DIY Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Tomorrow's Journey

June 16, 2019August 28, 2020

Solar Installs

Tomorrow’s Journey Solar Saga

We had hoped to install solar while we were on our winter trip to the southwest. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we dream. But the trip was fruitful in many ways – we met a great solar supplier and ended up with four Battle Born batteries at a great price from the Battle Born booth at Quartzite. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Debbie on our daughter’s
roof, preparing to feed wires down through the front cap.

Our basic philosophy on solar was to start with a modest build but design and install wherever possible with a maximum installation in mind. The solar also needed to make sense with our power needs and the size of our battery bank. Based on our expected needs and the fact we already had 400 amp-hours of lithium, we choose to install four 200Watt solar panels, but to design and install components based on an eight-panel, or 1600 watt system. Our wire sizes, combiner box, and solar controller are all sized to carry that size of a system.

wasted could be battery space — Wasted could be battery space

Installing more battery will require restructuring and/or expanding the battery bay. Our current bay barely holds four batteries, but mostly because it uses a slide-out tray (which requires slack cables and a place for them to move) as well as a control panel that just plain wastes space. It doesn’t make sense to double the solar but maintain the same battery, so any future expanse will be quite a project in itself.

We also chose to upgrade our inverter from a Magnum 2000 to a Victron Multi 3000. This brings all of our major power devices under the same vendor and common management software as well as providing a bit more power and functionality. On our first winter trip, we had to be a bit more conscious of our AC current draw than we’d like to be. Also the Victron will work in Hybrid mode – monitoring the current and picking up the slack when needed.

Parts

We met Matt Dalley from ContinuousResourses.com under the big tent at Quartzite. He was quite helpful. While I am an electrical engineer, I had no experience in the world of RV solar and have more than a few things to learn. Matt was very helpful, working through several renditions of my design and answering more than a few questions. In the end, I ordered almost the entire system through him. I am quite happy with all the products I received. One thing I must note though. When you order, you won’t get one big box with all your parts. You will get a box every day or so, for a week or so, drop-shipped from various locations around the country. In the end, this saves you money and I wasn’t in a big hurry anyway.

So, here is a list of parts:

4 x 200W Hitec solar panels
4 x panel mounting bracket kits (can be upgraded to tilt)
30 ft of 4/0 ultraflex battery cable and lugs (new wire from inverter to batteries)
30 ft of 4AWG UltraFlex battery cable and lugs (roof combiner to solar controller to inverter)
80 ft each of red and black, 10AWG PV wire for wiring panels (enough for 8 panels no matter where they are on the roof)
4 x MC4 2 in 1 branch connector (that I actually didn’t need, was thinking parallel at one point)
Combiner box with 4 inputs and breakers for 8 panels (4 sets of 2 in series)
Blue Sea Class T fuse block with cover (up to 400Amps) and 400 Amp fuse (for the eventual replacement of Battery catastrophic fuse)
Victron Energy ve.direct and RJ45 UTP network cables and adapters
Midnite Solar Baby Box and two breakers for switching panel inpu and Controller output.
Blue Sea Battery Switch
Victron Energy SmartSolar 150/100 Tr Charge controller with Bluetooth
Victron Energy MK3-USB interface
Victron Energy MultiPlus 12/3000/120-50 Inverter-charger 120V
Victron Energy WiFi module (to connect Color Control to wifi)
Victron Energy Color Control GX monitor
Install kit – lots of misc parts.

Some explanation. The 4/0 cable from the inverter to batteries was because the 2000 watt inverter in place was on the left side of the RV and batteries on the right. While 2/0 cable that was in place is technically big enough for 3000 watts, it seemed like a good time to make sure the longer cable run was as good as it could be.

I studied for some time as to where to put my combiner box, and thus the drop through the RV to the left rear bay where the controller would be installed. After carefully considering the various walls and closets I might end up drilling through, I decided no drilling through the cabin was the solution. I chose to put the box at the rear of the RV and bring the wire down through the rear cap. This made the future runs to solar panels mounted forward fairly long, but I ran through the calculations and the losses were minimal. Better to make the series panel runs longer and the combiner to solar controller shorter as it carried the higher combined current that was easily handled by the 4AWG cable.

Series or Parallel?

I waffled for some as to whether it would be better to put all my panels in parallel or some combination of series+parallel. With all the air conditioners, vents, etc. on the roof, something is going to be shaded any time the sun isn’t nearly overhead. If you shade one panel of two in series, you lose most of both. The other side of the argument though is if you put panels in series – there is more voltage for the controller to work with early and late in the day. I even considered running a pair of wires to each panel and doing the serial/parallel connections in my combiner box. In the end, I chose to serial two panels, each on the same side and parallel the groups. At least two panels should be making full power no matter where the sun is coming from. If I decide to change things later, it’s just a bit of wire, some connectors and/or 4 more panels.

A bit of relevant history. While we were out west on our first trip, we were clearly having a voltage problem – the inverter would complain about low voltage or simply drop out if we ran more than one appliance. This was a big part of the reason we went ahead with the Battle Born battery purchase at Quartzite. The culprit, however, turned out to be a faulty catastrophic fuse connection mounted on the back of a switch control panel in the inverter power path. The poor connection generated so much heat, it melted part of the panel including the inverter power switch which caused it to fail. The fuse itself never failed – just the interconnect was resistive and thus got very hot. As a part of my solar plans, I intended to replace this entire panel, but because of time constraints, this part of the plan wasn’t executed. It is still on my ToDo list. See the rest of this story on Youtube, Here.

Finally, we considered long and hard, on how to attach the panels to the roof. So, this is a good time to segway into the FIRST install:

My Daughter and husband also bought 2 x 100-watt panels and an MPPT controller in Quartzite. We were uncertain how they would use the panels – whether like a suitcase or on the roof. It’s a rubber roof – so VHB tape was out. The roof construction is basically rubber over 3/8ths (if that) plywood over styrofoam. Dropping screws into that combination doesn’t instill one with great confidence that the panels won’t become airborne. After some consideration, we decided to use butyl tape, well nuts and of course self-leveling sealant. Since my arthritis had kicked into overtime, my duties were primarily supervising and/or critically important adjustments. Thus, I made the mounting brackets out of angle aluminum (using jigsaw and drill press in the garage). I also drilled and tweaked the holes in the roof for the well nuts, but not a lot else. We drilled the holes and carefully trimmed them so the well nuts would just fit. We used ½” diameter, 1” long with ¼-20 brass inserts along with 1 ¼” stainless bolts. We attached the brackets to the solar panels, set them in place and marked the holes. Then we moved the panels off, drilled the holes, pushed in the well nuts, laid a small amount of butyl tape around the hole. Then the panels went back in place, were screwed down tight (two bolts per bracket), then self-leveling sealant on top. They are very solid. We configured the panels in series and taped down the solar wire with 2-inch segments of Eternabond tape. A small roof entry box was mounted over the hole drilled in the front cap top to feed the main wires down to the solar controller and combination circuit braker and cutoff switch that we mounted inside the front storage.

Overall, it was a simple install. Because the panels were going near the front of the trailer, we chose to use 6 brackets each. We ran 4AWG cables from there to the batteries. Two hundred watts has been a good fit with the two 6V GC2 lead-acid batteries they have for storage. It has been a couple of weeks now, and the panels keep up with most of their daily needs as long as they are parked in the sun. They don’t have a big inverter, so they do run their generator when making a pot of coffee or when they need to run the Air Conditioner.

So back to the main event. I survived the mini-build, so we decided to go ahead and tackle the class A build. This is central Illinois in the springtime, so we had to try to plan for a few days without major rain. Of course, the forecast changes hourly, so we got chased indoors more than once.

Our panels went on first. They came with four brackets each that hooked on and provided a pivot point that could be used with additional hardware (not supplied) to allow the panels to be tilted. These brackets hooked over the panel and attached with a single bolt. I’m a “two is one and one is none” kind of guy, so we drilled and added a second bolt to each bracket. I scoped out 9 possible locations on the roof – we choose 8, then the four initial spots that would be toward the rear – but reserving the area at the very back for getting on/off the ladder and for the combiner box. The box was bolted to the main cabin roof, but a 90 degree piece of PVC electrical conduit exited the back and entered the back cap for running wires down to the controller.

Controller in…
VIctron Multi in…
One of Many central Illinois storms.
Color Control and Battery Monitor

We installed the panels pretty much the same way as with the earlier install – except we used the provided VHB tape between the roof and brackets and stainless bolts into ½” by 1” well nuts with ¼-20 stainless bolts, two per bracket. They aren’t going anywhere. We ran the solar wire – setting up the two left panels in series and the two right in series, each pair to a breaker, connected in parallel before the 4AWG cables going down to the solar controller.

Our left rear storage had the Magnum inverter, our power controller/EMS and our 50 Amp shore power cord already in it. But there was plenty of room for the solar controller and the slightly larger Victron Inverter/Charger. We mounted a piece of plywood on the inner wall, then the solar controller and the mini breaker box. The cable from the panels went into the mini-breaker box, through a 60-amp breaker – out to the controller, then the output from the controller went into the mini-breaker box, through a 100-amp breaker and out to the main DC power cables that fed the Victron Multi. The mini breaker box not only protects the input/output of the controller, but also allows me to isolate the controller from the panels and the batteries.

Then I double checked that all the power lines to/from the Magnum had corresponding connections on the Victron Multi (and were labled), took a deep breath, and swapped them out. And it all worked! Once I remembered to flip on that tiny switch in front of the Victron Multi to the correct position..

To back up a notch, we ran the 4/0 cables from the Victron (left rear storage) to the battery bay (right rear), pulling out the 2/0 that was there. When I got up to pulling the old control panel – I realized I needed more hardware I didn’t have on hand, so we hooked up the 4/0 cables without changing the panel. Here is one of those odd things you run into that makes you scratch your head (or bang it on the wall), wondering WHY they build RV’s this way. The ground cable from the inverter, ran to a bolt mounted on the battery bay wall. From there a ground cable ran back to the top of the frame to another bolt (totally inaccessible). From there a ground cable ran to the batteries. Thus, I was not able to replace all of the 2/0 cable – at that time. Most of it, however, is better than none of it. When I deal with the panel, I will make sure I have 4/0 though the entire path from battery to inverter.

Since the main inverter switch is actually in the right-side battery bay, an unintended consequence of this particular install was that the Solar only charges the batteries when the inverter switch is on. Not too big a deal as when we are using the RV, it is always on. When in storage, it might be a different situation, so likely I will move the Inverter switch to the left storage bay, or reinstall the 2/0 positive cable just for the solar controller to the battery (my preferred solution). This last solution would also bypass the main battery switch, so I could shut off power to the RV, but still keep the batteries charged.

So, we’ve only had a few days of actual use – boondocking. On a mostly sunny day, it keeps up with our use (refrigerator, coffee maker, TV, microwave, two laptops running much of the day, etc). Since leaving home (a week now), we’ve only run the generator once for about an hour. In South Dakota it is running 600+ watts several hours of the day and we hit over 800 once. I’m quite happy with it. I’d be happier of course, with more battery and more solar so we had a several day reserve, but that won’t happen for a while.

Futures?

Replacing the battery switch/breaker panel and catastrophic fuses.

Rerouting some of the AC power. Right now, the AC leg that goes through the inverter only connects to the various plugs and appliances in the coach. The air conditioners and fireplace, for example, come off the EMS/Gen/Shore switch BEFORE the inverter. In theory, I could run one air conditioner off my inverter and batteries by using the inverter to boost power from a low current shore power source, But only by rerouting AC power for the air conditioner THROUGH the inverter. This will probably wait until we upgrade the system to more battery and more panels and I would install a switch so the air conditioner could be powered via either path. .

The only special tool I purchased for this install was a hydraulic crimper. I purchased this one: https://amzn.to/2FbUiXc on Amazon for $45.99.

Appropriately size well nuts can be hard to find. I scrounged through every hardware store in town, to find enough. While local HW stores would carry them, they often only had half a dozen or so of each size in stock. Make sure you get the ones with the thin shoulders so your brackets sit on the roof. The well nuts, or expansion nuts, as some places call them, need to be longer than the plywood/fiberglass on the roof – thus I used 1 inch long. I had some 1/2 inch versions and they didn’t hold properly in tests.

Feel free to ask any questions, here or over on youtube. Get to know use here on Youtube and please subscribe.

Postscript. I continue to be happy with the system. It won’t keep up with our needs when we are shaded as we are this week in Glacier, but it is working as designed. Its cool that as long as I have cell, I can connect back and see how the entire system is doing.

August 24, 2017September 14, 2017

Propride P3 hitch installs

Propride, safety chain, instructions….

This is the story of two installations of Propride’s P3 hitch system. We have a 26 foot travel trailer on an F150 truck and our daughter’s family has a 35 TT on a 3500 van. We’ve not been impressed with hitches with friction based sway damping, so after a lot of research, we chose the quite expensive P3. The P3 uses a trapezpoid “box” to connect between the tow and trailer. This, as they describe, effectively projects the connection point forward near the rear axle of the tow vehicle. The result is the trailer faithfully follows the tow, but the tow isn’t nearly as affected by side winds on the trailer. “Something like a fifth wheel hitch”.

We ordered two P3s and shipped them to the same address, which saved us a bit on the shipping. We decided to do our (25 ft) trailer first in hopes of working out any installation confusion the first day. Propride says the hitches can be installed in about two hours – but the average from blogs I’ve read seems more like 3-4. For us, it was more like 5-6. Its not because we don’t know which end of a wrench to hold, but rather because the instructions could be a bit clearer, because no two trailers are alike and because we encountered problems, especially on the second trailer.

I’m going to include specific instruction “additions” below, so these descriptions will simplified.

The first part to install is the adjustable hitch bar. Since receivers (car end) and the trailer hitch are often at different levels, the hitch bar is made in two parts, with a series of holes. The instructions have you measure the height of your receiver box and the top of the trailer ball mount with the trailer set level. Then a series of “if this, do that” instructions guide you which parts to put right side up or up side down and which holes to mate to bolt it all together. They are confusing. Some simple pictures would help a lot.

So following the instructions – the F150 said to have the adjustable hitch assembled straight across. The Van had the trailer end ½ inch higher. Neither of these turned out to be right. We tried a number of combinations over several days. I eventually went back to my instructions for a different weight distribution hitch. Those instructions had me take a measurement of the fender height, front and back, with the tow vehicle unloaded, loaded-no-weight-distribution and loaded with weight distribution. That way you get some measure of whether you’ve transferred weight up to the front axles and how much the tongue weight pushed down ont he tow vehicle. ALSO, just important, is to measure whether the trailer has been returned to LEVEL when the Weight Distribution is added in.Your tow vehicle WILL drop some as the trailer is added, and the P3 instructions didn’t seem to take this into account.

On the F150, we left the hitch bar ends even and added in enough washers to get 8 degrees of down tilt to distribute more weight to the front axle. The trailer isn’t quite level yet, so I may do one more adjustment on this. On the van, we raised the trailer side 2 holes and added one washer to get 6 degrees of tilt. We moved measurable weight to the front axle and the trailer is now dead level.

After the hitch bar, comes the jack posts. We had to remove the propane tanks and the tank shelf. Fortunately, the shelf sits on a separate bracket so we’d be able to move the shelf a bit when we put it back. The jacks slide over the trailer frame – and in our case since we have box frames, there is a steel spacer that went in back, plus a set bolt that locks each jack in place. Finally, there is a large U-bolt that goes around the frame to hold the jack down. Instructions say these go 26 inches back from the center of the ball hitch – but that can extend up to 27 ½ most of which was required on both trailers. The big problem was these jacks are designed for trailers that use just under 2 inch box frame members. On the first trailer, they went in fine. On the second one, the frame was just over 2 inches wide. The result was an hour of grinding on the spacers and test fitting. Eventually they barely fit on the frame. Because of this, I suggest a test fit of your jacks FIRST THING, because by the time you might find out yours doesn’t fit, you are well past the point of no return. I can’t imagine I was the first person to enounter this problem.

Then the frame bracket goes on – a heavy bracket that bolts across the trailer frame just ahead of the jacks. The Yoke (which bolts to the hitch head) reaches back to this frame and both allows the head to tip, but also holds the head straight with respect to the trailer. More U-bolts. We carefully measured this bracket, both side to side and distance on each side from the center of the ball hitch. Then again AFTER the Yoke is installed to tweak the distance because the extension on the yoke is supposed to fit in the middle of this bracket’s down posts.

Then the main hitch unit is lifted into place and locked into the trailer ball mount. The spring bars are mounted into the main head and connected to the jacks. The spring bars are lubricated at this point, but there are also grease fittings to keep them lubricated. After I pumped grease in until it came out the bottom, I discovered when we went on the road that a fair amount of grease gets squeezed out while driving and needs to be wiped off so it doesn’t end up all over your hands or hitch cover.

The Yoke is added to the main hitch unit and placed into the slot in the frame bracket and locked into place. Once everything is bolted then torque to specs (you need a 250 pound rated torque wrench).

Hitching up – which is a bit more complicated since you aren’t just parking a ball under a head – the hitch bar has to be the right angle (in two directions) and height in order to slide in enough to lock in place.

Finally re-measure the fender height, front and rear of the tow vehicle before anything is connected. Then measure with the trailer weight added to the tow, to see how much the front lifts (and rear drops). Then adjust spring jacks and measure again.

Basically the adjustment goes like this:

Look at how much the front of the tow goes up with the trailer weight on. You want to eliminate as much as half of that rise.

You then raise the trailer using its jack to make it easier to adjust the P3 spring jacks and run both jacks up to about 6 inches. Then lower the trailer till all the weight is back on the spring bars. Measure the front fender. If you’ve not take enough of the rise out – you can raise the jacks a bit more, but according to Sean, you don’t get much lift past 7 inches, and that is what we found: not a lot of change after 6 inches.

If there still isn’t enough lift or the trailer is nose down, there are two possible adjustments. One change the offset between the tow and the trailer in the hitch bar – raise or lower the trailer side of the bar to keep the trailer level . Two – change the angle – add a washer, to angle down the trailer side. This allows more shifting of weight on the tow vehicle front axle while also bringing up the trailer side. Be aware, this also stiffens the link between the two vehicles. No amount of angle or weight distribution will fix the issue of your trailer tongue weight being too much for the tow vehicle Rear Axle Weight Rating.

By all means, get your tow vehicle weighed and the tow + trailer weighed. This will show you how much weight is added to each axle AND give you an approximation for tongue weight and whether your trailer is overweight as well. I bought a tongue weight scale from Propride – but you can extract pretty good numbers for the two trips to the scale. We used a local Cat scale. The process is pretty simple. Just pull on with your front, rear and trailer axles on each of the three squares. Push the botton and give the guy a number. Any number….. like 77564. When the operator says, OK, drive to the office, go in – give them the number. Pay $11. When you come back, tell them “reweigh” and give them the same number – wait for OK, drive to office. Pay $2. We took our tow vehicle first, then came back with the tow+trailer rig. If you haven’t weighed, you are guessing or hoping that you aren’t overloaded. Given trailer construction these days, you almost certainly are overloaded. You probably can’t completley “fix” it, but at least you’ll know where you stand.

Words of wisdom

The jacks can go back to 27 ½ inches. This helps a lot on the propane bottles on some trailers. You will still have to move them (the shelf) forward a bit.

The frame bar is supposed to be 22 inches – on both trailers it ended up closer to 21.

Two people are needed to lift the heavier pieces and the Yoke because lining up both sides at the same time is difficult with even two people.

The hitch bar instructions are easy to get lost in the A, B, C, D sections. Have someone else read and agree with you before you start using the 250 pound torque wrench. This part is more confusing than need be. It can be understood but there’s nothing wrong with you if you have to read it 4 times to figure it out.

Measure your frame width carefully if it’s a box frame. Make sure it is just under 2 inches – or that your jacks are just larger (with shim) than the box width. Or do a test fit. After you’ve take off your old hitch and started an install is not the time to find out that your jacks are not going to fit without a lot of grinding on the shims. Especially if your rig is parked where you can’t leave it and you have no way to grind metal. (I did, you might not)

If your trailer jack has a foot-pad attached – make sure you either remove it – or run it up higher than the spring bars. You can move the head around when its not attached to the tow vehicle and make sure it clears your jack, but it will not clear the foot unless the foot is fully above the spring arms.

As soon as you attach the head, swing it through the full range of motion and make sure it doesn’t contact anything – such as the safety chains and or chain mounting bracket as it did on both of our trailers. Then if it does, drop it back off and make changes to your safety chains or whatever while it is off.

Both our trailers are Forest River (Flagstaff and Rockwood). Both have the safety chains connected to a single V-shaped bar welded to the front bottom of the trailer. The Propride head hits this bar and the chains coming off this bar when near fully turned. I’m going to have to re-position this mount to the frame sides. (Some states require TWO separate safety chain mounts – this is a FAIL on all accounts on Forest River). I can’t believe ProPride hasn’t enountered this problem before either. It would be a lot easier to relocate the chains BEFORE the P3 is installed.

You will most likely need chain, safety brake cable and electrical extensions. The 35 ft TT happened to have a long enough electrical cable, but everything else on both trailers needed to be extended.

The test….

We took the trailers on a three day, excursion to test out the hitches. Driving, they were great. No being pulled into a semi as it passed. You still know you are being passed – and I think the more we drove, the more we noticed the smaller push from the big rigs. We did have an “issue” getting our brakes adjusted. The “bump”, when stopping or pulling away is in indication that the trailer brakes aren’t set quite high enough. We have not done the “20 mph, see if the brakes lock up” test on either trailer, but we may still have to do that to make sure we don’t have the brakes set too high.

Because both trailers had extra angle in the hitch bar, it also made it a little more tricky hitching up and down. I kept my level handy and put it on the bar, and the head when hooking up as an easy way to see if we had the head at the right angle. I’m thinking a couple of stick on, round bubble levels might be a good thing.

When disconnecting, the instructions say watch for the ball mount to move to know when you’ve lowered to the right amount. That almost never worked. We kept a tape measure handy and did a quick measurement of the height of the hitch bar top at the receiver. That would get us close. Then, after everything is disconnected – have the driver pull forward just one inch. Watching the bar go up or down then indicated the direction the trailer needed to go so the hitch could cleanly pull out. Then pull forward a few more inches to double check. Adjust the trailer jack if need be and then move all the way out. They suggest putting a piece of tape on your breaker bar to measure the Jack height – another piece of tape could indicate the approximate height of the receiver for pulling the tow away from the trailer.

Hitching up is pretty straight forward, so long as someone can go straight backward. A rearview camera helps a lot. Depending on the slope the tow is parked on vs the trailer, it might be necessary to adjust the spring jacks to get the angle of the head to match the hitch bar enough to slide in.

I ordered some waterproof material to make two hitch covers – will report back, when I get around to making them. This is a bit bigger than other’s I’ve seen in pictures, but it also keeps all the chains and cables out of the weather. This was the second iteration – and uses two pieces of material, witih simple edge seams and sewn together down the middle. The material is a bit heavier that I thought it would be, but as something you’d use for Marine upholstry, it will hold up well.

As I mentioned, the safety chain and mount was in the way of the head when it swung when in a backing turn. Each of our hitches had a dent in the edge of the head where it had hit the chain. So, I found some Grade 8 bolts, nuts and washers and took some time one day to start preparing. The frame is box shaped with the two boxes coming together under the ball receiver. They placed a piece of steel over the end of each one and tack welded it in place. I used a dremel with a cutting wheel to grind off the welds enough to pry these off. The plan was to drill holes in the side of the box – sneak in bolts inside and lock them in place with washer, lock washer and nut – torqued to 90 ft pounds. Then a washer, the chain, another washer and two nuts (locked to each other) to keep the chain in place. Repeat on other side. While we were working on my trailer, we realized that we could do the same thing on the other trailer, except put the holes in the bottom of the frame boxes. The end pieces still needed to be ground/cut off to gain access. On the second trailer, we did the work at my house and I used my saws-all to cut the welded on bracket off. Interestingly, cutting one side was very hard – cutting the other side went like through butter – meaning the welding heat treated the metal differently on each side. Each trailer took about two hours to do all the work. I used pest crack foam to seal up the ends of the boxes – at least for now. All of this would have been SO MUCH EASIER if had been done before the P3 was installed.

mgg

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Tag: DIY

Solar Installs

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