Dreadlocks outfitting of InTech Discover

[dreadlocks]

hell yeah, been looking for someone else running em.. they look fabulous on spec sheet and worth the premium.. mine will be here Tuesday, cant friggin wait.. they been in my shopping cart for nearly a year now.

thats basically what I was going to do for wiring, these are such high voltage output with the 96 cells that with one panel on 100ft of 10awg is only like 1.5% voltage drop, if I went with 8awg.. I could go 200ft with 2% drop.. Ive got a 100ft 10awg extension cord for genset that seems like it'd be more than enough distance away.. was going to make 4x25ft 10awg marine cables with andersons and locking pins, sleeving em is a great suggestion tho, duh.. dunno why I forgot that.

Fixed panel is my ez button, it'll just be there always taking advantage of any sun it gets, completely secure.. when driving it can be recharging, when locked up at a trail head for a few days it can be charging, when shade is scarce we might find setting up 2nd one wont be worth it.. I'm mounting it to top of trailer roof rack and no shade from power vent or aircon will get to it.

in the Pacific North West its a whole nother ball game, like worst conditions for solar I've had to deal with.. if its not the trees, its the clouds that get you.. usually both.. this is why I got generator, last solar setups became mostly dead weight in Oregon and Washington.. Colorado gets over 300 days of sunshine, its pretty easy here to get a little sun at least.. trailer is larger than most of our connifer footprints, so I'm not parked under em as much as among em.. its actually a bit difficult to find a camp that is always in the shade all day long.. our stuff dont grow so big and massive with the lack of water and air.

 

[jwiereng]

our stuff dont grow so big and massive with the lack of water and air.

I am not sure there is less air in CO, but if true, I am not certain what effect it has in tree size. Moisture availability and temperatures are most likely the larger contributor.

 

[Alloy]

To start I'd suggest carrying 1 or both inside the trailer to use portable.

On our last trailer sometimes I set the panels up on the roof to get clear of the trees and being able to set the panels up "square" to the sun made a huge difference on overcast days.

The 8ga cost me $25 more per 50' cord for <1% loss. I've 4 cords.

 

[dreadlocks]

@jwiereng well air concentrations are the same everywhere on earth, its just the pressure is different.. High Altitude fauna is some of the slowest growing, yet longest living.. probably for a multitude of reasons, water scarcity being the biggest.. these massive quaking aspen organisms are thought to have last flowered/seeded during the ice age, since then conditions have been so poor that cloning has been the only way to reproduce.. so now we have entire forests that are just one big tree.

@Alloy, one is definitely going to be portable.. the only place to conveniently store it inside is against the rear ramp.. so I'm going to pin it to the outside of the ramp off the back of the trailer, top two pins will act as hinges so I can deploy it still attached, or we pull those pins.. and carry it off into the sun.. each panel is getting its own MPPT controller since they will both be in vary different locations, these panels are so large I'm worried about getting one of em on the roof unscathed, let alone trying to do it in the field.. I'm thinking of grabbing a couple 16ft 2x4's to make a ramp just to attach the one to the roof.

8awg would mean I cant use normal 40A powerpoles, I have these on alot of stuff already and I'm going to multi-purpose this cable so it can be used for anything DC related, not just solar.. 1.5% voltage drop is a whole wopping 5W of power I'll be loosing, not gonna sweat it.

 

[Alloy]

Panels peaked a 304W today but then it got cloudy..........at 12:00 a panel laid flat was 7-15W and 36-42W perpendicular to the sun.

 

[dreadlocks]

Got first SmartSolar MPPT 10/30, was an "open box" on Amazon for $180, but it was never opened, just a small corner crunched on original packaging.. worth the deal.

oh yeah, these showed up today.. to bad the sun is nowhere arround and the trailer was covered in snow this morning.. yay spring in Colorado.



My wife accepted delivery, called me and asked if these would fit on the trailer as they were huge.. my reply was, yeah they are huge and they better fit cuz I only measured it a million times.

 

[dreadlocks]

sigh, its day 3 now of rain and I said screw it and got the roof panel up.. running a temp cable down to do some bench testing, this weekend weather is looking good so I can bolt this down, drill a hole through the roof, install the EMT conduit inside and yank the cables to my lil electrical closet.

 

[dreadlocks]

ok this is pretty cool, parked under a tree.. in the shade, getting more than enough power for basic loads.. went from 50% to 70% SOC today from 9AM to Noon with fridge running.. numbers might not seem impressive, but I never got near this much out of a flat fixed panel on my other trailer when it was parked in less shade than this.. this is what I was kinda shooting for, my back yard parking spot is under a big cottonwood tree directly to the south, so kinda typical of a place we'd camp trying to stay out of sun.. I wanna be able to run base loads indefinitely without worrying much where I'm parked and no setup, and extend the luxury loads longer when not wanting to setup portable panel/genset.




I've thought long and hard about making a tilting setup, and naw.. I've got another panel and a genset, this thing will be more secure and weigh less w/out a 4 direction tilting frame.. KISS.

 

[Alloy]

What do you get when it is tilted?

 

[dreadlocks]

I hooked em both up in parallel and played with the one in the sun's tilt, had a little effect.. but not much, like 12W

Basically Flat on ground in sun vs Tilted directly inline.


This is kinda how I'll be setup at camp, one on roof doing like 30-50W and one on ground doing 200-250W, if the rooftop one happens to catch a break and get some direct sunlight for a lil while this can jump up another 150-200W.. its pretty nice having so much solar and being limited by the sun and not the single battery.

I could make top tilting if I want later, but I think this will leave me with excess as it is.. I would make a steel frame out of 2in angle iron, weld it to the roof racks then secure the panel within using rivnuts and wing-bolts.. could unbolt it without any tools and the frame would be like a manhole is to a manhole cover, no matter what of the 4 directions I want to tilt it, wont fall through.

 

[jacobconroy]

One thing I'm finding with lithium not often talked about is how capacity anxiety seems to be negated with quick charging.

for example, with cell phones for the last two decades I valued runtime over feature set.. with work paying me to respond to calls/sms/emails at any time all other features were moot.. I disabled everything and valued most a device that worked for days on end because forgetting to plug it in one night would spell professional disaster.. I remember being on the train when wife was days away from giving birth with first kid, got bored clicked on some stupid video then when phone shut down on me I felt like an idiot.. Or the time I flew to another state for a job interview, spent so much time talking to wife on phone afterwords it died on me and left me scrambling to call a taxi back to airport.. low battery anxiety has prevented me from ever using a smart phone as much more than a phone.. screw the apps and battery draining crap.

Now I have a phone w/USB-C fast charging and its a paradigm shift, if I wake up and battery has 20% charge.. I can plug it in my car and on my 20m drive to work I end up at 40% instead of 22% and can easily survive until next opportunity to plug it in for a few mins... burning through a bunch of battery watching cats on the internet is no big deal anymore, because the ability to go from 5% to 100% in 2h is so much better than 8-10h of yesteryear.

I'm seeing same gains w/Lithium in the camper trailer, I have two GC batteries in my 75 Westy with a lil 100W solar setup.. problem was it was not a vehicle I wanted to drive for 8h+ a day, it is slow, loud, uncomfortable, and a death trap by modern standards.. so I took it on big long adventures hoping a few hours closer at a time and resting.. which meant I could never get batteries back up w/driving and solar, its alternator was pathetic.. I had a 100ah AGM in my previous little adventure trailer, I would drive it across the country in a hard sprint, then spend a few weeks going a few hours every few days enjoying the location, then scream back home before vacation ran out.. I would have a full charge when I got there, and when I got home, but quickly into the trip I would be idling the engine for a few hours every day or looking for AC outlets to plug into just to try to keep the low voltage disconnects away.

With Lithium I can fire up generator when I want, as I want.. kick it on for half an hour and get ~15% of capacity back while your making the kids lunch is pretty awesome.. no pressure or need to get it back to 100%, battery is happy at partial charges for long times unlike lead.. just have enough juice to get through the day then worry about it tomorrow.

This last weekend I used 60ah in one day with heater, radio, microwave, coffee and a few other things testing for high consumption use.. I dont mind running generator if I have too for a few hours daily, just not all day daily.. with 8h of runtime on a generator I'd want enough capacity to go 4 days, same generator runtime overall.. with 60ah a day diet, and a 50% discharge thats a lead bank of 480AH equivalence.. you can get out of 30lbs what it takes lead >300lbs (an average of 2h a day of generator/engine use, fuel, and mebe driving)

With solar I'm going to try to prove that this quick charge curve is also a boon for boondocking, I found it obnoxious when I got a few hours of good sunlight and lead only wanted to sip on a fraction of the amps, and then when battery was discharged enough that it could take those amps the conditions were no longer favorable.. getting enough reliable direct sunlight to fully recharge a lead battery at a random location every few days is rather challenging proposition, on paper it looks easy but IRL its much more trouble.. all internet search results on solar design are assuming that your doing a fixed install with favorable light conditions, because why would you not? With lithium I can shoot for only a few hours of direct sunlight with a big enough solar setup, and slurp up the amps they output until its basically full again.. I dont NEED 8-12h of direct sunlight anymore and hell I cant wait.

I'm buying the solar panels tonight

I'm glad you took the time to write this down. Slowly, yet surely, I'm being "talked into" lithium. Once the general shock of, "Holy crap, my 125 Ah battery will only run my fridge & fan for 1.5 days before dropping down to 12.1 volts with AGM" passed I hauled around a 100 watt solar panel for a few weeks only to spend the days screwing around with the panel. Moving it, aiming it, etc. The difference in my battery longevity was negligible IMO.

Running the rig's engine for an hour each morning to get a bulk charge to the AGM made me the "redheaded stepchild" amongst my family. They do not like engines running around camp. Can't blame them.

What I learned is that I don't want to babysit my batteries at camp.

So, I'm starting to learn the lingo and work out a Li system for my rig. Someday I'll get a new RTT that will allow me to fill it's lid up with solar too. I appreciate all the time you spend explaining the minutia involved on this forum.

 

[dreadlocks]

yeah with LiPoFe4 you would go from ~60AH of usable capacity, to 80-90AH of usable capacity for half the weight.. then instead of needing to drive 6-8h to get it back to 100%, you could drive 2.5h to get it back to 100%.. (with a 40A B2B Charger)

With lead, if you get to your low disconnect.. then drive til full and then camp until you hit it again and repeat.. you'd need to travel over 2000 miles a week overlanding to be fully independent.. with lithium and the same strategy, you'd need to travel a mere 450 miles using the same formula.. (7/1.5 = ~4 days driving a week for ~8h or ~500 miles vs 7/2 = ~3 days driving a week for ~2.5h or ~150 miles).. To match Lithium with lead you'd have to increase capacity from 1.5 days to 6 days to drive roughly same distance.. how much would 4x more 125AH batteries cost you in money and weight, presuming you could even find a place for em? Now the $1k price tag of a 100AH LifePo4 battery is not looking so crazy, especially if the battery ends up lasting several times longer than lead.

All you needa do is go hit up some jeep trails for a few hours every other day and you'll have more energy than you know what to do with and never need to annoy your fellow campers w/an idling engine.

 

[dreadlocks]

I'm shooting to keep my loads between 20% and 80% of the battery capacity (60AH day diet is pretty big), I've reduced the charge voltage on solar to 14.4 and it leveled off ~80% SOC from 14.6.. the SmartSolar was in float mode with just like 20W input, so I plugged in crockpot, and with both panels partially shaded this is the output:



So battery is "full", panels are not in direct sunlight its 5pm, crockpot is on (constant load) and its costing me a mere 13W, koolaid man oh yeh.. A cloud came over, and with both panels under a tree, under a cloud I still got 50W of power.. which is awesome coming from a cheap 120W briefcase that would be outputting nada in same environment.

First day of realistic bench testing went pretty damn well, I'm thinking this might end up working even better than I had hoped..
in rather weak lighting conditions I can keep my minimal loads (fridge/lights) on indefinitely with zero setup, and luxury loads (furnace/inverter) without the generator near as frequently.
in moderate lighting conditions I can run a heavy luxury load indefinitely deploying the portable panel into direct sunlight
in great lighting conditions I can run luxury loads w/no setup and just piss away whatever extra I want, like keeping lights/fans on constantly.
in piss poor lighting conditions (rain/snow) I can just run whatever I want and rely on GenSet a little bit each day.

Further testing, actual field use and more data will prove it, but after multiple failed attempts at solar camping I finally feel like I might possibly reach the promise land..

 

[dreadlocks]

Drained it down to 20% disconnect overnight, great day of sun, just a few clouds here and there on portable panel.. didnt move it or re-aim it at all, just spot I left it yesterday proped up with a milk crate (so not much tilt)
by noon I was back to 80% SOC, by 2PM I was at 96% SOC.. with varying loads throughout the day (radio/inverter/fridge) and solar charger output is capped at 20A because thats the biggest fuse I had laying around for bench testing.



hadda tweak some settings on charger, went into float charge at like 50%.. its a known issue, supposed to be a fw update coming soon.. til then raising the float voltage up a bit keeps the draw high enough it drops back to bulk/absorb (14.4)

 

[dreadlocks]

Mounted and secured, the angle iron extends a lil past the panels in both directions to act as a branch deflector to lift it up over the panel instead of crashing into its corner.





edit Conduit Ran.. its getting painted now.. here's a photo of raw metal because it contrasts better