How I Installed SOLAR POWER in my VAN (The Easy Way) | Off Grid VAN

0:00 when i say my van is run on solar power that's technically not true it's actually run on battery power but those batteries are being charged by solar panels let me explain like i said everything is actually run off of a battery most people use 12 volt or 24 volt systems this is usually referred to

0:19 as direct current or dc and not everything can be run on dc but some examples are 12 volt lighting 12 volt roof vents 12 volt fridges etc 12 volt appliances usually have these 12 volt car style outlets that simply plug in like this or they'll just have a positive and negative wire like on this light they

0:43 need to be connected directly to a power source 12 volt batteries can also provide power to 110 volt or ac appliances but not directly the power needs to be converted there are a few ways you can make that work but we'll cover all of that in a minute for now just know that 110 appliances are the

1:00 regular house appliances that you'll find everywhere and they have a regular plug like this one now when you're looking at this diagram this is only half of the system if you use a battery eventually it's going to run out of energy so the same way you need to charge your phone when it dies you'll

1:15 also need to charge your battery there are a ton of ways that you can charge up a battery but just to keep things simple i'm gonna use three examples that i use all the time and then i'm familiar with shore power solar panels and vehicle battery or alternator these methods can be used individually you can use two of

1:31 them or all three at the same time in this example let's just say that you have all three of these methods set up your energy sources are pulling energy into your battery where it's being stored so that you can use it with your appliances this now is a full system because you have power coming in that's

1:49 going to replace the power that you're using now unfortunately you can't just plug a solar panel directly into your battery and have it be pulling in energy you need to use some extra devices to regulate and control the energy coming in and going out of your battery first up is power coming in for sure power

2:07 you're going to need something to convert the 110 to 12 volt like a trickle charger for the solar panel you're going to need a solar charge controller and for the car battery you'll need a voltage sensitive relay or a battery switcher because if you don't have that setup you'll just be draining

2:24 the battery from your actual vehicle that it needs to drive so you might go in there and try to turn it on and it won't be able to start for the power being used technically you don't need anything to use dc power you could just connect straight to the battery terminals but you're probably going to

2:39 want a fuse panel of some kind to prevent damaging your battery or your appliances and then for ac power you can't just run ac appliances directly off of your batteries so i like to use pure sine wave inverters well at this point the diagram is getting a little bit crowded there's a lot going on in

2:58 here but what if i was able to tell you that you didn't need all these extra things and there was a easier and slightly less expensive way to have all of this stuff and you don't even need to know how to hook it up well that's why we're going to talk about the portable power stations now

3:19 portable power stations have all of these small components combined inside of one device with a lithium battery set and a screen to monitor your system it basically makes everything plug and play and portable you can just pick it up and walk away with it in my experience i've noticed that with all of the same or

3:39 very similar components in your system the portable power stations end up being a lot cheaper and i made a little example chart to kind of show you if you had similar things how much would it cost to make each type of system now i have a premium price list and a budget price list the premium one is if you

3:56 wanted to make the exact same system that i have in the van that i'm building right now but you wanted to do it with regular batteries versus the blue eddy ac200 max that i'm using in my van right now you would end up spending about 410 dollars more for the same exact stuff now when you look at the budget version

4:15 of this list things get a little bit more muddy the power station route is still a little bit cheaper but with the battery bank system you end up with more battery overall and you have more wiggle room to move things around but you're still under that thousand dollar mark which is phenomenal now keep in mind i

4:34 was doing the premium pricing versus battleborn batteries which are my battery of choice but there's a lot more options out there for lithium batteries if you want to make a bigger system but less expensive i'm personally using power stations more often than a traditional battery setup just simply

4:54 because it's easier to work with it's plug and play more portable and in many cases less expensive and then you can use that extra money that you saved on other stuff in your builder or whatever now i've never showed you how i actually set up my systems with a power station rather than a battery so i'm going to

5:14 show you how i did that with this van right now like i said i'm going to be using the blue eddy ac200 max to run all of the electrical components in my van build it has 2040 watt hours of power which is a lot and it has a ton of ports so i'm basically going to be showing you how to connect the dc components because

5:31 you won't need anything else before this video i also cut out holes in my roof for some roof vents but i have an entire video coming out on that so we're just going to skip over that and go straight to the power coming in everything else is pretty self-explanatory so for the purposes of this video i'm just going to

5:48 be showing you how i install my solar panels which is pretty easy i basically just throw it up there drill some pilot holes and then make those holes a bit bigger so that the wires from the solar panel can fit through to the inside of the van [Music]

6:13 now that i have the holes drilled i want to make sure that nothing leaks so i'm using these grommets to help me do that basically the way they work is as you twist them they clamp down on the wire and make sure that no water goes through [Music] [Music]

6:42 i like using grommets that come with this big plastic cap that fit over the entire thing so that when i caulk or silicone it up there's just a big seal around the entire hole as well as the grommets helping grab the wires

7:15 and then to secure the solar panel itself you definitely can screw it in but i don't want to put any more holes in the van here so i'm just using this super strong marine tape i've been using this for a while now and so far it's been doing pretty well for me back down inside of the van now i have

7:37 these wires hanging down so all i have to do is connect that to the power station and it should start charging up this blue eddy came with an adapter that allowed me to connect it straight into one of the inputs but if you don't have this you might end up needing to find an adapter

7:51 now i'm just going to go around the van running wires so that i can connect the 12 volt appliances to the fuse box [Music]

8:21 so when it's time to connect your devices to your fuse panel this is how you do it if you don't have your wires exposed like this then you can use a wire stripper a knife whatever and just make sure that that wire is exposed like this [Music] then you just need to crimp these terminal heads onto the wires and that's

8:45 pretty easy you just slip it on there and then you use a crimping tool to squeeze that down and what happens is the metal kind of bends around the wire and holds it in place and now that's the permanent head on there these heads are what allow me to connect the wire to the fuse panel on mine the

9:03 middle section is where you put the positive wires and the top section is where you can put the negative wires but these are always labeled so you can't mix them up after that all you need to do is add a fuse to the positive section and basically what this does is it prevents any power surges by breaking a

9:20 little piece of metal in there to disconnect the system then you can put this little cover on there that allows you to label it so you know what wire goes where now that i ran all the wires for the ceiling i need to cut a few ceiling panels so i can show you how the lights work

9:51 now that the ceiling panels are mounted i'm just connecting these 12-volt lights to the wires that i ran in the ceiling earlier and actually learned that you're not supposed to be using wire nuts for this because of the rattling of the vehicle when it moves down the road it can make these come apart so i recommend

10:05 using crimps instead of wire nuts once you get all of your appliances connected to your fuse box you need to connect your fuse box to your battery the easiest way to do that is by using one of these you just simply plug this end into your power station and then on the other end there is a positive and negative

10:25 attachment that you can just simply put straight onto your fuse box and then everything can run straight through there now i've already gone ahead and done this i've connected my positive to my positive and my negative to my negative terminal i've got this right here so i'm going to just plug this into

10:41 my power station and turn it on one thing i like about this unit is that i can use the touch screen to turn stuff on and off so once the dc is on i see a couple lights come on i hear some beeping and i can see my security camera is coming on and now everything should work that's working i even set up some

11:01 switches over here so i can turn on and off these 12 volt lights right here i even put my security cameras on a switch right here as well if you want to know how i set up these security cameras then check out my last video as you can see we've got power going i'm going to actually turn this off

11:18 so you can hear me but yeah it's that simple you just hook everything up you plug it straight in and then for ac appliances you don't need anything because this already has plugs in it so you don't have to really worry about that [Music] there you go that's how you set up an

11:43 off-grid electrical system the easy way i still prefer the original method but this is just so much more convenient if you guys are interested in checking out a blue eddy ac200 max then i'm going to have a link in the description if you are interested in seeing how i set up my security cameras on my van then check

12:02 out my last video it's gonna be on screen right here and i'll explain everything you need to know over there but until next time see you later i'm out [Music]