 Alright guys to no one's surprise when it comes to solar you can call me the village idiot. Now you would not call this guy the village idiot. This is Garrett from AM Solar. He is the the president of the company here and he's gonna explain something that people like me, village idiots, assume when they're buying solar and so this is what this video is gonna be about. Sometimes you see a smoke and deal on Amazon with solar panels, a battery, a charge controller, an inverter for like a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred bucks and you think oh my god I'm gonna buy that one because it's it's in my price range but we're gonna specifically ask and talk to Garrett about why that's maybe not a good idea and we're gonna go through my components there are I'm gonna guess 20 what do you think 20 maybe a hundred and twenty we have a there's a lot of components we're gonna talk about the kits they do here at AM Solar for the schoolies and the vans and why it is important. Now before I show you my kit I just want to point out that one thing that you get with AM Solar is customer support. You cannot call Jeff Bezos and and get information. Me and the schoolie well really Dean put this together and I'm not blaming him by the way but there's a couple things are wrong so we're gonna fix those things first and then Garrett is gonna go over my system and tell us all about it and the components and why there are things like an on-off switch for power and why there's big fuses and things like that. And take advantage of the customer support don't think you're gonna annoy us so that you're super smart just send us pictures along the way ask lots of questions call us before you get a headache and we'll save you a lot of trouble. So some people look at our kits online like the inverter kit the Jack Scott which is the 2000 volt amp Victron MultiPlus they think wow your inverters are pretty expensive well you need to make sure you're getting a complete inverter kit and it takes a lot to make an inverter run so you need the inverter yes then you also need the digital multi-control to control it you need the comm cable to go between them and then you need the MK3 programming dongle to set the programming parameters for the type of batteries you have if you don't have those things which a lot of people end up not getting you've got a really expensive paperweight. And so I'll just say village idiot because it's most descriptive but if you buy from some place with no customer service and you try to install this and it doesn't work how would a person like me or someone else know how to get this at a certain point I'm guessing someone would get frustrated and then call a store and then beg them to install it. Yeah a lot of the time people will buy stuff and then call us and ask us how to install it and you know we're a for-profit business you know we can't just be solving the world's problems on how to program inverters just get it from us from the first place do it right and we'll be happy to help you take care of that. Yeah all right so let's go through some other components because you know like I said I'm using myself I'm using myself in it as an example because when I first started this I knew nothing about solar I just thought okay you get the four basic things the panel the charge controller the battery the inverter and then it just magically works and all this stuff like the cables for example oh I'll just pick that up at the hardware store that can't be too much but what in reality what's the story with all that? Yeah so maybe let's just start about talking about the roof on your rig so obviously you need solar panels but then you need something to hold the solar panels to the roof and then you need sealant to hold that and then you need your wire harness and then your wire harness feeds into a combiner box your ZAMP panels use these connectors goes into our combiner box that covers the roof penetration this combines them parallel and then you've got these thick cables that then go down to a disconnect switch that lets you turn on and off solar maybe you're wanting to troubleshoot something see how much solar is contributing you know versus every other system and then it goes down to a charge controller jacks got the MVP 100-50 because he has four 170 watt panels on his roof then it'll go down to a breaker and jacks has the 60 amp breaker and then it goes down to the batteries and all of these connections they require lugs and heat shrink and screws to hold them on and that's just stuff that you're not going to think of typically as you're designing your kit on your first trip to the hardware store if you get it from us we've installed thousands of these we know everything that's needed and we included all of our kits so important point there is that if you do go to the hardware store now I'm not talking about electrical engineers electricians people who are familiar with the stuff but I'm talking about people just getting into this lifestyle thinking I just need four things and that's it so why why would I buy something more expensive when I can get it on Amazon or something else for cheap first of all you're not going to know what you need I would have never known what I would have needed and without the diagram kit without all the components there's no way in hell this would have been put together it was actually the only job where we did not have to go to the hardware store multiple times because everything was included in the kit you can ask Dean about that if you don't believe me but and actually tell me what you told me before about Victron and the quality what do you equate it to it is the something of inverters it's like did I use a car and yeah so it's like the Mercedes of inverter systems whereas you know maybe something you'll find on Amazon could be Hyundai actually I like I spent I know like a beat-up Russian car from the 50s or 60s or actually a Volkswagen bus the things are keeping piles trigger warning for the Volkswagen people yeah but yeah so you said before this is like the Bentley of the inverters now why are these components better than other ones for example like I had this one on my first bus and now I have this one so well marine rated components that's one nice thing about Victron and I really like the Bluetooth communication feature and the ability to network with all the other components in the system because if you get everything that's the same brand as Victron it's all going to talk to each other it's all going to talk to you in a language that you're familiar with so he's referring to the there's in two different apps I have one is for my monitor and one is for my charge controller yes and I can monitor the two devices that you log into within that right they you know they convey data in the same format so you it's not a steep learning curve for two different things and actually one time I by looking at my app I knew that my alternator was going out I was not getting a charge from my alternator so I quickly drove to the O'Reilly swapped out my alternator and exchanged warranty and and then didn't have a breakdown it's a good deal Victron's good stuff we like to break our system down into five different sub systems these subsystems include solar charging alternator charging battery bank inverter charger and DC distribution and that applies to schoolies and vans which we put in a category of vehicle called empty shell right here we have three life blue 200 amp hour lithium batteries that are going into this rig to make a 600 amp hour battery system one of the things I tell people when they're trying to decide whether to get a GM or life blue bad or a GM or lithium batteries is if you start off with a GM batteries you need to pick the size that you're going to stick with for a long time you can't add to a GM batteries if you mix old batteries with new batteries they're going to have slightly different voltages that they're going to rest at and mixing those voltages forces them to operate at voltages that aren't ideal for the health of the batteries and it reduces the life of both groups of batteries new and old GM batteries but if you go with lithium batteries you can start off with 200 and maybe like yeah 200 is nice but I need more I'll add another 200 and then maybe three years later you add another 200 this is nice this when you use lithium batteries you can build a system that grows with your lifestyle so this area right here is a test station and we use some of the components in it to pre-charge lithium batteries like if we were adding some battle-borne batteries to a system that already had battle-borne batteries we'd want to make sure that the batteries currently in the rig were topped off at a hundred percent and then the new batteries also need to be topped off at a hundred percent before we mix them together so that's what this all does this is our shipping department where all of the orders get packaged we've got the most commonly used items scattered all over here your mouth feet they come in bags that includes every single thing you'd ever want from the tape at the bottom of them to screws if you screw into the roof to all the hardware used to grab on to the side of the solar panel we've got a stack of combiner boxes about to get shipped out got an order on the desk that's ready to be processed our shipping department is very busy over here we have our panel prep area where we put the mount sets on the panels and modify the buyer harness this is an interesting situation where we have back to back mounts to double the surface area we have it on this side but not this side so we typically do this in a situation where we have to get very close to the leading edge of a rig where a wind might come up on that we want to just double reinforce that and this modification to the wire harness we take a typical Zamp solar panel we cut off their connector here and splice on our custom 10-2 cable and then this feeds into a combiner box and stacks of cardboard for shipping the panels stacks of Zamp panels they have all the wires here too oh yeah all the wire wire counter so you know just depending on how much current is expected to flow through a certain circuit depends on how much wire you need this is 8 gauge this would work for about 300 watts of solar and then this is 4 gauge so that would be 680 watts of solar I think it's what I have for a cable yeah you have 4 gauge so I've mentioned that we have our systems built around five subsystems which are solar alternator battery inverter and DC distribution we also have preconfigured kits that have combinations of those subsystems already in them and those preconfigured kits are designed to give people an idea of features versus cost when they start their shopping so they can get an idea if I want lithium batteries looks like I'm gonna have to spend this much money if I want 680 watts of solar it looks like it puts me in this category so we have those preconfigured kits that people can buy and they can also just use it as inspiration so maybe they see I want I like everything about this kit but I want more solar or I want can you swap out those 300 amp hour AGM batteries for maybe just something small or like 220 amp hours AGM batteries and we have preconfigured kits for schoolies vans motorhomes camper trailers we're working on boats we're just trying to make it in every product category to help people get an idea of the range of possibilities and how much they might have to spend so guys hopefully this is informative again I consider myself a village idiot if I was trying to piece something together I don't even know if it would charge my cell phone and maybe it would fry it but Garrett maybe kid I want to ask Garrett what happens what if someone needs help who do they call who they talk to and how do you guys walk them through that process the easiest thing for us to handle is if you go on our website and you click on support request fill out all the information on that form and what that does is it gives us a background of everything that you've got in your system which is really important because you know if you don't give us that information we have to search through email records and read a bunch of material that might not be relevant so fill out that support request form and we get a lot of these where we've got a very streamlined system for processing these and you'll usually hear back from us within a couple hours and if it's emergency give us a phone call we can walk it through it on a on a phone call but the support request form online is the easiest it gets logged into our program that allocates it to the right people and prioritizes it and we we're very responsive with that and this is like an electrical engineer which gets on the phone right yeah electrical engineer on the phone or if not an engineer somebody that's spent a lot of time installing the actual components and is familiar with how your type of rig would work now these are DIY kits I know people are DIYing to save money how much money in labor would my kit cost to install if they wanted to have you guys install it like how much money are they saving with all the diagrams the customer support the everything else we got to think I'm not quite sure what you're asking on that one so like if you were to just drop the rig off and have us install it yeah okay so your solar array would probably be about 15 hours getting that going your alternator charging system maybe seven hours the battery bank might be eight hours the inverter system about 17 hours your DC distribution system one hour so some all that together multiply by our current shop labor rate of $130 an hour and it's it's not as much as the equipment but it gets done within a week and it gets done perfect yeah yeah so again the the the idea is they try to supply you guys to save money to do it in far off places and they handle the support and everything else all the components every single thing like I literally did not have to go to the hardware store for one thing it wasn't one wasn't one so they're gonna save thousands of dollars so if you guys want to save money save it on the installation do it yourself buy the nice components don't buy the cheap stuff made in China don't burn out your panels don't cause a chain reaction inside because that's what happened to a friend of ours and and I swear it's also tax-free so so called these guys and and even if you need a custom kit these are your guys right here we don't charge for tech support these are big ticket items you're spending a lot of money with us you're putting a lot of trust in us and we're gonna do a good job on it all right guys so mission accomplished we corrected all the mistakes on our diy install so the system is functioning the system is working and now we have Garrett actually to why don't we get a little rundown of my system here let me jump inside okay let's get a little rundown from input to output I guess all right so solar comes down from the roof and I think it's this this one in this one yeah one of them I bet it's this one goes down into a master disconnect switch then it goes to the solar charge controller which reformats the energy from the solar panels and turns it into something that can safely be fed on to a battery bank and then it goes out of that to a DC breaker and then into this which we call our positive bus here that's how we're treating this side of the fuse and then it goes on to the positive terminal of the battery and with lead acid batteries you need a solar charge controller that does temperature compensation and with Victron charge controllers they just sense ambient which is fine because it's in the same environment as the batteries if this were in a different area you would network over Bluetooth with your battery monitor temperature sensor and that would get a temperature reading that way but anyway on the battery monitoring system you have the negative coming off the batteries there's one negative coming off the batteries it doesn't touch chassis it doesn't touch any loads it just goes straight to the shunt and then all the loads negative chassis everything come off of this side which forces all the electrons to flow through this little black area and that's the only way it can get monitored you have to capture all of the electrons a lot of DIY installers they just put this kind of willy-nilly and have other loads coming off of the negative and that's like if you want to you know you like you stick it on a tree branch you're still missing a bunch of the trees you got to stick it around the trunk of the tree if you want to catch everything going to the tree so you stick it the easiest way to capture everything is right off the negative nothing coming off the negative other than maybe a temp sensor and all the electrons pass through there and then this reports through a data cable to battery monitor inside his living quarters that does some complex algorithms on it to figure out the exact state of charge and then these are two six volt batteries connected in series which makes it a 12 volt battery bank 400 amp hours total they feed the inverter here so we take the positive go through here go through this class T catastrophic views then a master disconnect switch and then this is the inverter that takes the 12 volts and converts it to 120 volts AC and then coming off of that it goes this line to your breaker box for all of your loads so this one is the main one this would shut off all the outputs and then these are all individual loads and for for village idiot terminology this is where all my household outlets come from this is the fuse that is is in charge of them so that that gets sent out to the regular plugs you know something for your hairdryer or your Instapod or something like that another thing the inverter does besides inverting 12 volt turning it into 120 volts AC is it takes shore power so shore power comes in through this goes through this breaker as an input and that can just be passed through to all the outlets if you're plugged in or it can also be converted down to 12 volts DC or whatever charging voltage is needed to charge these batteries and I talked earlier about temperature compensation with a solar charge controller temperature compensation is part of that and it comes through it gets that signal through this cable that's connected on the negative terminal of the battery there and then for DC loads they come off the battery and it goes through this thing called a battery protect which prevents you from overly discharging your batteries and harming them and then it goes to the DC fuse panel so my DC fuse panel is up stairs I guess you could call it because we're in the basement of the bus I have a panel and there is a battery monitor and the inverter power supply so I can remotely turn the inverter on or off and then I can adjust the input of the shore power from 15 to 30 amps yeah up on top and and that's where all my my 12 volt things are kind of connected positive up high negative down low and so this guys I just wanted to share with you is a complete schooly system it is a complete van life system this all these little components you do not see when you when there's some smoke and deal on Amazon for four different components for some smoke and deal so when you are buying the cheap stuff when you're buying just the actual components you're missing out on a lot that's why it seems like it's a great deal so and you're also not having tech support so which is invaluable yeah this I would say is the equivalent of trying to put together your own iPhone and not getting Apple care right what you need is you need the Apple care for a phone that is put together because if you're anything like me you are a village idiot unless you have some electrical background or you're a handyman or something like that or just a regular genius so one thing we should also mention is there's an alternator charging system that's kind of off the camera here that doesn't show as much it's just some thick cables and a battery combiner that's true I can point that out here the positive comes up and this is where I get energy from the alternator and and it goes in reverse when I'm chart when my solar is full it trickle charges the battery starter battery yeah alright guys so there you have it thanks again for the explanation Garrett thanks for setting me up with all these wonderful companies here lifeline Victron a.m. solar ZAMP solar panels up on the roof you got what you still got schooly five discount code yes so if you want five percent off and don't medic hooked you up solid oh yeah they did too we got a lot of nice people around here helping me out so anyways this is what a full complete solar system looks like and so if anybody has any questions please don't ask me I'm village idiot call these guys and ask them they are electrical engineers