This wasn’t a task I thought I would ever be doing, after all our solar and battery setup has been providing our power needs for over a year now, however, what we want to do is spend more time at locations and less time driving, not only to keep fuel costs down, but to enjoy our travels too. In order to be able to spend more time off-grid we need to collect more power and be able to store more power and with the addition of some new electric cooking gadgets this meant our Battery and Solar setup needed upgrading.
Our aim is to power our van, charge our tech and feed ourselves purely from the free electricity we harvest when we drive and from the solar panels. We recently started to use an Instant Pot for cooking amazing meals instead of suing the gas burner and gas oven, we also plan to try out the electric grill that our mate George makes 😜and even see if we have enough power to heat the van, run the fridge and get hot water all from the batteries.
We only have a limited space to put batteries, and really can only fit 2 batteries in the space I recently made when refitting the van, so we knew the battery had to be a Type D, a fairly uniform design shape and size battery to fit in most campervans, motorhomes and caravans. I found only a few Lithium iron batteries made in this size, lithium iron is far more chemically stable and won’t get hot or set on fire, unlike other lithium batteries, and Relion in the USA came up top on the best overall spec, safety and price. I contacted them to ensure my van setup of chargers and solar would work with their batteries and was assured 100% no problem, they then put me in touch with their UK distributor Alpha Batteries who were nice enough to offer a discount on the battery price to have their name in this blog. Alpha battery customer care was also really helpful with their battery setup advice.
I ordered 2 x RB100-D Relion batteries which are 100AH each, but unlike lead acid batteries, which only provide 50% of the stated power, the RB100-D can provide the full 100 AH, meaning I now have 200AH power available to run our electrical devices. In real terms this means we now have an additional 70AH over our old system, and saved 22KG of weight too as the Lithium batteries are much lighter.
While the RB100-D battery has a built-in BMS, battery management system, I still wanted a more accurate way to view the power available from them, just to see if we could cook tea in the instant pot or even if Mandy could get another nespresso coffee, and for this I installed the Victron BVM 712 battery monitor with a small display and bluetooth APP. You install a device, called a shunt, between the negative battery terminal and the negative load of your devices and this measure the load taken out of the battery and put back in, all in real time too. So it’s now easier to see what power we have left in.
The second part of this upgrade was to be able to put more power into the new larger battery bank and to do so via solar as this is totally free. We looked at installing more solar panels on the van roof, but sadly there’s little space for a meaningful sized solar panel to be installed, we then looked at removing our current 150W panel and either installing 1 larger panel or even creating an array of panels built on a raised platform to go over the toilet roof vent, but in the end we chose to get a portable solar panel array. The Dokio 200W folio type kit seemed perfect for our needs, very compact, easy to setup and a potentially big 16 amps of solar charge, but I wanted to wire this in parallel to our existing 150w panel to provide roughly 28 amps of solar charge, which meant I needed to upgrade our 15 amp solar controller, so we installed the Victron 100/30 solar controller, with built-in bluetooth so I can use the Victron APP to monitor thing, Gadget John after all 😁
The really benefit of the new system of roof and portal solar is we collect solar while moving, or just parked up on the street and then when we go to a parkup or campsite we connect the 200w portable array and can angle and position that to collect even more power. The Dokio kit did come with cables and a solar controller, however, as I wanted to wire the Dokio panel in with the roof 150w panel it meant i wasn’t going to use the supplied solar charger, nor did I use their cables, instead I used 20 feet of 6mm2 (10awg) cable with MC4 connectors to easily connect the panel and position it anywhere around the van, on the windscreen is a favourite as it’s the perfect angle to the sun and provides a sun shade to the cab interior too.
So that’s our new upgrades all detailed, the old batteries came out easily and the new ones slotted in perfectly, the old solar controller was swapped for the new bigger one and the battery monitor was also installed easily. We now have 200AH of power to call upon whenever we want and a decent amount of solar to charge the batteries back up. So far we spent one day where Mandy had plenty of coffee and we made to meals in the instant pot, I was charging drone batteries as well as cameras and my laptop and the batteries came down to 85% at the end of that day. The next day was intermittent clouds with a top temp of 18oC and with the 2 solar panels we topped up the battery to 100% within the morning. Leaving us to enjoy the rest of the day without worrying about needing to stay put and have the portable solar panel out.
I’d also like to say a huge thanks to Phil for his help sorting this out. Please go and subscribe to him on Youtube.
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