Van Conversion Electrics Overview

This is a basic overview of our current electrical system in our van to support off grid camping. There will be more details about the installation, operation, and performance of each major component in a later blog entry.

Objective

Our use case is "adventure camping" where we go out for a long weekend or a week or more. This is opposed to supporting "living in a van" longer term. The differences come down to what variety of power consumers/appliances we need to support. We decided we would avoid integrating a high capacity inverter at this time to simplify the installation and save money that would be spent on an inverter and more battery capacity. But we also want to leave ourselves in a good place to add one later should we decide we want to down the road.

Approach

There are tons of resources out there that tell you how to build an electrical system for a van conversion that you can find on YouTube and Amazon books. One great source I have enjoyed is Will Prowse's YouTube Channel and his book Mobile Solar Power Made Easy! on Amazon. Almost everyone says you should start with knowing the numbers around what your power needs are. You figure that out by looking up the power requirements of each "consumer" and then multiplying that by how long those consumers need to run in order to get down to how much energy needs to be generated and how much needs to be stored.

We start out in the sheet above listing out what things are going to consume power and what their power draw is in Watts and convert to amps by dividing by voltage, in this case 12 volts. Then we consider how long during a day they will be consuming to get how many amp hours we need since battery capacity for deep cycle batteries is measured/sold in amp hours. This gives us a rough idea of how much power we need to store, consume, and replace each day we are off grid.

Now we can consider our sources of energy. Alternator energy is reliable in that is is always there when the van engine is running but maybe we are not driving every day or far enough to top off the battery bank. Solar is great when the sun is out but cloudy days can lower the efficiency and so can not having the panels aimed directly at the sun which is hard to do when mounted flat on a van roof. You can see my educated guess in the table above and see that even accounting for fairly poor efficiency it looks like we can generate the power we need.

Plan

Most RVs, conversion vans, and even boats use a system built around a house battery bank that powers all the appliances and devices on-board. Power is then replaced by the vehicle electr

ical system, solar power, or often both sources. Power is distributed via a fuse panel and/or a switch panel that allows the user to turn on and off these various consumers.

Major Component Selections

Here is a listing of the major components we selected for our build to plug into the plan above.

Renogy DCC50S 12V 50A DC-DC On-Board Battery Charger with MPPT - Amazon Link

Why it made the cut: This unit combines the functions of a solar charge controller and a DC to DC charger to manage charging from the alternator in one package so it simplifies the installation. It's also cost effective as well. The quality of build could be better but so far it has worked as expected keeping us in power through our travels.

Victron Smart Shunt 500A - Link

Why it made the cut: Every van electrical system needs a way to monitor status and performance in order to make sure you have the power available to support keeping food cold, having enough light, running your fan, and charging devices. We picked this particular unit because not only does it do all of these thing, it also delivers this information to our smartphones via the Victron Connect App. This means we can check status whether we are in bed, or driving down the road, or hanging out at our campsite. It can also be extended as part of Victron's CX line to allow monitoring from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can read our more thorough review here.

Victron Cerbo GX - Link

Why it made the cut: The Cerbo GX takes system management to the next level because it allow you to monitor and control your system remotely via the Victron Remote Management Portal. We've written up a separate blog entry on the Cerbo GX here.

Newpowa 200W Monocrystalline 200 Watt 12V Solar Panel High Efficiency Mono Module - Amazon Link

Why this made the cut: We wanted at least 400 Watts of solar on the roof to account for cloudy days and the loss of efficiency of not aiming the panels directly at the sun. The units are highly rated and generate 200W per panel. They also happen to fit perfectly in front of the Maxxfan on the roof of our 148" WB 2020 Ford Transit. On top of that they are under the 25v limit of the Regnogy DCC50S so we can wire them parallel and get 400W of power. We use some special stainless steel brackets that allow us to be able to tilt the panels up for maintenance and cleaning.

Check out this other post for details on the solar installation.

Other Components

Here is a list of other components used in our electrical system implementation.