Up next in 10
Connecting your power system safely and efficiently
5K views
May 2, 2025
Have questions? Ask in the Chat! Don't forget to check out Odyssey Custom Vans latest build currently For Sale here: https://www.odysseycustomvans.com/ Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways we can help you: 1. If you need a vetted parts list, download our → FREE DIY Van Build Cheatsheet to help you save time and money on Van Parts and Gear: CLICK HERE: https://vanbuilderhq.com/ 2. If you want to get Done-For-You Van Build help, book a → FREE Consultation with my Calendly Link: CLICK HERE: https://calendly.com/odysseycustomvans/intro-call
View Video Transcript
0:01
[Music]
0:48
hey everyone welcome to live stream today we are talking about connecting your power system safely and efficiently
0:54
and if you're watching this video it's because we have been putting together a blog post on this
1:00
so hasn't come out yet but if you're watching this video you probably uh we might actually have this article ready
1:06
anyway we have an article we're going to go over tools and all kinds of stuff like that for electrical systems and how
1:12
to do that in your van but today's video is answering one in particular question
1:17
on the article which is uh connecting your power system safely and efficiently
1:23
and we're going to go over the following items in today's video we're going to try to keep everything nice and short
1:31
um so we're going to have one part is so part one you could call it is wiring your power system
1:37
safely we're going to talk about proper fuses proper wire gauge proper wire and
1:43
component shielding you may not have heard that before um in kind of the van world but uh it's important so we'll
1:51
talk about it and then the second part is going to be wiring your power system
1:56
efficiently so this was going to talk about wire length wire location which
2:01
can affect voltage drop if your uh power cable is too long and then to feral or
2:08
not to feral and I spelled that wrong so let's
2:13
fix that r r u l
2:20
e that's a very word weird weird
2:28
word okay if you don't know what a wire wire feral is I'll explain that too if you have any
2:36
questions or want to go deeper into these uh stuff that's not covered in the next part of this video um put that in
2:43
the comments and I'll be happy to answer them we're going to be using the help of
2:49
my little drawing over here so let me move my face into this
2:55
corner so let's see here we go so I've got this drawing of a simple circuit it
3:00
is very simple so yours might be more complex or might be a little bit different but the basics of safety in
3:09
proper fusing is going to be displayed here as well as how wire length uh I'm
3:14
going give you an example of how wire length messed up um and gave some false
3:20
errors on a 12vt fridge that I had uh
3:26
installed so lesson learned from that example and then we'll be referencing
3:32
the camera inside the van we're going to be talking about the uh victron links distributor and we're going to use it as
3:38
an example of how these different items in the van uh of the one behind me right
3:44
here is properly fused so if you're doing this uh if
3:52
you're new to Van electrical components and stuff like that it can be pretty overwhelming if you've never messed with
3:59
it before the good news is 12 volts is uh depending on how you're approaching
4:04
it is not that dangerous it's not like household power we're going to get electrocuted if you touch both wires uh
4:10
the voltage is lower however typically the current is higher especially if you're running inverters and stuff like
4:16
that so we're going to stay uh to the basics really basic in this uh quick
4:22
live stream and we're g to start off with
4:27
this because I think it's a an easy way for a real world example for you guys to see so I'm going to go into the van I'm
4:35
going to point out what this is what you're looking at so when I reference back to it you're not
4:42
confused so let's hop over here in the van and so what we have here is this is
4:51
the uh Lynx distributor cover it's probably how of focus but it's okay um
4:57
so this cover goes on here and that's part of our protection so nothing
5:03
touches this and shorts typically in a van you're going to have a panel over here it might be a made out of wood or
5:08
something like that but for some reason if you had something that was metal or could come in contact with these
5:14
terminals you're going to want to protect it now what this is is I always call it
5:21
a glorified bus bar so it's one bar here for your positive and one bar here for
5:26
your negative if you go in line you look of a bus bar it's usually just a bar with four post Terminals and allows you
5:33
to have one positive come in from your battery supply power to a couple devices
5:40
and then you'll have another one maybe off over here to the side it's the negative one and that's going to help
5:45
you ground everything nice thing about the uh not sponsored but nice thing about this uh
5:53
linkx distributor is that this makes it very convenient um it's a little expensive it's usually around like like
5:59
$200 for this unit on Amazon um but it's nice because it's a
6:04
it's all put together it's uh insulated really well which means you know there's
6:10
separation between uh the negative and positive so stuff doesn't short there's a lot of plastic and stuff like that
6:16
that keeps it safe and you you get four circuits and these are your usually your main High
6:23
amp circuits so in here what we're looking at is our first circuit is is
6:30
our um this is our dedic AC and the quickest way to find out how
6:37
to size a circuit properly is reference the uh manual the manufacturer's manual
6:44
on the product that you have it's usually in the installation manual so
6:50
this one recommends an 8 Amp Fuse we have an 8 Amp Fuse next we have our Renegy 300 wat inverter
6:58
charger a 300 amp fuse is recommended for it and then finally we have two more
7:05
down here that's our Renegy DC todc combo
7:10
Chargers and so this is pulling power out and this is putting power in and we
7:17
have this uh fused at 60 amps so this is actually not going into
7:25
the system what happens is the wire comes here it's fused and then goes into the system and the whole goal
7:34
of bus turn my camera back on I knew I'd run out of time here with this
7:42
camera all right how we looking let's see it'll come back on here in just a second there we
7:48
go so the main uh thing that we want to do here is the fuses are protecting the
7:57
wire that's their main job it also protects device the device
8:04
because by protecting the wire first we don't want to overload the wire the wire
8:09
is typically sized or it should be sized for whatever component that you're using
8:14
and so they kind of work hand in hand so that the fuse is rated for the wire and
8:20
then the wire is you is rated for the product that's being used and typically
8:25
those will uh keep it safe
8:32
so what we have here is uh uh yep all right so the next thing
8:39
that we're going to be talking about is we're going to talk
8:46
about okay we talked about the bus bar we talked about the fuse safety protecting the
8:52
wire um yeah so let's hop back over to the computer so I get back to my notes and
8:58
go to the the next part of this video and guys if you're watching right now live feel free to ask any questions uh
9:05
happy to answer them so let's go to the computer and our
9:12
first thing we want to talk about [Music]
9:17
is see if I can get this thing zoomed in
9:28
properly there we go so the first thing we want to talk
9:33
about is proper fuses we're going to go back to the
9:39
van oh thanks going
9:44
do I'm excited it's we're we're getting closer um spending some time working on
9:49
some blog posts in this video so but uh we're getting to it it's we're knocking things
9:55
out so let's talk about proper fuses go back
10:01
here so this one is pretty easy because each of the manufacturers provided me
10:07
with the value for each one of these fuses so all I did was look in the manual go by the man manufacturer
10:13
specification on the component that is either getting the power or providing the power to the system and then I just
10:19
went through and made sure that the fuses are right now I'll personally as a builder
10:28
double check to make sure that if something looks weird uh if maybe the
10:33
fuse is too oversized and I think it would damage something um I might
10:38
undersize the fuse a bit the worst thing that's going to happen is the fuse blows
10:43
and then you just have to put another fuse in there so uh everything's still
10:50
protected all right next we have proper
10:55
wire gauge and the proper wire gauge uh what I want you guys to
11:02
reference is and I'll remember to put this link in here you type in Blue C
11:09
systems wire chart Blue C systems that's a company that I use um for a lot of my
11:15
van builds for the electrical components and they're going to have a chart like
11:20
this um there we go so bluec
11:26
systems.com and then you can go in and they'll uh let's see here you'll go to
11:31
the website let me back up so go to the
11:38
website scroll down and then you'll see this chart and you can click on it and it'll open it up in a bigger
11:44
window now if this gu if this looks completely wild to you you've never seen this before I'll make it very simple so
11:52
this chart starts with uh the current in The
11:57
Wire uh and then the wire
12:04
size and then it goes up from there so find out how much amps you need
12:12
to support in the wire and then you're going to cross
12:18
reference that with the length so there's those three things you
12:24
have to worry about the reason length becomes an issue with wiring is the
12:31
longer the wire is so let's look at here on this right
12:36
side where it says uh 3% voltage drop and 10% so they're talking about
12:43
non-critical and critical non-critical means if a device can withstand a 10% voltage drop and not
12:50
turn off or damage itself then you're over here if you have something that's a very sensitive piece of electronic and a
12:57
slight voltage drop would start to mess it up as in the case of that
13:03
refrigerator that I'm going to show you right here I made this line too long uh the
13:10
gauge of this wire was too
13:16
low um so if it's critical then you go into this chart for your reference so
13:23
for example if you had a 16 uh so let's
13:28
use the the example that I had uh that messed up so I had a 14 gauge
13:35
wire and typically that 14th gauge wire can go 65
13:42
ft and your voltage drop is not going to be enough to where if it should mess up
13:49
your device however this piece of equipment that I was working with this vitro fro
13:55
fridge very nice fridge very high-end uh the electronics were very sensitive it
14:00
didn't damage the fridge but what it did is it created a nuisance fault because there was just I mean point it was like
14:08
6 of a volt or something like it was something very very uh right on the
14:14
border but you can see because it was a sensitive uh piece of
14:20
equipment the same gauge went from 65 ft to 20 feet just because of the percent
14:27
of voltage drop so if you have something that is giving you kind of nuisance faults but you've
14:32
you feel like you have put the correct wire in you've got the correct fuse the flu the fuse is not blowing but for some
14:39
reason it's just it's not enough juice to keep it happy so you can see the difference here
14:45
65 ft versus 20 so I had another wire that was not used
14:54
in this project it had it was actually a 12volt wre a 12 gauge wire and so by
15:00
upping or uh increasing the thickness so as the number goes down the wire gauge
15:08
increases the thickness of the wire increases so it's kind of
15:13
opposite so from going to 14 to 12 I was able to gain
15:18
5et and that 5et allowed me
15:24
to uh get enough current Down The Wire and it extended my length so that the
15:31
length of the wire was not in question so hopefully that makes sense I know
15:37
that's pretty detailed but the longer the wire goes the less
15:43
current that it can provide to a piece of equipment depending on how sensitive that piece of equipment is is if it's
15:49
going to be a problem or not uh because in these scenarios the fuse never blew it just didn't get the
15:57
adequate voltage because the the run of the cable through up the wall across the
16:03
van down the van roof down the van wall across the floor and back up to the fridge was just uh too long so by
16:11
changing it from 14 gauge uh to 12 gave me the
16:17
additional uh theoretical feat and that solved the
16:25
problem so if you're using this chart and you're all also looking at
16:31
uh let's look at the 12 gauge wire for example so we're going to go on here and we're going to type
16:38
in 12 AWG Max Amps and the first thing that's
16:44
going to come up is 20 so 20 is the maximum amount of amps or current that
16:51
this uh that this wire can
16:57
hold so as we go up you can
17:03
see we have uh if we need more current in the wire we're losing our feet with
17:11
the same wire that's why when you that's why we had to go from 14 to 12 is because there wasn't
17:18
enough uh we lost the distance because you see 12 goes here if you're going 25
17:23
ft with 5 amps Through the Wire you're fine when you go to 10 10 amps it comes it lowers to 15
17:30
ft 15 amps 10 ft and then 12 would be zero to
17:40
uh 20 would be 10t so that's a perfect world it's not
17:46
to say it wouldn't work if he went longer but you might have that nuisance uh error messages like I uh
17:55
had but if you have a circuit let's just say you I'm making this up now let's just say you had a fridge that was 20
18:04
amps if you know the the fridge needs 20 amps which is now that's not typical
18:11
just making this up but if you have if you have a device that needs 20 amps you just go backwards and you say okay what
18:19
can run 20 amps well a 12 gauge wire can run 20 amps well what what if I wanted to save
18:25
some money and go with a 14 gauge wire so a 14 engage wire is only 15 so this
18:31
is where safety comes into play by trying to save money some uh some de
18:37
wires may run into the problem of having bringing their uh bringing risk to their van
18:44
because they tried to go to a lower cost solution technically the device works I
18:51
mean the wire is hold is giving the voltage to run the device but it's not safely doing it because if you're device
18:58
is pulling 20 amps and you fuse a 14 gauge wire at 20
19:05
amps the wire is going to fail before the fuse melts or
19:12
breaks and that is where fires can be can occur that's the danger in the I
19:19
mean that's why Mo some fans catch on fire is because the wire turns into a
19:25
coil like in your oven at home no joke because the wire is the only thing that
19:30
is absorbing uh or is the resistance to all that current and it starts heating up
19:36
and getting really hot and if you've oversized the fuse to make the device
19:42
run the wire is not protected so if you remember when we go back over
19:48
here we've s fused it correctly to protect the wire and by protecting the
19:54
wire we're protecting the the the van and the device
20:03
that is why it's important to have proper wire gauge and then let's look at proper wire
20:11
and component shielding and we're going to go in the v we're going to go in the van here I'll show you the the chart
20:18
here so we're talking about proper wire and component
20:24
shielding so if you look here this looks like a professional install we've got really nice uh thick
20:34
jackets here on the cable so we've bought a highquality cable we've used heat shrink to
20:41
minimize uh it helps with you know corrosion and moisture getting inside the uh
20:47
terminal the battery lug and it's also making sure that
20:53
there's nothing that can accidentally Arc this positive part so we get it as close close to here as possible and
21:00
that's good we also got the proper fuses for this device so just because you have
21:06
this you got to make sure that you have the proper fuses so for this one it's a mega fuse is the name of
21:14
it but let's just say something really bad happens I don't know this inverter fails and something pops but it's a
21:21
little bit more violent so this cover is to protect anything from um not
21:28
only touching it or arcing it but if whatever happens inside here so if there's like a little burst or like a
21:35
little mini Spark It's contained in this uh cover and it's not damaging anything
21:41
else in the van or potentially shorting anything else in the van hopefully you're not going to have that much
21:47
current to where that's happening but this uh two wat cable right here it's a
21:52
lot of current you know it's maximum of 300 amps before it actually fills so
21:57
there there's 300 amps of current in this one wire so make sure your wires are
22:04
protected you don't have any Nicks or scrapes in the wire and it's uh yeah the
22:11
wires are in good condition you're not taking zip ties and cutting into the wire or you're bending the wire in some
22:18
Corner uh or you're forcing anything you know stuff is laid out uh and it looks
22:26
professional all right the next this is our second part of the video wiring your power system
22:34
efficiently so we talked about wire length wire
22:39
length we don't want to get oursel into the
22:45
uh uh so the wire length here has to do with uh let's see battery
22:56
charging if you want to do something we'll come to this drawing in a second but in a perfect world if you had uh
23:05
let's say you had a battery bank and let's change colors and we're going to do four batteries so you got four
23:16
batteries in a perfect world you want all of
23:22
your uh let's see here let's draw it like
23:31
this so we're going to do like a 400 amp hour
23:37
system now this is perfect world right here so in a perfect world we're going
23:43
to use the blue thing here you would want to connect actually
23:49
I'll do red you want to connect all the wires connecting the battery you want
23:55
these all to be the same length okay because you want the current
24:01
distributed to them evenly so if you have your power cable
24:07
coming in so this is your positive coming in the length of that one again this is
24:14
perfect world is going to
24:19
be uh equal coming
24:26
in and then the next one is you want it if
24:37
possible you know equal coming out so when you ground
24:47
it now some uh some people will it's not completely wrong this
24:54
doesn't really hurt anything but if you have if this is your wire if your power
24:59
coming in this battery gets charged first and then the power has to get all
25:06
the way down to this last battery last so that's why it's important to and
25:14
this will work but in a perfect world the length here and the length
25:23
here would provide the best uh charging
25:31
for your batteries because What's happen what's having to happen is the power is coming
25:37
into here and then over here it's coming into here
25:42
first so you've got this uh got make sure I'm drawing this
25:56
correctly
26:04
this is just a better way for the power to flow now I understand if you're in a tight spot and you can't do that and you
26:11
have to do it like this to where this is the positive coming in the negative um
26:17
with a heavy enough gauge wire here that might not be an issue some people actually and some other YouTubers that
26:24
do electrical uh info they might connect this with a solid piece of brass or I mean sorry copper like a bus bar and
26:32
that works out good too um you just want to make sure that you're evenly pulling power and putting power back into the
26:39
batteries uh if possible so if you have if you have a wire here that's this
26:46
long and then a short wire and then a really long
26:52
wire that's not Optimum that's what I'm saying
26:59
and so that's wire length as far as it goes with battery charging wire location this is what I
27:07
was talking about with voltage drop so let's go back to our drawing pad and we're going to go to the previous
27:13
drawing that I'm going to finish and so right here we have a
27:19
circuit where let me use this purple one to show you what I'm talking about so we we've got a battery here we've got a
27:27
turn terminal fuse protecting the cable that is pulling the power from the
27:32
battery to the disconnect and then we have to disconnect to
27:37
the bus bar and then we have our fridge and so
27:45
what are we missing here we're missing a fuse so let me get the purple stuff out of the
27:51
way all right so we got a fuse here it's not what a fuse looks like I'm
27:56
just saving time so we got to
28:01
fuse and so now let's go ahead and finish the
28:07
circuit so we need to turn the fridge on and off so we need to pull a positive
28:13
wire here and we need to uh have two things so one we're going
28:21
to put a switch in here so we got a switch to turn it off
28:28
and on and then we got a fuse to protect the
28:42
wire so this is we're put a green box around here so this one is protected the
28:49
question is what is the maximum fuse that we can put in this if this is a 12 gauge wire and so we'll just hop on over
28:56
to our I can find my mouse let's go to our computer and so we
29:03
got 12 gauge
29:15
wire I'm actually going to go to a different let me get some different info
29:25
here we're going to type in fuse size calculator and there's no affiliation
29:32
this is not sponsored just easy information for you guys but the first one that pulls up is explores doli and
29:38
if you've looked at um his channel on YouTube or website he's got some cool
29:43
calculators that help you with getting the uh appropriate uh fuse size and
29:49
stuff like that so the device amps let's say we've got
29:56
um we've got 15 amps the fridge is let's say the fridge is pulling uh 15 amps 12
30:09
volts and the wire size we're going to do 12 and let's make this 20 just kind of
30:16
show you guys the difference so 20 12 it spits out 20 as
30:23
the minimum fuse size well that's correct because that is the lowest we can go and
30:29
still protect uh or that's the highest we can go and still protect the
30:37
wire so over here by default we could put
30:43
in a 20 amp fuse now where it changes is
30:49
we need to find out what the manufacturer suggests for this circuit so if this
30:56
device needs uh no more than 15 we'll bring us down to 15 so that's
31:03
kind of how you do that and then one thing we forgot
31:08
is we're going to take our ground and connect it right
31:14
there so the uh oh I think I had some audio coming
31:24
through sorry about that
31:47
yeah let me know if you guys heard that the whole entire time on this video I might have to redo the
31:56
video
32:05
pause one second let me hop over
32:21
here okay so that last question we were trying to answer was is this
32:36
uh the wire location voltage
32:42
drop so right here we need to make sure that this
32:47
cable need to make sure that these lines especially the positive is not too long
32:53
and it's within the specs of our uh our chart over
33:00
here this
33:06
chart all right and then last but not least we're going to talk about to feral or not to
33:13
feral so if you have any type of device where you have the screw down the little
33:19
tiny uh let's see if I can find an example
33:25
really quick basically if you have
33:32
a something that you need to screw down in a tight
33:45
space we're going to use this for example so if you have something like
33:51
this and you have some bolts and they have a little like a
33:57
little size where you need to get a wire in but you don't want to have The Frayed
34:02
wire and you don't want to twist it and get it in there because it might bend and break off this is where you need to
34:08
buy a wire feral kit and this is on the
34:14
you guys can find this on the uh DIY van build cheat sheet which we'll talk about
34:20
in just a minute but this wire wire feral kit comes with all these ferals
34:27
and what they do is they will take your
34:34
wire so you're going to have an exposed wire like
34:40
that and then you pick the appropriate gauge
34:46
feral and you guys can see what that does is it makes the wire nice and neat
34:51
and then you're going to take a crimper like this you put it inside the crimper
34:57
I'm not going to do this because I'm not ready to do it on here but you're going to crimp that down and then that's going
35:03
to allow you to plug it into wherever you need to and you're not going to have to worry about the wire breaking off uh
35:09
it makes the circuit really nice and safe there's also very there's very uh
35:16
there's like seven gauge and 10 gauge ones these are perfect for inverters or
35:22
Shore power stuff where the uh the wire is much thicker um and you need to stuff it into an
35:29
inverter which is usually like a screw down clamping device this is what you want to
35:34
use make sure that that uh connection is really safe all right guys I'm going to call it
35:41
that is it for the video but make sure you guys check out the uh DIY van build
35:47
cheat sheet if you guys don't know what this is this is the last 3 years of my Amazon
35:53
purchases and I've put it into an organized curated list list of over 250 items
36:00
electrical we've got HVAC Fasteners stuff that I do for
36:06
8020 uh Roofing stuff like the roof seals uh solar such as Renegy devices
36:13
and then the most important is tools so the this tool list which is actually the
36:19
blog post right here that we are actually talking about um wire strippers criper combo
36:27
feral crimper screwdriver set so the stuff that's related to this
36:33
video everything is in this DIY van build cheat sheet the best part is it's
36:39
completely free all you got to do is put your name and email address it go straight to your inbox um and this sheet
36:46
is a ever growing sheet anytime that I have more um products that I want to put on
36:52
it we add to it and uh so it's a living document it's going to grow with over time with more products but if you're a
37:00
diyer and you're wanting to approach a van build and uh if I could have a list that I could
37:08
just check off you know 10 or 15 tools and say hey Nick said these are the best tools to get me kickstarted on my build
37:14
that way I'm not running into lows or Harbor Freight 100 million times they're on this list so just
37:21
download it it's completely free you'll see the crimpers uh the hydraulic crimpers that I use use um the riv nut
37:30
gun right here this is what I use to install the uh Adventure wagon system
37:36
but really if you need a uh threaded stud within your van crimped this is the
37:41
tool to get it's off Amazon good good price um but all of that stuff is put
37:48
together in a curated document for you right here completely free sign up for it I think you guys will really enjoy
37:55
it and then last but not least want to talk to you guys about Odyssey custom vans so
38:02
Odyssey custom vans is my van build business so that's where all this
38:08
content comes from and the van behind me is officially for sale so I just wanted to uh hop over here on the website and
38:17
uh yeah kind of walk through a couple things really quick to see if you guys
38:23
or just to show you what's on here so updated the website to include um some pictures of the van the van is for sale
38:30
but we haven't actually done the final walk through we have to do the uh plumbing system finalize that as far as
38:37
hooking up the heater and if you guys are watching in real time we've been doing that for a while but got some other things going on
38:45
so uh in the meantime I wanted to get photos to you guys so you could go through get excited about the build and
38:51
if you go on the website there's a video that I did a walk through at the ad Adventure van Expo so we took the van
38:58
that's behind me to Adventure van Expo had a lot of people look at it we had a lot of subscribers come out which was
39:04
unbelievably cool and we went through the van did a quick tour to get you guys
39:09
um excited about the uh you know the the finish of this van because we're super
39:15
super uh excited about the way it looks and um that we're you know getting close
39:22
to finishing it so to get you some photos in the meantime I put them together on the Odyssey custom Vans
39:28
website you can see where we're at at this point as far as everything that's been installed the options that are on
39:34
here so above here we've got all the detailed options that are in the van and then there's some really cool photos of
39:42
all the components within the van and if you guys are interested in purchas purchasing this van or you're looking to
39:49
do a custom build through Odyssey custom vans this is the best way to contact
39:54
me so you're just going to go to to uh sales at Odyssey custom vans that's my
40:00
email this is our phone number the easiest way is to click here it's going
40:06
to pull up a calendar link where you can book a time to meet with me uh if you're
40:14
local love to have you guys come by the shop or you can schedule a phone call with me just click a time uh for example
40:22
let's say next Monday here all open you can click on a time that works best for you and it goes right on my calendar
40:29
there's a couple other things over on the left- hand side uh just to double check be prepared for before the call
40:35
and that's it book your call you can chat with me and uh yeah love to uh show
40:40
you the van if you guys are interested but that's going to do it for the live stream today hope you guys
40:47
learned a little bit more about Electronics in a van keeping everything safe if you have any questions put those
40:52
in the comments below um make sure you guys are subscribed to this channel check out all the videos we've got tons
40:58
of Tours uh from the adventure van Expo we've got van tours we've got product
41:03
reviews um all that stuff is on the van Builder uh YouTube channel and then van
41:09
Builder hq.com is going to have all our blog post articles and information for you guys that'll help you with your van
41:15
build also don't forget to like this video share it to anybody who needs help building their van and that this might
41:21
be good to have and send to them other than that I'll see you guys in the next
41:26
live [Music]
41:45
stream
#Business & Industrial