Troubleshooting 12v Power System | MPPT Controllers How To Size Them Properly

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hey guys welcome back to the live stream tonight got a good video here I'm gonna catch up on a couple things

um that we're working on so let's just hop right into it with our little

presentation here to tell you what is going on so let me update this

we've got audio tonight for some reason it went out last night I have no idea why

but we're just going to get all caught back up so yeah if you're joining us tonight we're talking about the power system

we're talking about troubleshooting it um can I have a good problem some something

that I can share with you guys that it might be may help you in the future if you're dealing with uh electrical issue

and that's something that's acting kind of funny it might be getting an error code for example and

although the error code says check this it actually could be a symptom of something else so that's what we're

going to talk about tonight and that is with this uh Vichy frigo

fridge um so this is the one that Thomas has in his van and it is a drawer style fridge

so two drawer Style it's a very nice fridge

and yeah it's been doing great however there was a little error that came up

um and it was after he had lost uh the power in this uh van

had gotten below a certain threshold uh it was a little it must have been lower than about 60 you know percent or

something like that what's interesting is the uh

if you're using a lithium iron phosphate battery system you can go much lower

than a regular lettuce lead acid system and not damage the batteries so even though at 67 percent

uh where this little thing happened um you have to a lot of you have a lot of

power left so come to find out um we're bringing the van back in these

next these next few weeks because we're putting on the solar we're doing some other uh

add-ons as you guys can see throughout the live streams that we're doing so what I did was I said

I'm gonna take the fridge out and I'm gonna turn it off completely overnight so I'll think uh codes can clear

if that's even a thing with these fridges which it is they do clear

and then what I did was I uh I turned it back on I had the van uh

power system on and I let it run just for days on end uh it's been running constantly in freezer

freezer mode which means the top drawer is a freezer and the bottom drawer is a freezer

um and I was really putting it through the paces just letting it run 24 7. I would open the drawer and then shut it

just let that cold air out and have to have it keep working well for a solid week nothing happened no error codes the

coldest setting um so the first things right off the bat

power seems to not be an issued at the moment the ventilation because the error had to

do with an overheating of one of the systems was it E3 error

and then um yeah everything else was just uh

it was working fine so what happened so I took it off of the shore power so we have a Shore power

connection in the back of the van so if you go right here to the

if you go right here to the back of the van you'll see at the top of the this is the

manager 30 which is if you look at the very right hand side you're going to see three components

you're going to see the bottom right is airb compressor above that is the new mppt charge

controller that we've installed and then to the left of it that long

black box is the manager 30 from Red Arc it contains the DC to DC charger and the

mppt controllers built in as one unit on the top of that unit there's a

essentially like a computer plug uh like IEC cable is the technical name

and that's where you plug in to do Shore power because it's not typical that you're going to do short power all the time

so when it's in the shop I plug it in there just to keep the batteries topped off so I don't run into

the fan turning off while I'm working on it so I can have lights inside and stuff like that since we've got it to the point where all that stuff is in the van

so what it is I just let the system kind of die out I unplugged the shore power and over the next two or three days I

just let the battery percentage go from 100 all the way down to you know 80 70. and then right before I left the shop I

heard the refrigerator beeping I was very excited that I was beeping because

I created a situation to where I could have I something got exposed and that was this

uh low voltage um I meant to put this picture up on

here I'm just gonna have to show you on my phone

but the voltage that it started to get unhappy at was

let's see if I can find this

yeah 12 12.7 volts so when the system got to 12.7 volts it

fired off the low battery alarm on the refrigerator so not the error code of

something overheating but it was the battery alarm well it's so okay made a note of that

then I took hooked the system back up to shore power noted that it was at 67 percent for the power

so it was 67 battery capacity which is it's it's a ton of power used to have a

lot to go noted that when the system came back on it came to

proper voltage the uh hey Jamie when it got up to proper voltage

what we found was or what I found was that an E3 error

came up on the screen of the refrigerator so not only did it have the 12 volt now it has 12 volt and it

goes to E3 but E3 is not 12 volts talking to fast forward through this if

you guys are not interested but the point is the low voltage created the E3 error on

this type of uh refrigerator now there's nothing wrong with the refrigerator as far as all the

troubleshooting guys that were sent to me going through the whole process the fridge is fine

so what's happening is that particular fridge on uh

hard freezer mode but it doesn't have to be freezer mode whenever the voltage gets below

uh 12.7 the alarm is going to go off and it may

create that error code in the future so I'm gonna bring this to the tension of picture frigo I'm not sure if they'll

warranty it and move on but in the meantime the fridge is operating as normal

like different last week or so so um

now there's something that you don't have happen but at the same time finding out the root cause of what's causing it

will help you because if it's something that you can't get support on which uh

we purchased this through Panther RV and they've been very helpful they're all ready to go in case the solution doesn't

you know fix itself um so we've been in communication they're

great so there's no problem warranty wise or like getting it fixed uh if something actually is wrong with it but

let's say you're in a situation where you didn't have a a good situation you bought something there's no support

nobody's helping you and you need to find out what what the problem is because you're probably gonna have to be you're probably going to have to fix it

yourself so herein lies the uh

the title of the video so what I did was I went to the power system let it go down the error

code came up okay so that was that was all in one nuts show

but in the back of my mind is like I need to check my part of the system so not the fridge let's see if there's

something other than uh the the batteries just gets to a

certain level that may be causing this so in in a van

in the back of the van you've got your batteries and your power system

so one thing that you need to uh

have Pro make sure there's a priority is the next thing on our list right here

um

so that is top balancing the battery so what does top balancing mean

I'm going to briefly explain what it is but below here

there's a YouTube channel called DIY solar with will prowse I'm sure a bunch of you guys have seen his

channel and have watched his videos

so on his channel wait for this ad to go away

so in this video he talks about now he's making his own Battery Systems in some

of these videos and one of the first processes that you have to do is you

have to make sure that the cells are balanced I think there's two different ways don't

quote me on this this is uh he's an expert as far as understanding how to do this he builds

these systems all the time but you can top balance it or you can pot and balance it whether it's draining

the batteries all the way down and fully charging from the bottom up or topping them off at the top which is

what I'm talking about which is a top balance and what you can do is each of the

individual cells you're going to put on a charger and allow it to fully absorb

that charge and get topped off essentially now you need to do that for every cell

so for example in this video he's got a bunch of cells he's making some big old battery but these sales that he's

actually looking at in these videos uh are the same there's I think four of these type of cells in the sok battery

one of the benefits of the sok battery is it's one of the lithium iron phosphate batteries that

you can it's fully serviceable so inside that metal case you can open it up you

can remove the BMS and then the individuals there's four cells and you could if one goes bad you could take it

out put a new one in put the battery back together it's pretty cool unlike a battleborn which it's sealed

for life you can't get in there if something happens um so there's always pros and cons to

that but I wanted to uh I top balance the batteries before I put

them in Thomas's van but between me putting him in uh the charge cycles that

were going uh that the van has gone through with the last couple months

um I just wanted to make sure that something that I did was not affecting this low voltage and maybe like a

connection or something like that um so I went through and I went into the van

and that's where we're going to go to this next part of the video

so check out will process Channel I've got the name of the video it's right

here it is how to top balance lithium-ion phosphate sells quickly and

when you need to do it so I'm gonna let him take it from there as far as the details

but we're going to go over here where I have voltage check let's hop in the van and I'll show you what I did just to

make sure that uh how I put things together in the van

was was doing good for lack of a better word

all right so let's move over to the other camera

you guys let me know in the comments audio should be perfect there should be no problem with audio but just in case

there is just always uh just let me know

all right so checking that on the phone okay we're in the back of the van

uh now as the live stream's growing uh with people watching this

um if you've not been in the back of this van I'm just going to do a really brief intro of what we have here

so we've decided to go with on this build for Thomas uh we needed to have a wireless power

system that had an app where he could control all the devices on his phone instead of having to go to

light switches touch him all that stuff plus it's just cool to have it on your phone so

um I've been to a couple shows over the last couple years and one company I really enjoyed checking out

this was at an over Landing Expo event was the company redarc so they're based

out of Australia but they have distribution in the U.S and customer service and people here

uh there's one actual local in Charlotte I don't think it's a brick and mortar but it's you know it's a it's a place

where you can connect to people there's there's humans if you have problems you don't have to

worry you don't have to wait until you're in Australia time to to connect for certain situations anyway the red

Arc is a pretty beefy system um and

we decided to go with it we have uh on the front side you've got five 10 amp

sources that you can up to 10 amps of power that are wirelessly controllable and

then on the back side you've got five more that are up to 30 amps worth of current that are controllable on your

phone behind that system uh how we're Distributing uh Distributing the power

to from the batteries we're using the lynx distributor

everybody's pretty familiar with the links distributor I think and uh so really enjoy this

keeps everything nice and organized it's essentially a glorified bus bar but

it's pretty nice and then up here we have our four 100

amp hour sok batteries now the first thing I wanted to check was I

needed to disconnect the Mega fuse that I have in there so I've

got a 300 amp fuse

and we'll talk about size infuses in a later video

but that fuse is back here and that is Con essentially between here and our

positive terminal on our battery and then to connect all the batteries together

we've got a positive 4 ought UL listed

um cable here we've made this on our own so we've got the we've got the terminals

online or the lugs and you really want to if

you can find the UL listed ones it's kind of hard to but but try to find them if you can

uh the four out cable pure copper pure stranded copper and then we've got

our heat shrink and then we did the same thing for our our negative terminals

and then those are connecting all the batteries together so what I did is I wanted to take the

fuse out turn I mean turn the system off take the fuse out get it safe and take these off

these connections so I could test the system so this is where this can help you out

so the first thing you want to do if you're having some type of weird issue in a van

start from where the power is coming from and that's the batteries now my get was saying uh

it seemed like it was taken a bit of time for the van to recharge and when I was talking about Thomas as

far as uh the root cause is the band's not being driven as much as we originally thought

so that's why we're adding more solar so the time that it's sitting at the house

instead of always having to go pull a cord out and plug it into Shore power we're just going to maximize

the sun that's coming in uh from this guy and just maximize it by

just adding as much as we can so that during the week it's getting topped off rather than us coming in with the cable

and having to plug in the van to top it off uh now you may be asking well what

what's the reason that the battery keeps getting drained well if if you have an adventure van you want to

go places so when you're ready to go places it's nice to have stuff in the van ready to go such as the fridge being

pre-chilled you know you know to put water and stuff in there but again having it pre-chilled so that

when you're ready to go you just throw your food drinks in there and you can take off you're not really having to

worry about it getting up to temperature that sort of thing

um so that's the nice thing about having a off-grid power system

but if you are if you kind of get in a weird spot to where maybe you didn't drive it enough

but you're using it you're using the inverter you're really going to have to

you can put everything on paper theoretical but when you put in the real world you shake the van down there's

going to be things that change you're going to figure out oh man you know I left I need to use the inverter and I

left it on for two or three days or I had something I had the freezer onto my refrigerator and you know I didn't drive

for a couple days or it was overcast and there wasn't any sun um so you can have all the nice stuff

but have those systems work uh as efficiently as possible is what is what

the kind of Shakedown run is that's when you take your van out you know go on your trips write some stuff down

that you'd like maybe improved and then you bring it back just as as Thomas did here

and that's what we're addressing add as much solar as possible so that you know the battery anxiety goes away

transferring stuff like you know charging the cell phone or computer off

the inverter and moving it to a 12 volt system

uh like high-powered USB outlet like USB type c

with like a high wattage output like a 65 watt or something like that

um so we did that that's that's the whole the plan here that we're doing but even if that stuff is perfect we've

got our USB charging our laptops we're not using the inverter you know we're saving all this

it doesn't change the fact that there may be something up with the batteries um I know I kind of glorify it's okay

but guess what it's possible that one of these batteries uh is not

communicating something to the BMS it's not getting a full charge it's possible so what we want to do is we want to get

our multimeter and we're going to go through I know you guys can't see it but I'm going to go

back to my computer and I'm going to play a GoPro video that I took earlier

today and I'm just going to commentate on top of it because it shows me going through this so I'm gonna

just show you I'm gonna check the voltage one more time just because I'm here

and then we're going to hop off uh go back on the computer and then play that YouTube that a GoPro video

to explain how we tested this perfect

so we go through and we're going to test each one of these in that video

and then yeah we'll just uh I filmed that earlier today so

it'll be fun watching it together because I I don't want to talk too much right now because I might actually

talk over what I wanted to share with you guys today

but as you guys know put those questions in the chat below let me know what questions you guys have

it can be not related to what we're working on tonight

it can be other stuff doesn't have to be solar power or power troubleshooting it could be anything

but hopefully you guys are familiar with one of these so this is a

multimeter and essentially it's off and then you rotate it to volts

and you want to make sure it's DC so that's a direct current you do not

don't you don't want it on alternating because we don't have alternating unless we turn

on the inverter so we use this to test our system

but before you test you gotten what what are you looking for how do you know what the number is

uh so believe it or not lithium doesn't technically operate at 12 volts so when

you're checking the battery you need to go to the the manuals

um so I'm just moving some stuff around here on the computer give me one second

so something that's funny with what I do is if I try to find

information off of a website so the manufacturer's website for example

it's usually missing the information that I need and the only way that I can find that information is if I pull out

the manual and look at it which is weird for troubleshooting because I like to look up stuff quickly instead of kind of

looking through a book but sometimes that you you have to do that

and for this case for example I went to this uh forum and I was looking for

uh somebody to kind of ran into the same situation where

sok didn't tell them where the voltage drops to so when you

charge a lithium iron phosphate battery it usually charges around uh 14.5 14.6

now when you have a specific lithium iron phosphate charger it's going to aim for that and then

charge at that voltage which is a little bit different than lead acid battery because lead acid is a little bit lower

um so yeah 14.6 and then what happens is it kind of messes with your mind but that

voltage is going to settle and it's going to settle to a certain it's going to drop to a certain number

so I was trying to find out what that number was for sok because sok won't on

their website webpage whatever they're not going to tell you oh charge it this

and then when you see it when it rests it's going to drop to 13.6 because in order to troubleshoot

properly that 13.6 volts is the information that I need to know that when I read 13.5 on

each battery that everything's okay um so that's I found this piece of

information so I knew the batteries were okay what was even better was every single

battery was exactly 13.5 volts now when I bring up the

conversation about top balancing

something that would have indicated that we weren't having a good power transfer or charging of the batteries is that

three of the batteries were let's say three of the batteries were at 13.5 and one battery was at 12.8 for example then

we know there's a problem there's a problem with the BMS are there some problem with maybe one of them has like

a bad cell and it's kind of it continues to Rob power

from other batteries and that's just an example

but so that was what I was looking for thankfully every single battery was exactly the same voltage and there was

no problem uh so I'm going to go through let me go

pull up this battery uh battery good Lord this video

let's see I may have to

yeah I may have to talk over this one let's see

so essentially what I'm doing here is I'm just walking through each part of this

um I didn't leak the audio on this so I'm just going to talk over it anyway

but as far as this goes everything is fine I don't have to worry about how the power is coming into it

uh this is me just explaining exactly what I did in the van

uh we'll come back to this in a second so this cable at the bottom here this

one was uh damaged it's a Communication cable and it has to do with this which is the redarc shunt

we'll talk about that in a second because I thought that might have been a culprit

and uh I'm talking about the wiring and the wagyu Wago connectors the wireless

Dometic awning switch um as you guys know the theme of this van is there's not a lot of place to put

things and it's it's very difficult to kind of hide wires and not only that these two wires specifically I wanted to

make sure that if I needed to pull them to allow access across the van I was

able to do that

all right so you can see here that how the batteries are all connected together

I'm gonna try to fast forward it to get to

the reading of the meter okay it's a little X out of this one

let's go to this video

yeah so I'm talking about the shunt so everything is very very tight in here we have the shunt over here on the left

and then we get the fuse that fuses the batteries over here

on the right

oh perfect so uh the loading ramp on Thomas's van um

uh a couple friends were helping and there's a roller wheel that if you don't

lift the gate up properly it can potentially hit this cable and the

potential became real and it hit this cable so I've since moved it up even further it was about

two inches above the little roller wheel but apparently if you lean the ramp out it can hit it uh it can take up the two

inch Gap so I moved it uh almost eight inches maybe 10 inches higher so a whole foot

higher than the original location so we should have no problem uh now this cable right here is like a

networking Communication cable this is what talks to the red Vision which is the interface panel

and what happened this got a little we got smushed but nothing got broken another

wires were frayed or anything like that it just kind of got smushed um and you know the charge cycles and

everything have been fine now again we have the replacement right here so I'm getting ready to put it in

there so I was anticipating that it's possible that the batteries were not getting a

proper charge so sometimes the shunt it might say a

hundred percent um and real quick if you don't know what a

battery shunt is it is on the negative side of the power system

before connecting to the batteries and it it allows

uh it is it's like your

that's a terrible example I don't say like speedometer but it's it's measuring the flow of electricity so the

flow of electricity out versus the political electricity in and between the out and the N is able to calculate the

percentage of charge so you can see if that thing is damaged

not only is it not adequately charging the batteries probably or potentially

um it's not showing you the correct value

so that cable needed to get fixed

um I haven't installed it because I need to do finish the solar and all that I'll just briefly mention I took the

fridge out because I've got a thermal camera and I took a couple pictures of this I just wanted to see if there's any

hot spots in the motor or anything like that um uh I don't repair refrigerators but

I like to know everything that's going on in my customers Vans I don't want I want to have the information and make

an uh educated decision on you know what step we're going to take next are we going to do warranty or is it you know

non-issue because uh with the RV industry uh in the time that I've done it or

short time that I've done it you you don't want to

uh what's the point I'm trying to make

you can kind of get into the Weeds on things so things take a lot longer um it's not where you can go to Best Buy

and like return your TV or go to Lowe's and like return to fridge and get another one you know you have things

shipped to you things are in different locations of the United States so one you always want to buy good quality and

have a good relationship with a distributor or manufacturer which I try to do my best job at doing kind of

setting up all that stuff um but at the end of the day

you know it'd be easy to say oh the fridge is not working let's let's get rid of it you

know let's send it off and like wait for another one to come in well in this situation

I can't get it to go into failure mode unless the power system is below an adequate voltage which that's not the

fridge's fault the fridge is designed to alarm if the power on your van or your

boat or your yacht wherever you're using this fridge gets below a certain threshold

that the fridge is doing exactly what it's supposed to do it's just in our case

um we have a power system that can go below 67 and still provide power to the

inverter and stuff like that uh the fridge just is the one of the group that's not going to be happy so in the

event that uh Thomas is somewhere where you know he

needs that extra battery juice um uh what we're going to do is

anything below 67 or lower uh if he's not using the fridge we can turn it off and then we can surpass that

and go low uh go lower in percentage as far as a situation that would warrant

like that for example he needs to charge the paragraph or something like that we can turn the fridge off and then direct

all that remaining power to finish a charge instead of keeping drinks cold for example

um all right so let's move on past that the main solution is just to get more

power in the van and always have it topped off at 100 so that's what we're doing with the upgraded solar

now moving on to the batteries themselves let's hop over here

uh that's a good picture of the shunt um I did want to make a note here

if rhetoric ever does watch these videos but this is uh

essentially a network cable right

um but it's molded into this plastic

so even though the shunt may not be damaged instead of being able to replace

the cable it's molded in the plastic and you can't replace it so maybe maybe there's a

reason because the the way these are the pin out is on here and it's proprietary and specific that's cool I understand

that but it would be cool that this was you know if you damage this cable you could just replace it with like a

household network cable just for an emergency purpose that's all I'm saying

all right so moving on to getting the power

checked let's go to the other video

we get our multimeter so we're going to go through and we're going to start checking

uh the terminals now be very careful when you are working with uh lithium batteries

the the current discharge or any any battery deep cycle AGM lead acid

these can discharge a lot of Uh current

and so just be safe I mean I've got 80 20 over here

um when I work in the system I actually have a couple of ratchets that I have taped up so that they don't Arc

and just take precautions because you don't want to do some simple little oops and you fry like your wireless

controller for your awning for example um

so yeah just be careful and the reason we have these wires coming through here is because

this is the best location for them for maintenance and future uh repair if

needed these were all buried behind the sheet metal or behind the batteries

it'd be very hard hard to diagnose issue in the future they're all shielded and they're all you know zip tied

cable managed so if it looks kind of crazy here um that was taken into consideration

when using this as the path for the kind of wire Highway

so what we're going to do is we're just going to touch both sides negative and positive be careful where you're

touching and you'll notice that it's 13.5 volts so we do that on each one

each battery this first one here and then we got 13.5 then we got it on

the rear 13.5 and then our last one

is 13.5 okay

so we've oh hey going do hope you're doing great

so we've done our we've done the fridge troubleshooting

um just for everyone that's uh just joining us tonight we're talking about power system troubleshooting

uh and then also an update on what we're what we've been working on on Thomas's van uh we've been troubleshooting the

fridge we kind of figured out what the E3 error was was being created from uh

van just being on a low having low battery

um we talked about top balancing the battery which is essentially making sure all the batteries before we connect them as a group are the same voltage

and are fully charged uh the video I just uh came off of was

it was me checking the voltage of the van and uh

let me move this out of the way I was checking the let me zoom in here

checking the voltage everything came at 13.5 did we referenced a

Forum article that said after it had been charged for one to four hours

it went from 4.14.6 to 13.6 so that made me happy

uh now we get the battery shunt replacement so again if you're just joining the

battery shunt is this device that makes sure uh that measures the flow of electricity

in and out of the power system to calculate your battery percentage

and expected time that the battery will die basic based on the current power

draw uh so we're going to be replacing the battery shot I haven't done that yet

because I'm finishing up the solar and mentioning this solar

uh let's talk let's show you guys what I've been working on so behind me over here I'm gonna pull up

These Bars the four bars back here uh these are one inch square tubing

um aluminum square tubing uh they've been painted matte black uh if you want to paint anything on a

van you want to make sure use denatured alcohol right here clean the surface buff it if you need to

but uh paint that I've been using because if a van is pretty harsh on the

on the roof and I use a see if I have a can of it

so not sponsored but Krylon Fusion all in one matte black this stuff is

the Krylon Fusion is really good paint a spray paint if you prep it properly it does a really

good job um anyway so these back here uh so I

made those the rear ones that are longer or for the rear 50 watt panels we're putting on and then I've already got one

50 watt panel up on top uh but I pause because

um I like everything it looks super professional and I went on Amazon and I got these little plastic

ends that snap into they snap into the end of this

aluminum and they make it look uh just again a professional install is

what I'm all about plus I don't want this thing to whistle I don't want the wind to come across I

couldn't put it this way I had to put it this way so I don't want the wind whistling you know in the future that sort of

thing but you can see how nice of a finish this does and this is just a can of spray paint

um

oh man that's that's definitely a loaded

question because uh painting because it's uh the

pneumatic cooling is a plastic case right it's a plastic cover essentially on the pneumatic cooling

unit um I know which one you're talking about

oh yeah let me finish this real quick let me put it back down but what I did is I marked out all the locations of

where it goes into the roof rack and then these holes right here

you get the light that are towards the edge these line up with

they line up with the holes in the sides you can kind of see this is what's going to happen

so these holes right here uh bolt in

and then that way you can see it's just a nice professional look

nobody's going to be up there but if you fly a drone and you want to look at the top of your van I want to make sure it's matte black

foreign let me get back to uh yeah go and Do's

questions so let's see here

I think Nova wants to say hi

there you go

oh that's a good idea or a bad idea because you'll probably want to play now um so if I go to nomadic

go back to pneumatic Cooling

all right so go and do you have this unit or one of these so it which one you have

so you're probably dealing with this cover

laughs so

I'm I know the you may have wanted the black one

um because you have the high roof Transit right

now you could paint it but so my

now you know I'm kind of OCD I like the things that to be all the same paint match and everything but for this

situation the problem is you could paint it and I think that's good paint the problem is

it's just plastic is a little different and I don't know

because I know how metal works as far as the paint on it I feel a little more comfortable

giving advice on you know painting metal and prepping it because I do it all the time plastic's a different can of worms

because the Plastics can their surface either accepts it or it

doesn't accept it so you know if he had to sand it a little bit roughen it up put some primer and

then spray paint it black um at the end of the day uh if it's a high roof

I don't actually think I would paint it um I mean White's gonna give you a

slight benefit of it you know being cooler when it's on the indirect sun and not

the system's designed not to overheat but what I'm saying is it's just that less of heat that is in the

that's that that the unit's going to be experiencing so I would say

coming from somebody who likes everything to be matte black and kind of stealth

um I may give you the uh opinion of not not painting it uh

if you really did want the plastic one I'm sure they'd be able to get you a

to order one to order the the black one because it's just a cover it's just a

simple cover I would first try to get the black one if you really love the blacked out look

on top but with a high roof and the roof rack well actually do you have a roof rack

yet oh it's a dark gray vent okay okay

all right I know you're coming from

well see they've got to be able to get in it like buy one of these buy it

just give them a call and see if you can get just buy one um because I've worked with other

companies and for example I needed one other part either because I you know cut it up and I needed another one

um not sure how much they would charge you for that but

yeah I know what you're saying if you get the dark gray fan you probably won't

okay I would I would I know that sounds high but that's that is a reasonable

price for the lid in this RV van industry world I know it

sounds high but um I mean that that's what I would expect to pay if

say I'm working on a customer's van and I needed to modify something and I messed up or whatever and I needed to

get another one um yeah about 200 bucks is what I I guess that was going to be

so yeah that's that's my opinion

probably leave it but um but heck just you can try to paint it they make uh

if you sanded it down and you put a good diffusion primer um it's made for Plastics

so it is the whole thing is about it paints any surface Metals wood Plastics so yeah I

mean just give it a try

um if you really mess up then it's just going to be [Laughter]

if you mess up it's just going to be 200 bucks I know I know it sucks um

so maybe my advice would be just I know it's a different color but just leave it just leave it see if you can kind of get

used to it uh because I everybody's going to look at how cool

your van is they're not going to worry that you know it's not it's a white AC unit not a black AC unit

foreign all right hope that helped

all right so we were talking about uh the battery shunt replacement redarc the solar panel brackets the aluminum ones

so again something like this is uh you know something that you can make at home it's professional looks

great foreign

it's cool to find things that are at Lowe's and for example this is the bar

so this is the spare from my other van but this is essentially the Flatline

vanco roof rack I think they're using a 10 series it's a double

right there the thing is this stuff is very heavy it's very expensive takes a long time to

ship and foreign you know when you want to get creative and solve a problem sometimes

just a simple square tubing at Lowe's paint it get the right Hardware

always use stainless steel Hardware uh and you're good you're set

all right we're going to move into the next part of the video we're going to talk about

uh the red Arc manager 30 DC to DC mppt solar charge controller as well as a

Rover elite 20 amp mppt solar charge controller not sponsor no affiliation

um I'm just comparing both of these so that you guys can learn what to look for

now we did a live stream where I taught you guys how to interpret

a data sheet for lithium iron phosphate batteries and how to know the difference between

uh like an sok a battleborn and

um there was another battery I can't remember what it is anyway what's what's how you can pick up the

difference and justify paying more money or seeing that there's really not that big of a deal and going

with more of a budget option

um so over here in the right hand of the screen the top one is our manager 30.

now we're kind of comparing like a a Cadillac to a

Kia although Kias are looking pretty nice now these days you kind of can't

say that anymore um so the the major theory is going to be

better than the Rover Elite but that all has to do with your use

case so our use case is we're not trying to power the whole entire van we're just trying to add an additional

um you know let's see at the end of the day it's going to be what three six nine twelve

like an additional 12 amps of power throughout our day that we didn't have before

so in the top right uh we have three things that I want you guys to look at

the first one is in green here and that's the rated charge current

so the rated charge current is the first thing to look out for because so anybody can be watching these videos

so if you don't have a sprinter or Ford Transit or anything like that let's say you have like an Econoline or you have a

minivan or whatever it uh the reason that I highlighted is green

and that it's important has to do with your alternator so you'd even though

uh I think the the van that I have I think it's like 190 amp alternator or

like 160 or something like that even though you have all of that your disposal you got to make you gotta

remember that the car chose the alternator chose its own battery for a

purpose when you crank up that V6 or you have all the accessory power on a van you've

got halogen lights you've got the computer system you got the stereo system you've got Apple carplay you've

got the Ford Sync you have the lights and the interior lights in the van heck you might even have somebody charging

off of the Ford factory installed inverter so all that has been

uh sized and going through the Engineering Process to

provide a certain alternator for a van now it's important to not

uh abuse the factory alternator so TR

go low before you go high on the rated charge current of these chart DC to DC

Chargers because you want you want your van to act like it's under factory warranty you

know you don't want to burn up your alternator after you get your van done and it's like man my batteries stay topped off but I had to replace the

alternator because it burned up um now I'm not saying it's going to happen

to you there's a lot of wiggle room on these uh Factory alternators

and so my opinion is let me I'm gonna go

look up I'm going to cross reference an example give me one second I'm looking up the

Nations

it's a nation's alternator and it's the secondary

see secondary dual alternator all right so I'm gonna pop this up on

the computer so we got Nations start an alternator this is pretty popular brand for doing this

um I know about them I have not been to this website so if I click on something kind of crazy just bear with me

um so if we go to a Transit let's go up to a

let's see Ford Transit 1919 okay

so let's just pick the one for Thomas's van for example so let's look at our years what do we have to work with we

got 2020 2020 this is two this is not one this is not one not one

nope nope okay he's got three here we go dual

alternator so I was trying to look for a cheaper one but look at this

so this dual alternator setup

2020 to 2022 Ford Transit van 3.5 liter

the alternator this is not cabling wiring labor install

just the alternator kit is 2

195. 2199 2 199 dollars

you guys can see why I'm doing the streams earlier it's a little late in the afternoon

um now guess what these things are amazing

um because where is where's the amperage on these things

yeah 370 amps can you guys see that

370 amp output so Thomas has 400 amp hours so almost in

an hour of running this you could recharge this whole entire van but when you are

uh well that it depends on the RPM blah blah the thing is

there's probably twenty two hundred dollars that you would want to spend somewhere else in the van and that's

kind of my point so my point is start with a system and a foundation

that you can that on paper says you know what this is going to be good for my needs

uh the reason that we are introducing this additional mppt solar charge

controller is we were going to add another DC to DC charger

but we needed to look at the use case for

Thomas's van so is he a full-time van lifer no does he

use his van on a weekly weekend basis yes so

that the use case is the van is going to be parked for four or five days and then

it's going to go on a trip so it's not going from you know park to park to park to park it's he's

not driving it six hours a day to travel to the US

um it's for you know weekend competitions trips stuff like that

so the fans can be in the driveway so instead of having a cord pulled all

the way out let's try to maximize our solar on the roof you know we have we have four more spots let's just add 200

more watts that's what we did so the Rover Elite

uh so each of those panels cost 60 bucks so 240 bucks for the solar panels

like another 100 bucks or so for the wiring and then the Rover Elite

uh it's on sale for 99 bucks right now so yeah like uh let's just call it

500 bucks um there's some more costs That's not including the the tubing and stuff this

is assuming that you can just Mount the the panels up there let's just say the

panels and the controller and a couple cables let's say 500 bucks

so for 500 bucks we are going to be able to

uh solve our driveway problem

and we will be moving from uh 350 watts to 550 watts of solar

so there's one more bonus to doing this so the bonus of adding a secondary

system is redundancy so let's just say the great red Arc

system uh you know for some reason it stops working it stops charging the system

just for some reason I have I don't know something in the Box messes up and whatever

well guess what we have a secondary solar charge controller that's independent so we still have even though we lost

350 watts of charging we still have another 200 Watts that's still topping off the system

so you have redundancy in case one of these systems were to fill

now we're not dealing with a lot of amps here typically you could go up to you could

go up to 60 same here but guess what

you got to remember that the power cables going from your

batteries to the back of the van uh you need to lay that out in the

beginning because you can't just take a six gauge wire uh that has a max

amperage rating of 50. and you can send you know 60 amps over

it just because you wanted to upgrade you're gonna have to watch if they're gonna you're gonna have to buy more wire

then you're gonna have to run that wire through the van so the reason adding on a secondary

solar system is so attractive is that it's just the panels cable coming

through the van to a controller and you plug it right into the power system um and typically the you know the cables

they're not that expensive they can buy they're in kits

uh so if that makes sense so now that we understand that

we could go higher on the DC to DC charger we don't want to tax our alternator in

our van and we don't want to pay twenty two hundred dollars for a secondary

alternator because it's not because it wouldn't

solve a problem it's because the use case the the van's not moving so we need

to charge the van while it's not moving um and we got five to six hours of Sun every day on top of the panels

I know we have more sun but that's the range at which the Sun is most effective on the panels are that

you're going to get so let's solve that one that problem first

uh so we have a Max of 30 amps

and his 150 watt panels will be producing let's look that up

so as a hunt his the 150 watt panels this is the next thing I wanted to teach

you guys it has to do with how are solar panels rated for their

amperage output what do all those numbers mean because there's like there's like 10 numbers to look at it's

kind of confusing so on the back of the solar panel right here up at the top you're going to have

like a little label it's going to look like this

let's see all right there you go okay see how that fine print on the

label like it's a ton of stuff it's it's hard to understand

you've got max power open circuit voltage short circuit voltage Optimum temperature voltage Optimum current temp

coefficient P temp coefficient V temp coefficient I Max system voltage Max series fuse rating fire rating weight

Dimensions SDC it's a bunch of stuff so so where where the heck do you do you

begin so I boiled it down to one two three five

uh boiled it down to five things that should help you with your decision

so the first one in green was what current are we working with okay or like what do we expect this

solar charge controller to put out uh

so once we decide what that is and that's typically based on that's kind of that's ultimately based on the wiring

that you're deciding to use in your van so you can go as high as you want I mean you could use you can run four out wire

from your you know nation's alternator and and crank up you know

uh almost 400 amps for that thing in charge but that's really expensive

um for example if we go on Amazon

and we look up uh let's just we just want to get 10 feet of uh

let's see here we want to get 15 feet you know 15 feet that's pretty close to

run from your alternator to the battery system

so how much is 15 feet well 15 feet of that cable on

Amazon is 210 dollars so really your alternator your

High amp alternator is going from 22 now it's almost twenty five hundred dollars

still not counting labor so buy more current it's

Mo Money so 30 amps is nice because you can run a

six gauge wire very typical you know it maxes out at 50 amps so if

you wanted to run 30 amps and then you wanted to bump up an additional charge

controller with a 20 amp you could do that because uh

this is its Max rating and this is its Max rating all right let's keep moving on

so as far as the uh so the next thing you want to look at are these uh

this information down here so again here is let me move my face out

of the way here is all those numbers so like where the heck do you start if

you've never done this before so just remember the five that I'm showing you you want the rated charge current

the power input max power input that's how many watts of solar

you know panels that you're putting in and at what specific voltage

your uh your PV input voltage range or your

solar panel input voltage range that's very important dimensions are important because is it

going to fit on your roof or wherever you want it and then wait that's just something to consider just be conscious

of all right so there's our Baseline we wanted that's

where we want to look so we ignore uh

at the moment just ignore everything else except for what I'm telling you um

so short circuit current I'm gonna go very brief into this not going to get the weeds on it

but we're not going to focus on short circuit current we're going to look at operating

Optimum operating current so this is what we can expect out of the

solar panel and we're going to use that to size the system so in our case we get 9.73

well we know that it's not we're probably not going to get there uh efficiency wise

so the good news that's the that's the good news is this it's it's very rare that it would ever

go higher than that um so you do 9.73 times 4 I'm sorry

times two 9.73 times 2 because we got two of the

175 watt solar panels and that's going to give us about 19.46 amps

and uh you know we could sneak in we could probably sneak in a third one so 19.46

plus nine point seven three so technically

uh for this 30 amp system this red Arc

you know we could technically do three how do we know that that's possible so

let's take 175 Watts times 3. that's 525 Watts

so technically by their sheet we can't so we could do

five 100 watt panels what if we did three 175s according to their specs

525 is more than 520 and so technically that we couldn't do

that so that's why we have just two well we don't have the space number one

but number two the red arch system we can only do with our current footprint up there two 175 watt panels

so that we're staying safe under the 520 watt max power input that this mppt

charge controller can withstand that's built into the unit

all right so next so now we understand why we

bought two of the 175s so let's upgrade to the well

let's add additional 50 watt so we'll go to renergy thank God these panels fit the footprint

that I need because I didn't want to go with um some off-brand company that

it would fit but I wouldn't actually I wouldn't know about them so the footprint is perfect as you guys

saw um right here I mean look at that this thing is

perfect fits here here and here so we're doing

good all right so we got this let's go down to specs so for specs on this one

uh we've got maximum power 50 watts of course

and then we want to go to the operating Optimum operating current it's usually get a little parenthesis imp

and it's 2.69 amps so let's do 2.69 times 4.

that's 10.76 amps now you may be saying well Nick why did

you get a 20 amp charge controller well

because uh has to do with selection so all of these up here 100 amp 6060 you

know that's 600 200 the Rover 40 amp is 169 Rover 40 amp 40

amp okay so we got this one and we got this one so I wanted to stay

with the renergy brand I'll explain why you typically want to stay with a brand

of panel and controller you don't have to do that you can buy renergy and have victron

stuff all over the place my point is these companies sell this stuff as kits

and so they're going to do a little bit of the homework for you and I'll come back to this on why we

chose the 20 amp but the homework that they're going to do for you is the orange logo I mean the orange color

that's step three they're gonna do the homework and say for our controller look at this notice

how so the PV input voltage range that's the range of voltage that the this charge

controller can uh withstand it can say okay I can read anything between 9 and

30 volts give me some between 9 and 30 I can do it um if it hits 32 I'm okay with it but I

like 9 volts and 30 Volts for my PV

uh input solar panel input but guess what we go down here to the

Rover that we got check this out its range is broader we get 15 volts to

100 volts for its uh PV input range now

these are this is my opinion this is not fact but my opinion of why they do this

is because if you have a company and you have multiple range of products

uh if you design something that has a broader Spectrum to grab you know more

skus let's say somebody that bought this Rover Elite can use it on

essentially all of their solar panels

and why that's important is if I click on this solar panel I'm gonna scroll down

and actually back up let's click on yeah that's 100 watt let's do this

so let's look at the 100 watt

so where's our voltage did it

um so we got cvsc

it's operating let's say we got 20 20.4 and the open circuit so 20 20.4 and so

let's back up let's check out the 50 watt

and so we got 18.6 22.3 18.6 is the important one

so you can see a Tran 2018 I bet this one is really really close

18.9 let's go

we got a bigger one let's go to 200 watt

uh so we got 22.6

so for example um and then if they wanted if you wanted to add more panels

uh the voltage it also okay let me back up this is so we don't have these in series

um where's my notepad

I think I have my nose make sure I'm not telling you guys the wrong thing there's no editing on live streams

so we ours is we have a parallel configuration uh we are not in series so

if we were in series then our voltages would add instead of our current adding

our amperage and so this broader range here uh

would would assist us on that all right getting into the weeds let me

slow down just a little bit um if you guys have any questions put

those in the chat I got a couple more things I'm going to talk about and then we'll be getting to the end of today's

stream so um yeah ask me those questions I'll be happy to answer them

um I actually might go over here and go over a funny there's a comment on my

Ford Raptor style Grille over here on the channel I'm saying that I I took too long to

install it so I might react to that really quick that'll be kind of fun

uh all right so just to speed this up for

you guys the green is think of it as your your

alternator and your wiring going to your power system how much do you want to spend or have

potentially go into that as your everyday charging current the max power input that's how many

solar panels that this charge controller can withstand the PV input is the range

uh the voltage range that it can accept

um and then uh the dimensions weights pretty self-explanatory

so to wrap all this up and get to the end of the video

um there's really these are the really the only five things that I think are important for selecting it a lot of this

stuff can get really complex for example you know this is uh

this picture right here it on the left this is the this is the red Arc

manual and this is the specification so all that fine print you see there it makes sense to me I like to see all this

so I know where I can go with the system you know is it going to accept this or

that but to the uh you know

regular or entry level DIY or it's a lot of stuff to consume because

at the same time you're wanting to be safe you want to know that you bought something that's going to fit and you're

going to feel safe with it charging when you're away from the van because remember this you know this is charging

your van when you're not in the van so this system is active when you're not in the van and a long time ago that's almost

four years now but when when I I first started the uh the van thing and I put

my first you know solar pin on my van well actually that was only about let's see when I put because I had the

van but I didn't have solar I just had the DC to DC charger but when I put solar on there and I knew

that thing was active while I was you know not in the van it took me a while to get

used to it but if you've got the knowledge and you understand this stuff that anxiety will

will go away um yeah so use this as a cheat sheet come

back to this video kind of listen to why I thought this was helpful for you guys

um and yeah so that's uh so at the end of

the day what we did was we went the Rover Elite because it was

you know 99 bucks it was the lowest amperage that we could go with

it's renergy so it's going to be happy with the renergie 50 watt panels I know the voltages work but since they

usually come in combo kits and stuff like that it's just kind of a no-brainer energy has uh excellent videos so that

say Thomas is off you know across the whole country you know

uh that you know you get to know your van and learn about your van and if a

company has good videos then customers can watch them and you know they can feel

confident knowing that if they needed to repair something they uh and wanted to they could

um yeah so that in a nutshell is the difference between these two DC uh these

mpbt solar charge controllers it's also why I chose it

and um yeah it just kind of boils it down to make it help you guys make an easier

choice on this all right let's get into some fun things for some reason yesterday I lost audio

at the last 20 minutes of the stream and I'm not sure why because the lapel

microphone that I'm wearing right now it's on a separate Channel so it has nothing to do with this the

fancy mic um but hey you know stuff happens

um all right let me let me set this up this uh reaction video here I'm not gonna do

like a reaction reaction video um and so

they the the video that uh they sent me okay let me go here first

this is from this is from Michael so Michael sent me a message talking

about and this is all positive I just think this is fun

um let's see here

it was saying that it was way easier to uh than my video shows to change out the

Ford Transit Grille and so two things

let me back up here there you go

all right so Michael says way easier than this video shows that's my video

uh I changed out the grill in 2020 literally 10 minutes uh no need to touch the fascia so I

agree with you but let me explain why it takes longer than 10 minutes

uh and he references this video so

let's see here um so this is one of uh pretty Van Gogh's

videos and uh these guys are awesome so nothing against them but what I want to point

out is um

the the clips on here uh on the van

uh for me you know so pulling this out it's okay if you rip it out

you know kind of aggressively I'm I'm not that's fine if you want to get it out quick but the point uh that Michael was

making is that uh you can change it on 10 minutes um

so I'm not about speed I mean things need to get done in a relatively good time

but if you guys watch this video

this Grill is not the same Grill so Ford had a half year so 2020 like the first

six months let's say this Grill so this but by the way this is a 2019 Ford Transit so it's not a 2020 and up that's

when they made the change so this Grille here is held in differently than

uh the other girl so I will agree my grill this is my

personal van it takes longer to get this out one because I didn't want to break the

tabs on my own van and have that be a problem to deal with later because you if you break plastic tabs in

a van if you guys have ever been into uh Auto Body repair or anything like that the worst

thing is breaking off these plastic tabs that you can't put back on there now guess what this Grille is only held

in by plastic tabs um I actually have two pieces of plastic in the top left and top right that I

have uh drilled into the uh plastic behind it just as a safeguard because

this is only snapped in with plastic I mean it could technically be ripped out just as easily as you put

it in but I take my time because one I'm teaching you guys that's the whole

point of this channel is a Learning Channel and number two I just don't want to

waste my time with ripping something out and break and then because of me trying

to you know win a stopwatch race that

um that's all I'm saying you guys don't have don't think about when you're working on your van don't think about like speeding through

the whole thing and breaking something um you just don't want to do that uh forget so for example here is the

little piece that I'm using to make sure that

where is it there it is so what I'm doing is I'm putting a little clip in there because the top

section doesn't clip in positively on a 2019 Ford Transit

all right now let me go back to the comment here um

so in the freedom vanco video so this is a different model year

Ford Transit and the clips are different but they're not that different

so there is still a potential to break the plastic or the so just be careful

just be careful it's not a race that's my whole there's my reaction it's it's not a race

just make sure you uh just take your time and I will give you one other real

important point uh on Thomas's van specifically this van

in this video does not have the windshield wiper front camera

controls on it so if you imagine if I if I had you know kind of pulled it

out quickly it's possible to damage very expensive camera and very expensive washer control

motor and the feed line from the uh the windshield washer fluid so uh

although time is a consideration it's not a race when you're doing this stuff especially if you're a DIY

so my video was long because of that there we go so

Michael I'll do a quick response like that um

yeah I just uh don't it's not a race

um let's go back to some more comments because for some reason none of this got

recorded yesterday I don't know why

all right so we're moving down Jamie was upset that the stream didn't happen yesterday yeah I was I was worn out and

I needed to focus on getting those uh uh aluminum tubing

it's uh like precisely drilled out

um so Mitch the information on the AC unit uh

if you're on a live stream in the future let me know if that has to do with air conditioning or like AC as the inverter

um that would be helpful uh

Craig I did order the bump out for the adventure wagon uh they can they will provide those to you

um at a cost obviously but you can buy it uh just raw plastic or they can

upholster it for you no problem

I have not done the rear of the van so he's asking if I have done the uh

if I put the adventure wagon into the the panels in the rear of the van so

I've not done that um so run the Equator this comment was

having to do with uh not knowing the price of every specific build so that's hard to do when you're doing interviews

because you kind of want to maintain a relationship with the person you're doing the interview a lot of these

companies have no idea that I'm going to interview them I'm just kind of having them walk me through the van so you know

kind of having them asking the question about what the price is uh sometimes it's a little bit Ford and what I would

have to say is as much as you watch YouTube you will start to Under start to

get an idea of how much a build costs uh the first place you can look is a good

cheat code is just look at the power system if they've had a massive power system it's probably a very high-end

build just as we've talked today about all the stuff that goes into a van you

know bigger power system more expensive cables and so on and so forth so forth

uh and then just really zoom out and just look at the van I mean there's tons of exterior accessories typically that's a

very high-end build um but yeah if you go back and watch this video and kind of take that as a place

to start it'll kind of help you see your price range

I mean there was Vans there no joke I mean anywhere from

you know the diyers they were selling like their used bands for maybe 60 to 100 000 uh all the way up to close to

the you know 300 000 range uh so there's a big range but I mean

there's a lot of expensive stuff that goes into these vans uh

the redarc power system that will be coming soon you guys already saw that we've done a little bit of the red Arc

um we'll go through the whole system that video that live stream is coming soon

um this question was about propex versus brass or plastic and which one is

stronger so really there's uh there's not necessarily one is stronger

than the other it's just the materials are different plastic fittings are made for plastic

tanks uh brass is dangerous because you can actually tear out uh break

uh the hole that you screw in the plastic fitting to be careful with that

um another difference is brass has a larger interior diameter because the metal is

stronger plastic has a smaller interior diameter and that's because it needs that room to

enhance the strength so there's it can be restricted but let's let's be honest if you are in a van

um uh let me let me move this up

uh but if you're if you're doing van life you know your water restriction from the back your van to you know five

feet from your sink is it's probably not that big of a deal um let's see I think I've gotten to most

of these um yeah we're gonna about we're gonna end the stream here in just a second so guys let me know if you have any other

questions I'm just looking through uh any of these that I missed

foreign [Music]

all right guys couple more minutes and I will say three minutes and then I will

end the stream for tonight um let's talk about reaching out and

contacting me if you guys are interested in a custom van build you can reach me

on Odyssey custom Vans website so that's my company Odyssey custom vans go to the contact

page fill out the contact form and be happy to hop on a phone call to talk about your future build

um and the message you know tell me about your story why are you getting out there why are you doing either the van life or you're traveling

um uh or you know you're using the van for other purposes you know tell me the story about you know where you're

looking to go and what you're looking to do uh I'd be happy to start that conversation with you

um also until I get it up I'm gonna keep saying this every stream until I get the consultation link up I will be doing

phone consultations so you can schedule time with me to talk on the phone about specific

uh questions that you have on specific things so you can actually schedule book

a time with me until that comes up in the next couple weeks

this contact form can be used for that so in the subject line just type in

consultation and then the message you know what what you want that to be

um and then I'll reach out and we can we can talk one-on-one on the phone instead of uh kind of doing it through the live

stream so I'm here to help you guys I do these live streams as many times as I

can throughout this week when I'm working on different builds in the shop uh as soon as Thomas's van is

uh put back together and out of the shop our spec build will be coming back in

the shop we'll be working on it and so our goal is to get that one knocked out

um before the adventure van Expo series kicks off

and that van will be ready for sell but the cool thing is until now and the sell

you guys will get to see all the components and products that we put into the van how we did it heck you might

even be a part of the process as far as me changing my mind on what I want to do

with the van which is uh um I'm thankful Thomas's van is in here because I've I've gotten to brainstorm a

little bit about uh what I'm doing on that van instead of just like kind of doing the uh the whole General

spec build um but anyway guys thank you so much for staying to the end of the Stream

uh always here to take your questions if you have any questions or comments put those in the

comment section below and we will see you guys in our next live stream

thank you