Recent content by dmilamj

Can anyone elaborate on why the chassis is not appropriate for the battery to battery ground connection?

It's an AGM battery, a Universal Battery UB121000 from Amazon. We'll see how well it holds up.

Next up is to build a very low-profile enclosure for the power system, finish up the fold-into-a-bed third row seat, and then onto the shore-power system!

Power System Update One goal of this build is to keep the full 8 passenger capacity for in-town use. With that in mind, I've wedged the house battery and all associated fuse block, solar controller, and ACR up against the driver side wall. Here's a shot of my setup: Just a little...

Dude, definitely go with an automatic charge relay setup. I used this one in my van, and I was impressed with the quality of the switch and relay: With this setup, you don't have to remember to change a switch, and your start battery is always connected to the alternator (just like stock.)...

Advance Auto did a load test and said the battery was okay. But as mentioned above, it doesn't seem to be holding charge with no load, so I guess that is my (obvious) problem... What's a good method for checking for current drains on the start battery? I guess I can hook my multimeter up...

That's true. I figured my van might be sitting for weeks/months at a time during non-camping seasons, and I wanted to be able to keep the battery topped up. I had the start battery tested at Advance Auto and they said it was good. I then put it on a smart charger, and the charger thought it...

You are correct there is no backwards on that ACR, so I know that's not a problem. I measured the voltage, and I'm getting a voltage drop of about .11 to .13 volts along the length of the charging cable during operation. It seems like I should be able to get an okay charge with that voltage...

Sounds pretty sweet. Are the photos missing? This thread could use some photos of the van, man.

So I have recently added a Solar/Dual Batt setup to my camper van and am having an issue with charging of the start battery. Here's the setup in my 2004 Chevy Astro: 100 AHr Universal SLA house battery 150W Renogy solar panel EPEVER Tracer 2215BN 20A MPPT Solar controller BlueSea SI-ACR and...

Very cool trip. Thanks for the report!

Nice looking van. I like the blacked out lower third, I'll probably copy that for my van at some point.

So they block Imgur huh? Is anyone else having trouble seeing the photos? Your build was one of my inspirations, so looking forward to sharing my build with everyone here.

3rd Row Seat - Folding platform part 1 So I started work on the folding plywood platform portion of the seat. The idea is to have two panels that are hinged off the front edge of the seat base and that fold up underneath the seat. Here's test fitting the plywood and hinge location. Here are...

3rd Row Seat - Part 2 To make the new seat base, I cut the front edge off of a stock seat base so that I could reuse the upholstery mounting points and the nice radius edge. The rear needed to be an inch narrower to fit inside the 47" hinge spacing, so I used 1x1 square tube to fab up a new...