It took more than a year of mulling over this one but I finally worked out a way to make the middle cupboard a bit more usable to me. The issue as many know is that this cupboard as it comes is one of the few that is accessible when the bed is down (making it valuble cupboard space) but it is deep and an odd shape meaning its difficult to get much in it in an organised manner.
For a year I just had a soft box that I shoved in over the pans and it was super annoying. For ages I mulled over how to get a usable shelf. This is what I came up with.
Shelf shaped to allow a higher level storage. Shallow enough to allow pans into the bottom. Upstand to keep items in and hinged to allow easy access to the top shelf.
I formed it all from carbon fibre using a aluminium honeycomb core. Something similar could be done in wood with a metal door. Composites are something I am accustomed to working with.
The two halves of the shelf sandwich. The shelf actually lost about 20mm in order to get the pans inCompleted shelf before trimmingWith hinged upstand added.In place with DZUS 1/4 turn fasteners opened ready for loadingFully loaded
So when I got the van it had the dreaded roof crack on one side. As others have discovered and I repeat here, roof is an ASA plastic. My first attempt was to plastic weld the crack shut using some ASA plastic rods and a soldering iron.
I have experience doing plastic welding on motorcycles and the issue that I have found (with my technique at least) is that I can make a bond by welding from one side and can sometimes get a decent weld but for a structural bond, you need to weld from both sides. On the van there is no access to the inside of the ASA shell. . . .
My first weld actually held up for a decent amount of time, 6 months- year.
When it opened up, it did so at an awkward time, I did a rush re-weld that didn’t stick. After this I started considering adding reinforcement material to it. I had seen people drill holes and bolt metal supports in. I decided that bonding carbon fibre sheet to it would give me similar results with no penetrations.
First attempt produced some freaky results. I used non-structural thickness of CF but as I was sticking it on when the roof crack was shut it would be in tension and strong enough in this manner. Unortunatly, that wasn’t how it played out. I didn’t strap the roof crack shut, used a 48hr cure adhesive and the roof opened up over night and it cured in an open state. The sheet ended up bent in a way I wouldn’t have though possible!
After this, I added a second piece but used a structural thickness and researched for better structural adhesives. The advise I got was Plexus MA310 which is quick setting and advised for difficult to bond plastic surfaces. The second time I also held the roof crack closed with a ratchet strap!
Not had any movement since adding the last reinforcement. I believe mine was cracked as the previous owners were closing the top on the roof bedding and it wasn’t closing at the back adding extra strain.
So onto phase two and almost complete redesign of the charging, storage and generation system.
As with a lot of this build, cash flow dictated a step by step upgrade and even after all this time, some of my planning wasn’t very forward thinking. . . .
Step one was to get more visibility on what the solar panels were doing. I knew it wasn’t enough but I needed to know more. I went with the Victron Energy 75/15 Smart solar MPPT controller. This gives historic monitoring and Bluetooth display of generation, voltages etc. On phones and Macs (not PCs weirdly). They have a fully configurable charge profile (for lead acid/Lithium) which worked with future upgrades.
Next up was the solar panels. I wanted more, the question was how to fit more on the roof. I found that Lensun sell semi-flexible 50W panels that are roughly the same length as the width of the central section on the roof. This allows me to easily go to 200w and I connected the panels in a series/parallel config (48V system). Parallel panels are meant to be more resistant to shading, series gives you an earlier start to charging, combination hopes to surf the middle ground!
There were other reasons I went with the Lensun. Having previously had a cheap ebay panel, I wanted a higher quality panel but still wanted to stay with the semi-flexible panels. The semi-flexible panels are notorious for not being the most reliable but they are lightweight and low profile. Lightweight means less issues with the roof struts (think they would need upgrading for extra weight). The lensun claim a better construction and do have aluminium backing. They have a golf ball type surface which they claim helps keep them clean, which for the dusty environments the van sees is important to me. The junction box also appears much more robust. The cheap ebay panels have a junction box with a thin profile and I was always concerned that wind and vibration may be one of the faliure modes for these panels. The lensun panels have a much wider flatter box.
Without any doubt the traditional glass panels are more robust but the cost of additional height and weight.
I went the messy above, clean below install route. I have seen lots of beautiful roof install pics where the solar cables go straight through the roof and are dressed inside. I wanted to keep a single roof penetration and keep wiring inside the van invisible, so it’s not invisible on the roof!
In retrospect, I would have installed them all lower allowing for me to fit 300w by covering my broken roof vent (as an option, still looking at ways to get that working again).
I have seen others fit 300w on these vans but only by fitting the panels over the gutters rather than between them. The gutters and roof hatch otherwise limit you.
Next step was storage. The flooded lead acid 110AH battery was massively struggling to give out anything like its 1320Wh plate figure. A guess would put its real capacity more like 500Wh.
I read more and more into the Lithium batteries and although the cost is high £1000, the promise of a true 1kWh+ storage in the same space with less weight was alluring. The other factors are the reduction in round trip energy. In lead acid charging the last % is wasteful, so lots of the solar energy is lost. With lithium it more or less all goes back so your overall solar energy requirement drops. I found a bloke selling off 130Ah lithium Reion batteries from a failed EV project for £300 so I bit his hand off.
So at this stage I had updated the solar, solar charger, battery. Next was dealing with the charging and monitoring. I had done one winter trip with the lithium and relied on just turning alternator charging on and off with guess work as to charge times. Far from ideal. At this point we are in the world of trying to integrate a third party Lithium battery into a Victron Energy system. The solar charger worked fine but one has to find a way to make a BMS for the Reion.
I went the option of using the Victron Lithium split charge relay Cyrix-Li-ct and installed their BMV-712 battery monitor to use as a BMS. This has a relay output. Initial idea was to set this to cut the alternator charging when the capacity reached 95% (using the solar to do the remainder). Unfortunately you can set the relay to work on low state of charge but not high. Instead the relay is set so that it disconnects if the battery hits its float voltage and if that happens, it won’t start charging again unless the voltage drops considerably (level can be set)
So far I pretty much manage to run on solar alone for most of the year, I have a switch to disconnect the split charge that is generally turned off apart from winter months. I have generated nearly 700wh/day in summer, can struggle to hit 100 in winter. The fridge is circa 2-300wh.
And that for now is that! Some wiring modifications were included as well but I will cover that separately
So to recap, when I got the van it had no coach electrics. The split charge solenoid had been replaced with a simple relay by the previous owner and this had died. The battery was completly flat.
I needed a system that could power a C60i fridge and deal with the split charging (thanks to others for this one). I decided to go for an all in one unit (Ctek D250SA). This went where the converter/mains charger once was. I ripped out the converter as all the mains voltage had come out of the van (due to multiple reasons).
Working out what I needed power wise without any experience was tricky. I found places saying 1w solar for 1L capacity (this might work on a sunny day in a nice climate but is way low for general use). Ran into people using the C60 with 100w solar that thought it was self sufficient. I figured double the 1w – 1L would work out but was still low.
For the solar panel I got an ebay ‘140w’ semi flexible panel and bonded it onto the roof with the recommended adhesives. The CTEK gave the advantage that the system even kept the starter battery topped up and the all in one solution gave proper charging and MPPT all in one.
This did not include monitoring of any kind and who needs it as long as your system always provides enough power! The problem of course when it doesn’t.
I had volt meters on both batteries (as part of USB charging) but doesn’t give you any indication of what the panels are doing and when you are heading into negative production.
I managed 3 days in a Spanish desert in high heat with no problems, but my panels were facing south and I could keep the tent vents open most of the day to keep the ambient temps down.
3 or 4 days in a festival in portugal and the fridge was cutting out. Lots of sun but parking meant I had to be parked East-West, there was lots of dust from a road meaning we had to keep the tent vents shut and dust got on the panels.
Where to go next was a problem. The shape of the panel was too long to get a second on the roof, so in the end I had a complete system change.
Early solar instal with cheap ebay panel in the background while I tried to salvage the roof hatch that had rusted through hinges.
