 I left Blythe, California yesterday midday and it was around 80 degrees and today I woke up in Flagstaff and it was a balmy 21. Now you might ask yourself, why would I do that to myself? It's because I'm here in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona Wind and Sun to get my solar installed. Hey everybody, it's Robin with Creativity RV and I'm here in my truck. That's my fifth wheel behind me and I'm here in the back parking lot of Northern Arizona Wind and Sun because I'm having a bunch of solar put on my roof today. Now the boy says, cool mom, when are we going to get out of the truck? And put the slides out so I can relax. Well I just want to make sure I'm parked in the right place for these guys that are installing it. Like you guys might know, this is my third rig. On my first two rigs I had about 400 watts of solar. It was enough for me to charge my batteries which I only was able to have two of because my rigs were smaller and charge some lithium power boxes so that I had power overnight. But I wasn't able to use some of the stuff that I wanted to use like an instant pot or a blow dryer or an air fryer or something like that without having my generator on. Well when I bought this new fifth wheel I had the choice of putting a generator and an inverter and more batteries and it only comes with one battery. I have a grand design solitude and that would have been about six grand for the generator and the inverter and so I decided to opt out of that and put that money into solar. When I talked to Doug here he literally asked me what appliances I used and what kind of a refrigerator I had and how long I used them and how long I boondocked and about three days later they came up with this great sheet actually it was three pages of components everything down to the screws that they thought that I needed to put together a whole system and then we went through the cost and we went through what I needed and what I didn't need and what I ended up getting was 1200 watts of solar a 3000 watt inverter and six lithium batteries. Now the most expensive thing in that was the lithium batteries. I have heard some people um are concerned about the safety of the lithium so I did a lot of research I talked to Doug about that. The RV lithium batteries have come a long way they seem to be a lot safer than other lithium batteries and here's the thing you guys with my old AGM batteries on one of my rigs I actually had to check the water in them and they were hard to get to and you can't run them down lower than 50% because it can wreck the battery that's hard when you're boondocking even if you have solar so with lithium batteries you can actually run them all the way down they weigh a lot less and long term I thought they were a better investment for me the other thing is that I have a nice big space for batteries because I didn't get a generator in this rig but all of the components and the lithium I understand is only going to take up half of that bin before I even got here they put all of the components on a power panel together that is going to pop right into my bin so they don't have to install it all piece by piece while I'm here my understanding is they just have to put the panels on the roof pop up that power board put in the batteries that should all take about eight hours I'm told and then the actual head engineer walks me through the entire system but this thing is going to be a monster I even heard you guys that I'll be able to run one of my air conditioners off this thing it's like the unicorn of RV life hey they're here that's him that's my installer I think I'm so excited this is James he's with northern Arizona wind and sun he's up in my bin installing my stuff how's it going James everything's going great right on he's going to walk me through the system here in a minute I'm super excited this is my solar controller GX what do you think boy pretty exciting right I'm going to learn how to use this man installing solar is hard work so these guys have been at it for hours and even I'm exhausted so I think they're almost done which is great because then they're going to give me a walk through which I'm going to share with you guys so if you have any questions about solar and how it works hopefully the questions will be answered here too see this is the benefit of going to a fifth wheel look at the room I have for batteries yeah so there's 600 amp hours of lithium and then this is the full system right so if we start the bottom this is the links bus bars network so there's enough to really put eight batteries on there so if you wanted to add two more batteries you could without really needing to modify the system too much this is the shunt this is what's monitoring so all the batteries connect here and then all the loads connect over here and all the energy flows through this so this is what monitors all the energy flow from the batteries and keeps track that's essentially your fuel gauge inside okay and then this right here is your inverter uh 3000 watt multi-plus okay and then these are the charge controllers here managing uh 650 watts or 40 watts each right so there's like 1280 watts on the roof of solar and then you know split into each charge controller so we can monitor the front panels and the middle panels um and then this is the breaker box and then this is the DC disconnect for all the DC power to your rig and this is the panel that you guys built for me before I even got here right right so you just have to pop it in which is amazing yeah you just measured it and then I uh I did okay of course nice yes um what's the red thing do not touch the red button no these are just disconnects so this is the primary like cables from your power source uh from the batteries essentially they're four odd like cables and then they go to this disconnect which is 350 amp rated like 600 amp peak so then we pull everything from that disconnect so if you want to shut the entire rig off like if they put it in storage or something yeah so you know how you have the disconnect up there uh-huh so if you throw both of these disconnects you'll completely shut the entire rig off okay which some might say is an issue or not you have the choice as to whether or not you want to do that this disconnects the inverter this disconnects the DC distribution okay so if you shut that off it'll just shut the inverter off if you shut this off then it'll shut off the like smoke detectors and co and everything inside the rig so when you put it in storage like a lot of people wouldn't shut this off but then again if you're putting in long-term storage what does the smoke detector and co matter right so um but honestly if you put it in storage you don't really need to shut anything off you just turn off the inverter and then the solar will maintain everything provided it's still getting sun so cool yeah so first things first we've got your entire system integrated so we have an inverter system that's supplying power to your receptacles and your microwave and basically anything you want to run inside the rig um we have the display panel down here so we can go ahead and take a look at this effectively this kind of shows you what's going on with the system um it's kind of late now so we're we're making just a little bit of solar power um the inverter is running ac loads you actually still have that fan going inside there so um this is showing you what's coming off the battery which is effectively the difference between all three of these loads and this is like all your dc loads so like the the led lights this one down here is like the led lights um and then this will be all like the receptacles up here and anything running off the inverter so the fan the vent fan and the led lighting and the slides and such will all show up on this as your dc loads and then up here would be the ac loads and then this is essentially your battery bank um capacity uh currently it needs to calibrate because the system just came online but effectively this is going to show like a fuel tank here so um if you were at like 50 the blue line would be halfway and it'd be kind of gray at the top and um blue halfway up so um it also shows you how your net draw from the batteries in the current battery voltage so net right now we're discharging at like eight amps from the batteries which is the difference between all of these there's like 220 watts of loads and then 130 watts of supply coming in and you can kind of see how the power is going so like the solar is supplying energy to the loads right here and then also the batteries are supplying energy to the dc side but when you're making a lot more solar power you'll see that this will all be going that way towards the batteries okay so right now i'm like at 13.2 yeah if it needs to reset though you said well 13.2 just is the battery voltage but this is actually now going to show your state of charge just like you would have on a fuel tank okay like you know how you have your fuel gauge so this is essentially your battery state of charge so like voltage really doesn't matter especially with these lithium batteries you're going to use this as a reference one we're going to link this to what's called the vrm network which is um like a cloud-based monitoring uh through victron and then i will be able to see what's going on in your system and if you ever have any issues oh cool yeah you can just call me up and and i can say well this happened or that happened or like if i have to i can reprogram your inverter from my desk like anything that i need no way i didn't know that yeah so and i can actually access this panel so once i have it set up if you're like hey i don't remember what you said about this or that i can actually go in here and move your panel around oh my gosh like right in front of you and show you like this particular setting does this or look at this to do that kind of situation so we'll get you fully networked and so not on my own once i leave no i can help you okay forever is there an app also yeah so there's going to be a there's a couple different apps there's uh the charge controllers um are bluetooth so you can look at them on like near near location bluetooth but the VRM which is the same program that i'll link you to to my profile you can have as an app on your phone and so you'll be able to adjust your settings or like turn on your inverter from like anywhere in the world so like my camp chair like outside yeah in your camp chair or like if you park your rig and fly somewhere right and like you can check and see what's going on in your system if you have to like that kind of thing okay and you can set up warnings and alarms we can also set up like extra temperature sensors and whatnot so you can like get an alarm if the temperature inside this rig gets too hot with your cat or something like that too so oh wow so um what kind of maintenance do i need to do with these batteries and with this system none perfect i so i can i mean aside from getting your rig into some rain every now and then to wash the panels off okay that sounds good um what if i see that the level is getting really low then stop using power chill out chill out yeah okay so i can run an air fryer my instant pot recharge my devices the tv's one air conditioner maybe yeah if it's really sunny and hot so like the thing to bear in mind is that the system that i put together for you is limited to 3400 watts or 3000 va continuously so you wouldn't want to like run your microwave and air conditioner and several other things all at one time right that's not to say you couldn't run one at a time kind of situation right so you just have to manage your loads that's important he's got a new friend somebody likes james he's cute so i'll manage the loads so i is the would it pop a breaker like well likely happen is the inverter will overload so it's not going to cause it like damage it'll throw an alarm up and you'll know you messed up then what do i do is there a breaker on the inverter just go reset the inverter you just reset it turn it back on easy peasy and then don't do it again heard okay i think that's it i think i'm good the other things is like this the inverter is going to shut off low voltage disconnect if you graveyard your batteries like completely kill them it's not the end of the world like you you're not going to destroy them that's the great thing about having a lithium battery bank with an internal bms or with a bms in general is that it's going to self protect so there's really not a whole lot you can do to destroy the system