1970 Bay (Outlaw-ish)

[sladey]

Thanks god you're not doing this without advice - it would have been the first van with scoops!

Like the proper colour scheme

[hot66]

to be fair, with Richards beard, straw hat & questionable taste in shirts he does look like he lives in a shabby beach hut

[KS]

Shabby chic? Oh, I thought he said shagging sheep. No wonder Bootsy sat up and took notice.

[murph2309]

Erm - thanks Keith. That was a bit before my time. Obviously everything was only the first time round when I was a teenager in the late 80s....

Thanks for the correction - was it a DKP thing?

Sladey - as for asking for help - I really am quite aware how uncool I am on things like this (and many others) and I'm really glad there are proper guiding hands on this one. I had even chosen some faded wood effect vinyl for the floor. Yep. I see now how pants it would have been....

[murph2309]

Electricity......

Without doubt, this was the most tricky thing to research and choose from myriad options. So I decided to start at the end. What did I want.

240v? Not really, not going to have a telly or electric heater or magimix to whip up a cheeky salsa. Occasionally for charging laptops and camera batteries. So no need for 3 pin plugs anywhere. Portable pure sine-wave inverter would do the job for laptops etc.

So, 12v everywhere, USB charging sockets preferred, maybe one cigarette lighter plug for some things

Power storage. Lithium? AGM? Lead acid? Lithium.... hmmm. Great storage and performance, but very expensive and frankly, it just feels like a fire waiting to happen. Failure in the charger or circuit breakers or anything....just too many what-ifs for me to sleep comfortably or leave the bus for any length of time....

Lead Acid? Proven tech, but heavy and need some TLC - I want it to be fit and forget til they run-out of cycles.

So I decided on AGM batteries - 2x 75Ah - one in the engine compartment, one just above it inside the cabin in the wheel well. AGM stands for Absorbent Glass Matt and the acid is soaked into the glass fibre, so they are spill-proof. They're relatively light (I say relatively, they're still 27kg each....) but pretty much maintenance-free. They also have good 'deep cycle' properties, which means they can be discharged to pretty low levels and still recharge again, they also retain their re-charge performance really well over many years, lead acid can see a serious drop-off after a couple of years. They also charge 5x faster than the flooded lead acid batteries. Oh, and they also work well in low temps. So a bit of an all-rounder. And they don't explode....

So - I chose these ones...

.

[sladey]

Cool

[murph2309]

And for charging? Well - I liked the idea of not being dependent on campsite hook-up for power, so I wanted solar on the bus. Cue another shed-load of research. OMG there are so many types of panels out there. So I won't bore you with the alternatives I looked at, but I went for semi-flexible, back contact (good efficiency) 100w panels and bought 2 of them. They are about 3mm thick and weigh only 2.3kg each, so we're not going to put much weight on the pop-top.

These ones will produce a maximum power voltage of 17.6V and a maximum power current of 5.68A each



In sunshine, together they'll produce about 11A/h, If you get sunshine for about 6 hours a day, obvs then about 66Ah - which will nearly fill one of the batteries.

At full charge, this means I will have around 1.8 KWh of leccy or about 90 Watt hours for 20 hours...... and that means, briefly, that if I have an energy efficient fridge, and LED lighting, and nothing else of any real significance (other than a lot of iPhone / Pad etc charging and that won't be too much; 18 Ah over 6 devices - 1% ish of the batteries if my maths is right....) I can splash out on a big stereo and not worry too much about it.....

Anyone bored yet? Haven't got to the best bit yet....split charging.... Yeah.....

[911hillclimber]

Brings back memories!
My son-in-laws Bus has 2 solar panels on the tilt top and it does really well in keeping things going.
He has avoided site hook-up and 240V too, no water heating.
Fridge demand was the tough one.
Worth every bit of research.
(I'm not bored by it)

[murph2309]

So, I figured there are 3 sources of charging available on the road - Alternator, Solar, and 240v hook-up.

Each needs to be regulated so the batteries get the optimum charge (apparently 14.7V for AGM). The solar, producing 17+V needs to be managed and the best tech is called MPPT or maximum power point tracking and is a DC to DC converter that makes the most of the available charge.

I think my alternator will make about 75A at around 14-15v and although I'm not planning on ever piping 240v directly to sockets in the van, it can be used to charge the batteries, just like you would at home with a trickle-charger.

So you need an MPPT, a transformer for the 240v as well as the alternator. And then you have to work out how all that is going to charge the batteries. You could have a series of switches but that's a real ball-ache and frankly I know I'd forget to turn them from one to the other and then get confused and it would all go horribly wrong. And they have those huge panels that just look scary & ugly so I wanted to avoid those too.

It's relatively easy to get the alternator and solar via the MPPT to charge the batteries, but adding in the option to automatically switch to 240v charging wasn't as easy.

Infact it was a total nightmare. How do you get them to switch to the most efficient source? Or even multiple sources? Flipping hours I spent on this, even researching marine forums as boats and buses have a similar set of needs and options. It all came back to needing to flip a switch sometime.

So I called Tim (Impmad 2000) all round top bloke and electrical guru.... "Check out CTEK he said - haven't used them, but they have kit that I think might do what you're looking for."

And so I did. Genius. Swedish company and they have something called a 'Smartpass' which links to their version of an MPPT and can be combined with Alternator charging and one of their 240v battery chargers. And no switches needed. It's all done in the smartpass...and if there's a surplus of electricity, it will then top up your starter battery automatically too. Brilliant.

Even better, it has temperature sensors, so will reduce the current into the batteries if it gets too hot....

Frankly, I think it's witchcraft, but this is how it is set up:



And if you're really keen, here's 3m 45s of your life you'll never get back (no sound...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN6oF-wj9XQ

And finally, for those 240v needs like laptop and camera batteries, I've gone for a portable 300w pure sine-wave invertor, which of course steps the 12v DC back up to 240v AC. So called pure sine wave, because it has the classic sine curve of AC power that we know and love from our school maths. Other invertors can alternate the current, but do so cheaply by making a square wave - this can damage laptops and stuff, so I avoided those.

This one will plug into a cigarette lighter that will have a fat 30A fuse fitted to it, so we can get the full 300w out of this - otherwise, a standard 10A fuse would mean the draw would be only around 100w. Apparently.



So there you go. The product of about 2 months of research and choices. But it means I'll have really flexible, really automatic, really fit and forget electricity for the bus.

[KS]

You might find this video a little more informative (it's got sound!). Now getting me thinking about my camper set-up...

https://youtu.be/TjqcOAjT4W4

[murph2309]

If you do go for it, the next gen on from that video is the D250SA and an upgraded Smartpass. Recommend Tayna Batteries for the CTEK and batteries, and Photonic Universe for the panels.

Solar Panels - https://www.photonicuniverse.com/en/cat ... -boat.html

Optima Marine AGM Batteries - https://www.tayna.co.uk/marine-batterie ... /8052-188/

CTEK D250SA - https://www.tayna.co.uk/battery-chargers/ctek/d250sa/

CTEK Smartpass - https://www.tayna.co.uk/battery-charger ... tpass-120/

CTEK MXS 25 AC/DC 8 stage smart charger - https://www.tayna.co.uk/battery-chargers/ctek/mxs25/

And of course all the wires and stuff....

Oh yes and one more thing - the battery monitor - this will go in the cabin area and is the only outward sign that you have witchcraft in your bus. And I like how minimal this thing looks



All done. Lesson learned? You have to work really hard to make things simple....

[sladey]

Didn’t understand a word. Very impressive though.

[murph2309]

So the next major decision to make was the fridge - remember the old one looked like this..... eeew. That wasn't going to be used again...



The new fridge needed to have a couple of key features: to be energy efficient and really compact, as I wanted a straight-run behind the driver's seat. Quite a few people will put a 'stepped' run in like this to accommodate a fridge with depth, but I don't really like this, just feels a bit messy to me.



To avoid this step, we needed to work with a depth of 400mm, most of the fridges on the market are over 500mm , so it was going to be a challenge. Not to mention the energy-usage.

There are loads of options out there for cooling, ranging from ice boxes through to propane-fueled 'absorption' fridges (but they need leveling and quite a lot of maintenance), but none of those was quite right for us. However there are some really good low-energy DC compressor fridges, especially those from Waeco / Dometic (the same fridge but two different brand names, same manufacturer....yeah, I'm not sure why either....)

And one in particular is a really clever one, because it has a detachable compressor that you can put up to 1.5m away from the fridge, meaning that we can fit it behind the single-run width that goes with the 3/4 R&R bed. For anyone who's interested, it's the Waeco CRP-40, meaning it has 40l of space inside and runs on a compressor. And look, without the compressor, suddenly we're under the magic 400mm. And it only weighs 18kg...



Even has a little freezer section for those choc-ices on a hot day (note use of singular there)



But the most remarkable thing about this fridge is how little power it uses. At external temps of 25 deg C and an internal temp of 5 deg C it's rated as drawing 40 watts - that's about the same as a pretty dim incandescent bulb.....

Even better, it only needs to run 23% of the time to maintain that temperature, meaning that your overall power draw on this fridge is 9 watts per hour!!!! Or roughly 10% of the available charge that I have. Frankly, that's amazing. I can have the fridge on all the time when we're camping and we really won't need to have any 'usage anxiety' with the fridge. It also has clever features like being able to lock the door closed when you're on the road and lock the door slightly open so that you can have air circulating when the bus is stored...brilliant.

So that's the cooling sorted.

[DustyM]

You could squeeze a lot more in with a few mods.

[murph2309]

OK - so we're a little behind schedule on the updates here - I've been out of Singapore basically since the end of May and have just got back. It's been busy at work, but also had some time at CLM and have had a holiday in the bus with the family.... more of that later.

So to bring you all up to date on the build....

Next up was the cooker / sink.

This was pretty easy, combo Smev cooker / sink unit. 2 burners, sink on the LHS



Then we had to decide on the heat - I wanted something that would keep the chill away, the bus will likely get cold in anything below 20C and my lot are now used to Singapore temperatures, so I needed something that would keep them warm. I also didn't want to either run it off the cooker gas, so that meant taking the combustible bit from the petrol in the bus, so we can take a feed from the petrol tank for the heater.

2 options, Webasto or Eberspatcher (Or Espar as they're also known). Neither are cheap, but I found a great deal online where I could get an Espar for roughly the same price as a Webasto - the deal-sealer for me was that I could get 4KW output from the Espar vs 2KW for the Webasto for roughly the same price.

So we went for the Espar Airtronic B4. Clever things, and not much space, and are fully programmable.