New owner of Vintage Bus 1980

[freds]

Next question. If heat is needed at night or AC during the day in your estimation how many hours a day do u think u could support an air conditioner or heater and still not need to supplement the panels on the average mostly sunny day? 2 or 3 hr or will it be more or less?

I know when I'm in the infield at the race track living off inverter I need about 4 hr of gen time when I'm not needing HVAC and I go 2 in the morn and 2 in the evening resulting in about 10bucks a day in fuel. Not counting the inverters or batts or hardware that we all already have but just the panels and charging controllers how much did u put into just those items?

Hi Joe

I just realized I didn't answer all your questions...

My Tesla house battery pack if fully charged holds around 10.4KW of power, however for the longest life you generally charge to only an 80% power level so around 8KW of storage though I can elect now and then to go to a full charge.

The biggest draws are my air conditioners and when they are running flat out they draw around 2400 watts, so around three hours at that consumption level. I have no experience yet with what their duty cycle would be at say 80-90 degrees, so at this time guessing longer. During the night I could elect to just run the air conditioner that services the bedroom.

My outlay for the solar panels and solar charge controllers has been, oh shit you made me add everything up!!!

Solar panels                          $1700.00
Victron Charge controllers            $1800.00
Victron Color control computer         $510.00
Victron 24V to 12V 70 AMP converter    $141.00
Victron 24V Isolated 20 AMP DC charger $165.00
2 Tesla battery modules               $2200.00
SimpBMS for Tesla battery modules      $800.00
Signineer 6KW inverter                $1200.00
==============================================
Total                                $8,516.00

Actually this isn't bad, just 8KW of Battle Born batteries would have been close to the same amount.

DIY LifePO4 battery packs has been really dropping, if I was starting over today my totals for batteries would be around $2000.00 rather then the $3000.00 that I spent.

I am considering buying another couple of Tesla battery modules to double my storage capacity.

I could have gotten by with two solar charge controllers instead of the three that I purchased.