Browsing Tag Electrical

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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

Continue

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,

Continue

After reconfiguring the Leaf battery modules into a 48V system, we were ready to build a stand for them. It needs to fulfill a few requirements. First, it needs to support the upper portion of our battery bank which weighs in at about 200 pounds (400 pounds for both upper

Continue

We knew pretty early on that we were going to need to replace the rooftop a/c for a few reasons. First, it simply didn’t cool the bus down very well. It was a 13,500 BTU Coleman Mach unit. It blew cold, but it just didn’t push

Continue

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

Continue