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Connecting your power system safely and efficiently
May 2, 2025
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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
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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
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unbelievably cool and we went through the van did a quick tour to get you guys
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um excited about the uh you know the the finish of this van because we're super
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super uh excited about the way it looks and um that we're you know getting close
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to finishing it so to get you some photos in the meantime I put them together on the Odyssey custom Vans
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website you can see where we're at at this point as far as everything that's been installed the options that are on
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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
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all the components within the van and if you guys are interested in purchas purchasing this van or you're looking to
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do a custom build through Odyssey custom vans this is the best way to contact
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me so you're just going to go to to uh sales at Odyssey custom vans that's my
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email this is our phone number the easiest way is to click here it's going
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to pull up a calendar link where you can book a time to meet with me uh if you're
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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
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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
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there's a couple other things over on the left- hand side uh just to double check be prepared for before the call
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and that's it book your call you can chat with me and uh yeah love to uh show
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you the van if you guys are interested but that's going to do it for the live stream today hope you guys
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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
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of Tours uh from the adventure van Expo we've got van tours we've got product
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reviews um all that stuff is on the van Builder uh YouTube channel and then van
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Builder hq.com is going to have all our blog post articles and information for you guys that'll help you with your van
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build also don't forget to like this video share it to anybody who needs help building their van and that this might
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be good to have and send to them other than that I'll see you guys in the next
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live [Music]
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stream
#Business & Industrial