COMPLETE Van Life Solar System for UNDER $500 TOTAL!

0:00 Hi everyone, welcome back to my next video. And so today you can build a complete 200 watt system including a lithium battery, a Lifo 4 lithium battery, 100 amp hour for less than $500. In fact, you can build one for less than $400. So I went ahead and ordered two uh I've ordered a battery

0:23 and I ordered a kit. And the reason I ordered a kit, and I think you should consider buying a kit, is because it's all in one. Now, what you can do instead is buy a uh the the solar panel and buy a power station, but a power station that will run a fridge alone will cost you more than $500. So, that just is not

0:48 an option. It's it's a good solution for many of you, but it's not a a 200 watt kit uh system ready to go for 500. You can't do it with a power station. Now, this is a Bougge RV. As you can see here, the full retail on this uh kit uh two 100 watt panels is uh $260. I had a $30 off coupon, so I paid $ 230. So, as

1:13 you can see, it comes with two one uh 100 watt panel, 200 watts total. Um, I think it's a really good panel. Again, I've got four Boug RV panels that I've owned for three years now, and I'm very happy with them. Of course, it has MC4 connectors. Don't buy a panel that doesn't have MC4 connectors. It's you're

1:32 they're universal. You can always get plugged into them. Now, let's take a quick look at what else you get. Uh, you get a 30 amp PWM controller. Now, MPPPT is better. It's more expensive. uh it'll work just fine for this system. Um you won't even there will be some loss in power in significant amount. So it it comes

1:57 with all the cabling you need. So this is the MC4 connector which will connect to the MC4 on the panel. And then this is plenty long to go from the roof to the inside to the solar controller. Or if you want to mount them outside, you could go from the outside uh in to the inside and connect to the solar

2:18 controller. This is a this is a good cable. Uh it looks like good quality to me. It's 10 gauge. So, this is going to serve you really well, I think. And then you have to have the next cable you have to have is from the controller to the battery. That's a lot shorter cable. And uh of course, that's what this is. So,

2:36 this will go from the controller to your battery. And then it comes with feet and feet mount on well I can probably show you here how that will go. Uh you can see this solar panel there's holes. I'll show you the holes and you just set this down on it and bolt it into the hole. Then when you turn it upside down you'll

2:58 screw in or bolt in through uh this hole here. And it comes with a little kit of all the the nuts and the bolts you need to attach this to your roof. So, so far you're not buying another thing. Now, if you want to run these panels in parallel, you need a a junction cable, a cable that will put the two into

3:21 junction. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense to you now. It comes with two. You have to have two. One's male, one's female. So the two cables will go out into this and then you only have one coming out. It combines the flow of power. So the two positives and the two negatives will go into here from each

3:39 panel and then they'll come out as a positive and negative and then you just plug it into your to your cable with your the MC4. So you have to have these if you want to run in parallel. You don't have to have them if you want to run in series. Uh and there advantages to both and that's a topic for another

3:56 day. Okay, there's the panels and the kit. Now, next you need a battery. Let me show you the battery I've purchased. So, uh what I chose was the Echolow uh 100 amp hour lithium ion lipo 4 battery and they're now like everyone getting into the lithium business and their price was very good. So, I paid $240 for

4:18 this Echoorthy uh battery. That's a little more. The one of the cheapest ones I saw was 206 207. But again, because this was a brand name I knew uh I had confidence that they were going to be around for a while, I went with them. So, here it is. It's uh they've gotten really small. These lithium batteries

4:36 are very small. It comes with the uh bolts that goes into it, the terminals. Lifeo 4 100 amp hour. So, here's the complete kit all in one place. I paid 230 for the battery and 245 for the uh solar panel kit. So, that's the goal to um to build this and then uh I'll test it and see if it will run my fridge. I'm

5:02 confident, completely confident that it will. We're not going to actually install this on a system, but I am going to show you how to make the complete assembly. When we're done here, we'll go from the solar panels to the charge controller to a battery and it will be hot. So, that's

5:20 everything but mounting them on the roof. So, they send you this uh battery cable, and this is designed to go in uh into the battery, and I'll show you in just a second how to do that. And the other end I've already connected, but you have to strip and crimp these connections. And I've already done that.

5:42 I don't you don't want to just stand me sit and watch me do all these uh connections. Then it comes with these uh I I don't know what exactly their name is. I think of them as fork connectors. I'll show you in a minute how to do a fork connector. Uh but for now and one thing always to remember is that you

5:59 absolutely must connect the battery to the charge controller first. Otherwise the you can get a um uh when the when you connect the solar panels you can get a power surge and you can fry your your uh solar controller. So just remember it doesn't matter why always connect your battery to the charge controller first.

6:19 The battery came with a little bolt just like that. This one you can you screw it in as a a bolt. It also has a good Phillips head. We'll just connect this for now. And we'll have to move it and put it away wherever you're going to want it. Now, this has to be tight. I mean, you can't just have this finger loose or

6:42 you'll create heat and resistance. So, this has to be good and tight. In fact, some people recommend torquing it. I think that might be getting carried away. I'm just going to do this as tight as I can with the screwdriver. And the other end of this is already uh connected and I've already put the ends

7:01 on it. So, I'm not going to do that now, but let me show you the solar cable. Now, I have not done this because I wanted to show you how to do this stripping and crimping just really briefly. This is the cable that goes to the solar panels. It has MC4s on the end, and that's how you can know that

7:19 it's in the one that goes to the cable. You can see the this is the two sets of uh MC4 connectors. So, we're going to put these in parallel. We have two discrete 100 W panels. How are we going to connect two of them to our one charge controller? Well, you run them through kind of a combiner box. And that's how I

7:39 think of this as a a combiner box except it's just a cable. So, you take the positive or negative, it doesn't matter which, from one and and the other and plug them in. So, this is going positive to positive, positive to positive. So now both of the positive cables are connected. You see here's here's the

8:00 sign. That's a positive cable. So there's the positive cable going in that one and the positive cable going in that one. And and it can't go any other way because it's impossible to connect positive to negative. Uh you'd have you're going to have to actually cut and strip and crimp to make that happen. And

8:17 now we have a positive coming out. The male is positive. It's got the red on it. That means it's positive. So there you go. Now, we'll do exactly the same thing. Uh, we have only two cables left. They're both negative. Uh, they're female ends, and in our culture, female is negative. And so, you, uh, put that

8:35 in there, and you connect that there, and you put this one in here. And now they're connected parallel. So, this is a simple way to connect it and make it parallel. Here are the two negatives coming out of the two panels. Here are the going into one combiner. Here are the two positives going into

8:59 one combiner. And coming out of them is one positive, one negative. So this is now ready to connect to my cable. So this is the solar cable they gave to us and it just has a positive and negative. So now this goes into the cable they sent along. This looks to appears to be a pretty good cable.

9:20 pretty good quality. Um, real good quality actually. And that's how you combine two 100 W panels or any size. It doesn't matter the size. It might have appeared a little bit uh complicated, but really you can't do it wrong. Now, on the other end on what they do is they only give you um blank ends, which

9:41 actually makes and they also give you the MC4s. If you want an MC4 on it, you can put it on it. But in this case, we don't want uh an MC4 on it. We want to go into the solar charge controller. We've got the two panels hooked up together in parallel. You see that's positive. Two positives

10:00 into a positive. Two negatives into a negative. And then I've connected that to the positive and the negative that they sent with us. And then they go out. They're connected through the length of cable. And it is a good long cable. I don't know how long it is. It's at least 10 ft. And that's good if you're going

10:16 to let set it out uh set these out on the ground, you can get them further away and you got more room to play with. I I like that a lot. Okay, so now we have a positive and a negative. We've got the battery connected to the um to this charge controller. And the charge controller is working. It's telling me

10:35 the amps going in, the volts going in, and the voltage of the battery. Right now, this battery is at 13.2. It's lithium, so that's right. One last thing to do is now we have these two forks. We have the little teeny tiny bolt that comes with it. And so we have to put the bolt. And we'll put the

10:56 negative on first. And it says right here, positive, negative. So we know exactly where to put it. So you just set this in here. Put the screwdriver into it. I put it on. And I just kind of play with it until I've aligned it with the the hole and I screw it in. We're going to do the same thing with the positive.

11:16 So, same thing. I'm going to put the I've got the uh the fork. I've got the uh bolt through it. Going to lay it down in here and just kind of play with it till it gets into the um make sure it stays in tight all the time. Screw it down. Double check it's red is positive and it goes to the positive

11:40 sign. Okay. And that's it. We're done. So it's now putting in 4.3 amps uh out of these two 100 watt panels. They are connected in parallel which means now it is essentially it becomes one 200 watt pan panel at still at 12vt. It's still a 12volt panel. So I think we have succeeded. Um everything has gone

12:04 according to plan and um it was tedious. I I find this stuff a little bit tedious, but it's not in any way hard. This was all you have to do is strip and crimp. If you can strip and crimp six wires, you'll be good. You'll be set. What I'm not showing you is uh I'm going to put a heat shrink on these cables and

12:28 then I'm going to put a fuse there. You don't see a fuse here yet. None of these things ever come with fuses, and I don't understand that. Uh, but you you want this fused, and you want it fused on the positive cable, and you want the fuse to be immediately close to the terminal. It

12:46 isn't absolutely necessary, but you really do want a fuse coming in from your panels, and that's easier. You have just go to Amazon and buy a MC4 fuse. It's an MC4 adapters, positive, negative, and on the middle it has a fuse and you can untwist it and pull out the fuse and then you've broken the

13:06 connection between the panel and the charge controller. So, I didn't I don't have one here with me, but that's a good way to do it. Go to Amazon. I'll have a link down in the description, but go to Amazon, say uh MC4 fuse, and they'll come right up. They're pretty cheap. So, this is the Zfoot. That's what it's

13:22 called. And you can see there's a Z here. It goes this way, this way, this way. And so there's a big one big slot here. And on the bottom, we're looking at the bottom of the solar panel. And over here's the junction box. Just so you know where we're at. Then this hole lines up with this hole. You put it on

13:42 with this down. Got that? That that goes down and away. And uh now you just bolt it on. Now you can see that this foot this this is a foot is is lifted about an inch a little more than an inch off the roof. You're going to get air flow under the roof. Solar panels don't like being hot. They as they the hotter they

14:04 get uh the more inefficient the worse their power production is. You want to air gap here. That's the whole point of this thing is to create this air gap. So, this just bolts into the one hole and then you're ready to mount it. Then it has two holes and I would then screw into whatever you're going to do it in.

14:26 Goes on like this. Then you screw down into your roof or your roof rack or whatever you're doing. So, that's it. That's how it works. So, how do you mount the solar controller? Well, you can see it has four holes here and you just mount it directly. put it on the surface, whatever you want, and then

14:43 just screw in or bolt in, whichever works in your situation, right into that surface. What a lot of people will do will get a piece of plywood and then attach this to the uh to the uh plywood, and then they'll have the inverter beside it, so it's really close. And and then below it, they'll have a bus bar.

15:01 Bus bar is a discussion for another day. Uh a fuse box. So, all your electrical would be on one box mounted. and you mount that one place and then everything's together. So that let me give you my final thoughts. I think the quality on the Boug RV is excellent. I highly recommend this. Can you build a

15:21 complete system for 500 bucks or less? And the answer is definitely. We have uh less much less than $500 here in this Echoflow lithium battery. We have the Boug RV complete system complete except for two fuses. And I do recommend you go buy those two fuses. And it's well less than 500. If you're willing to buy no

15:41 name, you're under 400. So, it really is not hard anymore to get a a satisfactory system. One lithium with 200 watts of solar is very satisfactory. You can run your fridge, you can run your fans, your lights. For well less than $500, you are into a complete solar system. And I kind

16:05 of quickly walked you through how to assemble it. This is assembled right now, putting out uh 3.1 amps. I got to It's gotten kind of cloudy. Uh but it's putting out good power. I think you would be very very very very well served by the Echolow and the uh Bougge RV 200 watt kit. So, if this video has helped

16:26 you, give you an idea of just how cheap solar panels and and batteries have become. I hope you'll like us on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, hit that thumbs up button, and we'll talk to you later. And remember, when you come to the end of your life, die full of joyous, happy memories, not regrets. Oh,

16:45 I wish I had have. I wish I could have. I wish I would have. Live your very best life today. Even if you got to buy the cheapest stuff, you got talk to you later.