Follow Our Progress
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January 3rd 2004
My friend Alan joined me at the bus today to work on electrical
system while the girls all stayed home.
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We took it pretty easy and spent most of our time
soldering connectors for the two battery banks.
All of the connections were made using 2/0 welding cable that
I picked up from the RV surplus store for .80 per foot.
The connectors were a bit funky, but after a bit of grinding
and drilling a hole in each one to feed in solder, they worked
out just fine.
We made 4 cross connectors (red/black) for hooking up the 6V
batteries in series to make 12V and 4 parallel connectors
(red/red & black/black) for joining the 12V banks together
to up the Amperage.
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Since I only was able to pick up 4 of the total 8
batteries, Alan helped figure out the best layout for the
batteries so that all of the cable runs could be around 6 inches
and still form a complete battery bank.
We tested with the volt meter quite often and the readings
came out out exactly as expected each time.
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We figured out the best location for the
inverter/charger and ran all of the existing wiring through the
inverter.
It was pretty simple. The plug that was going into the
fuse box moved to the input side of the inverter and the output
from the inverter went into the plugs old home.
I didn't feel we had time to wire in the new panel I bought
yet. I'll tackle that project after we get back from our
trip to Quartzsite.
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To make the wiring easier and have a bit more
control over the two battery banks, we installed a battery bank
switch. The switch has 4 settings - off, bank 1 alone,
both banks and bank 2 alone.
I still have to install the disaster fuses I bought between
the switch and the inverter, but for testing, we just wired it
all up directly and used the switch to control the power to the
inverter.
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The whole mess installed and ready for
action. The batteries form a 440AH bank that runs into the
bank 1 side of the battery switch. When I add the second
bank of batteries I'll hook them up to the cable that we
connected to the bank 2 side.
The switch feeds the selected battery banks positive energy
to the inverter (or nothing if the switch is set to off).
When we disconnected the 110V line from the house, the
inverter kicked on and took over the job of keeping the
bus powered.
When we plugged back in to the house line, the charger
automatically started charging the batteries.
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I still need to build the bay for the batteries under the floor where
the inverter is currently sitting, but for now everything is working
right where it is.
Alan and I tried to get the battery monitor (remote control) for the
inverter/charger to work, but so far it looks like something is
broken. I'll follow up on Monday and see if I can get another
remote or if the inverter is not communicating with it properly.
There's not a lot of time to goof around with it, so I hope that it
turns out to be something simple... |
