New owner of Vintage Bus 1980

[freds]

I assume the panels u r using would also be the best bang for the buck for me too? I would think I would not need the costly charge controllers u have put in and for a couple grand i could fill my trailer roof and cover a less expensive control?

I don't make the left coast too often but if God is willing ill be in Sacramento late May. If u were ready and willing to do some chassis stuff at that point bring yourself down to Norms towing and we will strip and redress your baby's underbelly.

Good Morning Joe

I got my panels from https://www.santansolar.com/ in their scratch and dent sale, as used panels from someone who did an upgrade on a solar farm. It looks like they are selling new panels for about the same cost as I paid.

The thing about shipping solar panels is that they are so large they require an extra large pallet and require special handling so it costs as much to ship a couple as it does for ten of them. A general rule of thumb you can't have too many panels (grin)...

I will keep in mind that you might be out this way, not sure where I will be at that time myself.

I understand you get your batteries for free and already have your inverters. I went for a 24V house battery system as that's a voltage of a single Tesla Battery module and I wanted to add on modules one at a time. Though I did consider 48V and a different inverter, but that would have required buying two modules at a time.

Generally the higher the voltage of the house pack, other costs go down for wiring and solar controllers. I have heard some horror stories about other brands of solar controllers failing and cooking large battery arrays.

[freds]

Your 240V drawing is confusing me. First, can I assume you are talking ACV? If so, what will you do with 240VAC that's not split-phase?

The HP power supplies do not care what form of higher voltage that you have as an input since they are designed to be used around the world. It could be split phase or a tap off of two legs of three phase power which is 208 volts, they adjust to a wide voltage range.

The key operating point is that aggregate power generation of the combined power supplies is greater than what the solar charge controllers can absorb. It's the solar charge controllers job to manage and account for the type of house batteries that you are using.

In my case I plan to split the power out via the battery isolator to my two other solar charge controllers when charging via the generator.

I suppose I could do the same when plugged into 50 AMP service, though generally when you do that; you are going to stick around for awhile, so not the time pressure you have when running a generator.

[freds]

Speaking of solar charge controllers; if your house voltage pack is higher then the bus start batteries you can use one as interface between the house batteries and the bus batteries as a full time maintainer.

The YouTube channel "Beginning from this Morning" has an episode on doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04hVUQQYiyY&t=13s

[freds]

Reached a milestone with the Kitchen rework today, I used the Microwave LOL!!!

[PrevostNewbie]

I do that too, when i am in the bus working, it's nice to have a bathroom, water to wash your hands, a kitchen, etc. Congrats on your power working, Life is good.

[freds]

Ok you can blame this on automation or design choices by yours truly. Given that I have made a living from software relate stuff for 40 plus years, I do tend to try and be a little smarter or dumber until I work all the bugs out.

Anyway my bus house systems automation has been based on very local (inside my bus, not dependent on reaching the Internet) Internet of things (IOT) stuff. The brain of my house automation is Raspberry Pi on a bus wired/WiFy network that is private to the bus.

As part of the design I went with Shelly Humidity and Temperature sensors that are battery powered. They are suppose to wake up every five minutes and detect the current values and if they have changed by X amount connect to the local WiFy network and report the change.



As you can see I have one such sensor stuck up on the wall of my bathroom.

As a sensor the drawback is that they are battery powered and I am on my second set of batteries in the last four months.

As a side note I am not yet living in the bus so it's going through larger temperature extremes then if I lived in it, so probably more reports than what would be normal.

Given that I plan on living in the bus full time for the next 10-15 years, maybe I should get them directly wired so they can be more reliable.



As you can see from the above graphic there was no kitchen reports until I inserted my last spare battery this evening...

While I could make the automation software ignore a heat zone or use the nearest zone if a zone is not reporting, I thing a hardware solution is more appropriate. I.E. Add some wires to provided power so that they are always ON!!!!

[PrevostNewbie]

I think wired is a good choice, those sensors most likely sip power from the tiniest of thimbles.

[freds]

I think wired is a good choice, those sensors most likely sip power from the tiniest of thimbles.

They make a replacement back that accepts USB power and converts it to 3 volts. I will add some small DC to DC converters to power these.

My biggest problem is fishing the wires through the walls, which I dread doing as once the hole is drilled, it's drilled...

[PrevostNewbie]

They make a replacement back that accepts USB power and converts it to 3 volts. I will add some small DC to DC converters to power these.

My biggest problem is fishing the wires through the walls, which I dread doing as once the hole is drilled, it's drilled...

I totally hear ya

[freds]

My bus came equipped with a large Norcold 1200 double door refrigerator/freezer. It worked on electricity but not on propane, which I recently discovered was that the ignitor coil had cold solder joints and had disconnected from the controller board.



I made the decision that my bus would be propane free, (opps now thinking of it for engine HP boost LOL!)..

But anyway this latest project that went very smoothly; was upgrading the refrigerator from the typical RV propane/electric cooling to a 12 DC compressor to be more power efficient inline with my solar power goals.

I purchased my conversion kit from:

https://jc-refrigeration.com/product...ld-hvac-units/

They have videos of how do the replacement/conversion of the cooling portion of your refrigerator/freezer. They offer replacements for most RV type of your refrigerator/freezer.

Here's the video of the basic procedure that I performed to upgrade my refrigerator/freezer.

https://jc-refrigeration.com/wp-cont...10-Norcold.mp4

I first heard about this conversion from the youTube channel "Morton's on the Move". https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCir...xZZApeIe0a5-6Q

The videos covering their conversion is:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yte1V3CkDrw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeKtqqleMdM


And since the proof is always in the numbers, here's a history chart from my first run:



I was able to install my automation temperature sensors by running them in through the holes for the drip pan drain and the ICE maker.

I realized on my way home after powering it up for it's first time that I forgot to clip the refrigerator temperature sensor to the appropriate cooling fin, just left it hanging. So as you can see from the graph's it over cooled the interior, but hey it works!!!

Still tucking it away and I will document another modification that I made in a future post.