This is on a SWB van and on a roof peppered with stainless bolt heads for hardware underneath so as ever a compromise if you want to keep the panels as flat to the roof as possible.

 

[Soundz]

Fugly damn I adore that never heard it before

Bugly I know of

ya can squidge a vic 12 1200 VE direct inveter into a t5 passenger side single SB along wiv a big fan to cool an orion 12 12 30 an a temp sensing relay, a rocking big neg bus a vic smart shunt an the orion it's self ....................... sitting off the deck to allow all the cables to sit beneath......................and then stick a 12 way 12V DC fuse box on the back and make that look preddy and of course easy to access


_S2I2305 by Stuart Philpott, on Flickr

an under t'other one ( drivers side ) scag in a a 5 way fused pos bus with a roamer 230 gen 2, and a moved comfort unit, and a 75/15 vic MPPT, and a isolator with overal mega fuse and a seriously bonkers battery holder

_S2I2528 by Stuart Philpott, on Flickr

and equally mad isolator holder trimmed with a walnut ring.......................................... which everyone does right?

_S2I2280 by Stuart Philpott, on Flickr


but we will have to wait and see if there is possibly enough negative space for a 100/20 MPPT.....why did they have to make it so deep?

why do I do this to myself

OMG why do I do this to me.it's a blummin van there's loads of room in the back

Being serious for not very long................. I do wonder if T5 and T6 SB's are slightly different in size?

ok I'll admit me EHU ( will it ever be used?) is scagged under me tailight with some mad double hinge contraption and me DP consumer unit is also close by to miinimize unprotected cable run

The PV isolator is hidden behiind her curvy 3 hinged , shell door spice rack thingy, along with the mains batt charger 12 20 vic.....dats the LHS door besides the fridge for the unlearned

_S2I3158 by Stuart Philpott, on Flickr

So I guess one , with time, one becomes pragamatic, one learns there is only so much one can cram under 2 folks butts,

but then

there is always hope

Sorry I needed to have some fun............it is remarkable what you can get in these seatabses though.........sure there is room in the back and sure trouble shooting might be an epic PITA but it's a transporter every MM is contemplated

 

[Stay Frosty]

Yesterday afternoon was a bit brighter, finally, with sunshine at the front of the house from 1:00pm onwards so I moved the van into the direct sunlight and started putting in some free electric!

That was at about 2:30pnm and by 4:00pm I turned off the charger and put the van back against the house with 215Ah and 96% full showing on the shunt display, this was with the roof down the whole time. When I've drained down the battery a bit I'll see if it makes any difference to the panels performance with the roof up at right angles to the sun, with the panels flat down the highest output I saw was about 225W at 13.6V.

 

[Soundz]

Yesterday afternoon was a bit brighter, finally, with sunshine at the front of the house from 1:00pm onwards so I moved the van into the direct sunlight and started putting in some free electric!
View attachment 197489
That was at about 2:30pnm and by 4:00pm I turned off the charger and put the van back against the house with 215Ah and 96% full showing on the shunt display, this was with the roof down the whole time. When I've drained down the battery a bit I'll see if it makes any difference to the panels performance with the roof up at right angles to the sun, with the panels flat down the highest output I saw was about 225W at 13.6V.

Educate me frosty.................................. with 350 W of panels squeezed on to your roof, an those panels being in paralell, what size cables have you had to use ? I understand why you went this way mate becuase of the limitations of the DCC50 just curious as to the fall out of carrying those Amps over the cable run, which is probably around 4/5 M

Mate did you consider getting a separate MPPT wiring panels in series using dcc as B2B? Bud you are a sparky a professional electrician (.well from your avatar).so have made choices here I plausibly wouldn't have.I'm not calling ya out or any of that cobblers just trying to learn to understand the whys of the choices you made . Has part of your thought process to using paralell been if one panel is shaded you'll potentially harvest more than if wired in series?

Ta muchly

stu

 

[Stay Frosty]

@Soundz hi mate, I'm no expert on auto electrics but as a sparky in a previous life a 4mm2 cable was good for 20A depending on the length of the run but generally anything in an house, run wise, would have been ok.
On my van the individual panels came with 4.00mm2 tails which I've paralleled up and then extended in 6.00mm2 cable to the second joint box and then linked a bit of super flexible 10mm2 cable both poles through to the solar isolator input side in the wardrobe below.
From the isolator it's back to 6.00mm2 for the run behind the kitchen units to the DCC50S below the drivers seat, I've got a 30A fuse on this run by the B2B charger which I could realistically drop to 20A as the two lots of 8.5A per panel summed should come in below that comfortably.
The DCC50S fitted the bill for my approach to going off grid and as you indicate wouldn't be how you might handle the install, I'm not sure that there is a wrong or right way really although my way I do seem to have a bit of a surplus of electric now and I have to admit lumping all of the electrics to an area where I could have actually installed a 2kw inverter would have been better as nearly 200A at 12Vdc into a 2kw inverter to produce a 26A at 230Vac output is bonkers.

 

[Stay Frosty]

@Soundz I didn't answer your last point about the harvesting advantage of panels in parallel it was more the upper solar voltage input limit of 25V on the DCC50S, with the panels in series I would be getting 40 odd volts so a non starter.
I went by the Renogy figures for the amps output on the panels but then got carried away on the idea of something for nothing, ie. free electric, if I could have squeezed them on the original plan was to get two of their 200W panels as they were on offer at a pound per watt just before Christmas.

 

[Soundz]

@Stay Frosty mate bless ya for the replies...thank you !! Def not about " the right way" One of the things I love about the transporter world is how we all problem solve in different ways. I'm brain storming if ya like mate trying to figure why folks might take a different approach to me and learn from that.

Ha yeah thought 10mm2 cable might figure somewhere The to my humble eye issue with 12V systems and cable is it always carries so many amps compared to a 230 V cable run ( to achieve the same wattage ,so we are stuck with massive thick cables and voltage drop calculators in our vans. Tis the way of it.

Mate I've been banging me head against a wall with solar charge controllers this last week actually posted here somewhere hoping for advice....I don't think the Voc and Isc are the whole story When panels are VERY cold in full sun they seem to be able to produce higher figures than the aforementioned Voc Isc readings . But I haven't grasped it all yet. I can't assertain whether this is really applicable to us in mild blighty. But if it is then on the face of it it "seems" like a good idea to overspec solar charge contorollers.so one can harvest as much free leccy as possible.........

So to that end and as an aside I spent sat replacing me 71/15 victron with a 100/20 and with massive amounts of jiggery pockery made it fit OMG it was TIGHT.

Frosty I adore this free leccy stuff...........my campy van is all about us being offgrid and making images of wildlife, so me beiing me i've massively overspecced the power I need for a weaco 65 a few lights an a wallas heater cooker gizmo. Even down to the 12 1200 inverter so I can charge camera batteries with their own make charger. Which actually as you say is bonkers taking 12 V up to 230 and then back down through the charger is utterly nuts but hey

Mate having this off grid system on the drive and spending a couple of years working out how to DIY it all, has been , and is an eye opener.not only from the point of view of seeing what some converters do jees there are some horror stories out there !! But also having at least a base understanding of how it all works which means I can fix it

What I never saw comming was how much We use it when not camping.

I work the tools we charge all me dewalt 18V stuff in the bus head torches everything USB and on and on. I utterly understand you getting carried by it all I just didn't see how much we would use the free energy for the house from the bus. It's a real eyeopener

Oh finally yeah when you put the pop up and the angles are better to the sun you will def harvest more,

 

[Stay Frosty]

Funnily enough the wife had asked if it was possible to power the house from the camper.
She got very interested when I said yes-ish if I made up a kamikaze blue lead with a male 13A plug top each end I could back feed the external 13A weatherproof skt on the front of the house and by turning off the main switch on the consumers unit backfeed the rest of the house circuits from the 16A breaker on the outside skt!
Never mind the legalities or how lethal this might be but try to imagine the joy and disappointment on her face when told that run this way she could have the lights on and the TV including surround sound but not the hoover, cooker, iron or washing machine!

 

[Pete C]

My brother had a builder round doing some work that involved mixing cement. They had a power cut, and the builder was gobsmacked when my brother plugged the cement mixer into his EV and ran it from there.

Pete

 

[Stay Frosty]

@Pete C It's still a novelty at the moment but realistically if there was a full uptake on EVs then a households "second" car is a logical alternative to a similarly priced but completely static wall hung battery pack in the garage.
I don't want to live forever but realistically would like to see how this particular aspect of society pans out in the future, maybe the kWh unit will become the new currency and the grid the method of clearing and transferring payment?

 

[Soundz]

@Pete C It's still a novelty at the moment but realistically if there was a full uptake on EVs then a households "second" car is a logical alternative to a similarly priced but completely static wall hung battery pack in the garage.
I don't want to live forever but realistically would like to see how this particular aspect of society pans out in the future, maybe the kWh unit will become the new currency and the grid the method of clearing and transferring payment?

i became aware of this ( using an EV as a battery bank to power the house) from watching ID Buzz videos.it's fascinating.
Lol I can't do what you can mate re wiring of house but ironically we had a similar convo this morn with my darling asking if she could power her hoover old big upright, off the bus with a long lead. I was moaning because the bus battery was full and we were wasting leccy. that could be harvested from the bus panel...

 

[Stay Frosty]

We always take our Henry hoover away with us and the pressure washer plus the sunbed as so far we've only ever camped in the UK... Ok, none of the above really but could take a microwave oven and use less gas?

 

[TeeCeeJay]

I'm a little bit confused as due to my Luddite acceptance of apps and Blueteeth the only indication of charging I've got is from the Renogy shunt which I've included here and while it has the slow strobing of the display to indicate "stuff" is going on the arrows are facing up as if charge was leaving the battery however the indicated battery content has increased by 2Ah in the last hour.

I watched a video the other week about the Renogy Monitor and the 'up arrows' indicate that after calculating whats going in and what you're using, your battery power level is going up overall. Likewise, down arrows mean you're using more than is getting put in. I'll try to re-find it and post it here.

On a separate note, what have you used as your isolator from the Solar panel before it goes into the Renogy DCC50. I'm about to do the same for a 200W panel and am trying to figure out the isolation / fusing requirements.

 

[Stay Frosty]

Cheers @TeeCeeJay I've used a domestic 30A double pole cooker switch (no neon indicator) on a white pvc single box with 20mm stuffing glands top and bottom to clamp the cables so basically what you would use in an house to isolate a cooker or small electric shower.
I put a 30A fuse at the seat battery end just before the feed goes into the DCC50S with the neutral cable going into a neutral busbar along with all the other neutrals before the shunt then leisure battery.

 

[TeeCeeJay]

My solar panel factory cables currently end in the Off Side rear corner. Is there any reason why I can't use the chassis ground/earth point at the back near the rear light cluster and then just run a single positive cable to the DCC50 under the front seat? (Through a single pole switch to isolate the solar if required)

 

[Stay Frosty]

I was instinctively going to say "no, of course not" but thinking about it there's only the live from the solar panel that actually connects to the DCC50S so I suppose it could be yes?
Just doesn't feel right and in my case I bunged a pair of 6mm2 in and connected the neutral into the neutral busbar along with all its neutral mates more through muscle memory I guess.

 

[TeeCeeJay]

Thanks @Stay Frosty. I've bought individual red / black 6mm2 cables so I think I might go with the single switched +ve cable and just terminate / earth the neutral at the back of the van. If I'd bought twin-core then I'd never have thought of the question! This will allow the DCC to pull the full 50A off the VB if we need to switch off solar and get a quick/good charge to the LB.

Here's a link to the video I saw the other day where it shows the explanation of the Renogy 500A monitor display. Very handy for those who don't like instruction manuals! Hopefully I've linked it the right spot in the video where he talks about the screen.

 

[n10n]

Is there any reason why I can't use the chassis ground/earth point at the back near the rear light cluster and then just run a single positive cable to the DCC50 under the front seat?

This should be fine. After all, from electrics perspective vehicle chassis is just a giant negative busbar.

 

[BenT5]

Just redoing mine at the moment, 2 X 100Ah batteries under/behind. 2000W inverter, EHU, 12V. Have an Victron mmpt solar controller to put in shortly. I'm running 25mm cable to 2 heavy bus bars, audio fuse holders etc

 

[Dellmassive]

Tidy . . .