Warning: Seriously nerdy stuff lies ahead. Proceed with caution.
This week we have an update on our "bus automation" project. Last time we introduced the technologies that we were exploring as well as some of the hardware we intended to use for experimentation.
I spent some time configuring and learning
As many of you recall, we dropped the bus off to our painter in Mexico in mid-June to get painted. Mexico has had very heavy rain in this last monsoon season. This is very good for Mexico - very bad if you want to get a bus painted.
Last week, we put the converters, relays, and fuses on our board and got it wired into the supply side. We did some preliminary testing to ensure that everything was connected correctly.
This week, we finished wiring everything up. We ran the control wire for the "backup" system power, ran
After getting the A/C power mostly squared away and tested, it was time to tackle the 12V DC "house" power side of things. Most modern motorhomes actually have three discrete electrical systems powered by two separate sets of batteries. The first electrical system is to power the vehicle part
In our last post, we went over our process for selecting the Victron Quattro inverter. We discussed a few of the benefits offered by this inverter as well as gave an overview of how we wired everything. Now we finally have enough of our system hooked up to run a
We finally have all our electrical connections wired up and our BMS working. It is time to fire up our Victron inverter and see if everything works! Before we do that, we will explain why we decided on this particular inverter, briefly recap how we wired it up, give a
We are starting a four-part series on our major electrical components. In this series, we will share our research and thoughts as to why we selected REC BMS, the Victron Quattro inverter, the Victron Color Control GX, and the Victron Smart Solar MPPT solar charge controller. We will also go
We want to give a huge thank you to all the folks who take the time to provide feedback and advice on our build. Thank you! We read every comment and consider every idea. When folks bring up potential issues with safety, we pay particularly close attention. A couple of
After wiring the inverter to the 120V load center, we were ready to wire up all of the A/C circuits. We have seen many bus conversions and RVs that only have a couple of A/C circuits. But, we would like to be able to cook something in the
After wiring up the supply side of the system, it was time to actually prepare to send that power somewhere. We decided to start with the 120V A/C side of things. Our starting point was to map out where we need 120V in the bus and how many different
In our previous episode in this series, we installed and secured the Nissan Leaf battery. Now we connect all the components to ensure safe power delivery to our systems. At the bottom of this post, we provided a list of all
When we purchased our bus, we knew that it had a 30 Amp shore power connection, but to be honest we were not exactly sure what that meant. We knew it was smaller than 50 Amp (you know because 30 is clearly less than 50), but we soon found out
The time had finally come to install our Nissan Leaf battery into the bus. To be honest, this whole thing has been such an experiment, we were kind of surprised we actually got to this point.
When Juan took out the old factory bus heat and a/c components in
