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
A Hacker's Take on RV House Batteries: Part 7.5 UPDATE to Supply Side Wiring
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
A Hacker's Take on RV House Batteries: Part 7 - Supply Side Wiring
This has been updated: please see the update here
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
Plugging In - Wiring Our Bus For 50 Amp Shore Power
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
RPM Love: Installing and Testing a Tachometer On a Vintage Bus (Detroit Diesel 8V71)
Why would we want to know the RPMs on an engine with an automatic transmission? Besides keeping tabs on the engine, a tachometer can be very useful when using the jake brake down steep inclines. From what we read, they never installed tachometers at the factory and instead limit the
Dash Rehab Part 4: New Sensors and Creating a Wiring Harness
In Part 3 of our Dash Rehab series, we showed our solution to one of our trickiest sensors: the oil pressure gauge. Thankfully, none of the other sensors gave us that much trouble. We bought our new gauges from Speedhut.com, and all the gauges came with very detailed instructions
Dash Rehab Part 2: Making Things Shiny
I began riding motorcycles when I was fifteen years old. And when I wasn't riding, I was reading about motorcycles.
There was one picture from Motorcyclist magazine that became etched in my mind. A Kawasaki ZX-7R motorcycle with a "chrome" frame. 
This is not the exact picture - I couldn't
A Hacker's Take on RV House Batteries: Part 5 - How we Make Cables and Final Wiring
In this post, we want to highlight how we make large (2/0) cables and introduce some of the tools we have really enjoyed using.
As discussed earlier, our Nissan Leaf 48 Volt module is comprised of 7 cells in parallel combined with 7 cells in series. This makes for
A Hacker's Take on RV House Batteries: Part 4 - BMS selection, BMS wiring, protecting the copper, test fit, planning
After fabricating a metal cage to protect the battery, we needed to tackle how to protect the exposed bus bars. Originally we were going to try to use some kind of plexiglass or clear acrylic to enable the polished copper to be seen. That proved to be too difficult. Besides,
Solar Reflections: Our experience traveling to see the solar eclipse
When we originally thought we would start full-time RVing early in the summer, we had planned on being in Kentucky to view the solar eclipse. We even made campground reservations early in the year, knowing it might be difficult to find a spot if we waited until the last minute.
A Hacker's Take on RV House Batteries: Part 2 - Reconfiguring a Nissan Leaf Battery
When we last left off, we had cracked open the battery housing and were planning on configuring our 2013 Nissan Leaf module into sixteen 24-Volt batteries. The original plan called for 24-Volt configuration because each of the Nissan Leaf modules is configured with 4 cells, 2 joined in parallel and
Bus Solar Part 1 - Researching and Buying Solar Panels
We have been researching solar power since before we started on this full-time journey. Initially, we wanted to setup a system that would run our pool pump and maybe offset some of our high Arizona air-conditioning bills. There is something really cool about getting energy directly from the sun (for