hey guys welcome back to the channel today i'm talking to you about solar panels
before we get too far into it i am going to go ahead and give these a good clean
because we've had them up here for about a year and a half now
and they are pretty filthy i've noticed a bit of a decrease on how much power we're getting
so i'm gonna go ahead and give these a good clean and we'll get into the review
if you haven't already checked out my solar guide i would highly recommend you do so
i've sold over a hundred guides so far and i've got really positive feedback about everyone i've
sold so if you want to check that out head over click that link below the video or up in the
corner and feel free to let me know if you have any questions when i was planning out our solar
system i was really stressed about how many watts we were going to have for the system itself and i
really wanted to make sure we had enough power since it's really important for me and Cayleigh
while working on the road to make sure that we can charge our laptops the camera the drone and
not have to worry about how much storage we have so i was very stressed about having enough watts
right here i have three of the Renogy 175 watt rigid solar panels they have performed really well
ever since we've had them i haven't had any problems with them but one of the things that
i wanted to talk to you guys about was the fact that i haven't relied on them as much as i thought
i could so with that said solar is a really nice feature to have but i think there's some more
important features when it comes to roof space that i think you should consider uh for me and
Cayleigh that was having a really big skylight and then also the roof fan i've seen lots of vans out
there that have cargo carriers on the roof as well plan out everything you need to have on your roof
and then try to fit as many solar panels as you can because chances are your main power supply
is actually going to be your vehicle's alternator that's what ours is and if we do run low on power
we usually end up plugging into shore power or even a generator if we absolutely have to
so with the solar panel during the summer months it's really nice we can pull about 30 amps an
hour if we're getting full sun and that will charge our 200 amp hour battery super quickly
but when we're parked in campgrounds or during the winter time when we're only getting maybe five to
six hours a day we might only get like five amps an hour because the sun is so low in the sky that
we can't rely on the solar panels my advice to you would be to get as many roof ends as you want
skylights cargo holders anything you think you need on your band's roof and then fill out the
rest of the space with solar panels in total we're pulling about 540 watts of solar and about 30 amps
at full capacity now that is honestly quite a bit of solar and one of the questions i get asked most
is how much solar do we actually need and that is pretty much my answer is as much as you have
room for would be great when it comes to choosing solar panels about 200 watts seems to be about the
largest size that you can get but they do vary a lot and you can get more than one i would try
to get one solar panel as big as possible that way you don't have to use a lot of connections
and you don't have to worry about wiring them in parallel or series mine are wired in parallel and
that is because i have the Renogy 50 amp dc to dc charger with mppt it has a maximum input voltage
of 25 volts so the difference between wiring them in parallel versus series is series keeps
the voltage the same and increases your amperage so mine is going to be 10 amps plus 10 amps plus
10 amps up to 30 amps but the voltage is going to stay the same if i had wired these in series
the voltage would have increased and the amps would have stayed the same so i would have only
been pulling about 10 amps but the voltage would have gone up these solar panels are about 200
each canadian and they are the rigid ones they aren't the soft ones the soft ones are going to be
quite a bit more expensive and a little bit harder to mount i know depending on your application if
you have a flat surface they'll be really easy to mount but with most vans especially the sprinter
t1 t1 ends they have these ribs that go along the top which would make mounting anything flat
very difficult how i mounted my solar panels was actually fairly simple i purchased some
unistrut that runs the length of the solar panels on both sides and then i used a rivet gun to rivet
and bolt the unistrut down to the roof of the band and i bolted it where the ribs are to make
it super strong i used m8 bolts i believe and i sealed them off as well that basically gave me
two roof rails that i was able to mount the solar panels to and then i picked up some aluminum angle
and cut small pieces and mounted them right to the unistrut using bolts and washers that they
are a little bit flexible i can kind of move them around as i need to and they're not permanently
mounted to the van i also limited the amount of holes that i had to drill in the roof to eight so
that was kind of nice i don't have ten holes uh per panel if you use the Renogy brackets you'll
be drilling a lot more holes to mount your solar panels you can also see right here is the edge of
my roof gland which i will link in the description below off amazon i think this is around 20 25
it was fairly inexpensive but because i mounted mine here i did have to cut around the outside
of the solar panel but i should have a clip to be able to show you guys what's going on there
and then you can see uh right there how i've set up this so i have four brackets holding the solar
panels to the unistrut and then i've also bolted the panels together in the middle with four bolts
basically just going in between each panel holding them together be sure to uh throw lock washers on
everything and even some lock tight on the threads make sure you really don't want this coming loose
as far as mounting the roof gland i would recommend using the sika flex it's a really really
strong durable sealant that works really well it's designed for rv roofs i will link that below in
the description as well after i used four brackets to bolt down each corner i did have a little play
in the middle here so i did kind of custom make a bit of a bracket here and then just use two
bolts bolt it down and it is very very strong i've been driving through some pretty heavy wind storms
and this has never rattled or come loose not even close so it's really solid it's a little
tougher to access but you can see there is a bolt over there and there is a bolt right here it's
just kind of a custom-made z bracket you could call it or an s bracket that worked pretty well
i just picked up some metal from a hardware store and bent it at the distances i needed to mount it
so all in all this is a very affordable way to mount your solar panels on your van without
putting a lot of holes in your roof and these are also very customizable if i want to take
one off i can pop it off and then just slide the brackets down essentially on the unistruts yeah
if you have any questions regarding this system feel free to let me know in the comments below
and definitely check out my solar guide it was very useful for a lot of people out there and i'm
sure it'll be useful for you as well if you're a beginner it comes to wiring the solar panels
i would just pre-purchase uh Renogy's 10 gauge mc4 connectors uh i believe it's 10 feet of wire
and that'll be able to handle more than enough for your solar panels it's more than enough for
me it works really well and those mc4 connectors also very handy i also have two of the branch
connectors to make sure that i can hook up all of them in parallel and that made everything on the
roof waterproof and sealed and something that i don't have to worry about another important
thing to mention about wiring your solar panels is fusing them so you're going to want to use in my
case these have a maximum current of 10 amps so i put a 15 amp fuse for each solar panel on the
positive wire the reason why you do that is because if one of these panels go and
it is not fused that electrical current is going to go to the weakest and easiest place
so it's going to flow towards that broken solar panel and then you're basically going to lose
all of your power from your solar panels and you're not going to know where that break is
so be sure to fuse each solar panel individually and do that by 1.5 times the maximum amperage
is usually what you want to do they also have a fuse rating that you can look up online
so yeah i use 15 amp mc4 fuses that i can easily access if i need to i also just want to apologize
uh the roof doesn't look so good right now you can see kind of primer sprayed in areas i did
a bunch of rust treatment last summer and i also raptor line the outside of our van which i'll be
making a video on so be sure to check that out it turned out quite well i'm happy with it but
i only wrapped your line up to the drip catcher the rain gutter here mostly because i couldn't get
enough raptor liner for the roof so i have to do this part and down our distributor didn't have
enough in stock so i had to wait until this summer and i'm going to be taking everything off the
panels and stuff and then i'm going to be coating the whole roof with the white raptor liner so
that should clean things up and make things look a little bit better one more thing i wanted to add
in there is me and Cayleigh have seriously been debating getting a ladder for the outside of the
van i was just climbing up and down up and down trying to record this video so if you guys have
any suggestions on ladders that we should consider buying let us know in the comments below we wanted
to stay away from it for a while because i wasn't too sure if it was really necessary
since we aren't storing anything on our roof and we also wanted to do somewhat a low profile i know
our van looks like a camper van it's got the window on the side but i feel like a ladder is
just that extra thing telling everyone that you are a camper van so if you have any suggestions
and you think we should install the latter comment below let me know that's it for me guys be sure to
like this video if you liked it subscribe to the channel and i'll see you in the next one.