Hey friends, welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido,
and ever since we got back to the Salt Lake City area on November 30th
we've been busy, hard at work installing some new Victron equipment in our RV,
including this MultiPlus-II inverter charger.
We're going to explain to you in this episode the hows, the whats and the whys, so stay tuned!
You may recall when we were in Canton Lake, Oklahoma we had some major electrical failures.
Our Xantrex 3000-watt inverter/charger failed on us.
We had to overnight in a new unit right here,
and when we made our last stop in Mesquite, Nevada this season,
just prior to arriving in Salt Lake City,
when we went and plugged into hookups in Mesquite this new one also failed.
We got an error code that indicated it needed to have immediate service, and it started smoking.
So what I did to get past that problem is I merely bypassed the inverter,
went with the shore power directly into our distribution panel.
Allowed our solar panels to handle the charging of the 12-volt battery system
until we got home here, where we could take care of the problem.
So rather than get upset about this, I decided to see this as an opportunity
to get the rest of our electrical componentry over to the Victron ecosystem.
Now, we already had Victron electrical components in the RV
including our battery monitor and smart shunt, and our solar controller.
And having everything including the inverter/charger all on one platform from Victron
comes with a set of advantages which you'll learn more about a little bit later in this episode.
But in the meantime I wanted to take the opportunity to explain to you
why the MultiPlus-II is such a unique unit.
It has a number of features that are not available on any other inverter/charger on the market.
One of the most important of those is that it handles North American split-phase electricity.
Now I'm not an electrician. I don't play one on YouTube.
But I'm going to go to the best of my ability here
to try to explain to you what split-phase electricity is.
Now on a 30-amp RV, this is the type of power cable that you have.
You have a positive, you have a neutral, and you have a ground.
So you have three conductors encased in this sheathing,
whereby a 50-amp actually has four wires.
You still have a common neutral and a common ground,
but you have two hot lines. You have a line 1 and a line 2.
That's the difference between 50-amp service and 30-amp service.
And the way that this works is on a 50-amp distribution panel,
it's divided into left and right halves.
And one of these positive leads powers one half of the electrical panel,
and all the circuit breakers on the branch circuits that
are on that side of the of the distribution panel,
and the other hot line handles the other half of the distribution panel
and all the breakers on that half of the distribution panel.
The MultiPlus-II is the only inverter/charger on
the market that handles North American split-phase electricity natively.
It takes all four of these conductors from shore power,
passes all four of them through the inverter/charger,
and passes all four along to the distribution panel.
Therefore the MultiPlus-II powers the entire distribution panel,
powers everything electrical inside your RV.
There's no need to have a separate inverter for line one and line two,
which is two inverters. It handles everything with one unit.
Another feature on the MultiPlus-II that's pretty cool is it has what they call Power Assist.
Now, let's say for example we're on a 30-amp hookup, or running off our 30-amp generator.
If I try to do something like start the second A/C unit,
there's not enough power on 30-amp service to support the load
that the second air conditioning unit is going to draw when it tries to start up its compressor.
So what the MultiPlus will do is take our battery power and make up the deficit
for that short period of time that it needs more than 30 amps of current
to do whatever the draws are requiring within the RV.
Then once it settles back down to beneath a 30-amp draw,
the MultiPlus-II will stop drawing from the batteries
and just let it run off the 30-amp shore power, or the 30 amp generator.
So here you can see the MultiPlus installed where we placed it in our RV basement area.
These are just simply the status lights.
It shows that right now I'm on shore power and I'm float charging the batteries.
Obviously, the set of lights that are all off on the right
are for the inverter function, which it's not using right now.
Here we have inside the battery cables and the 120-volt in and 120-volt coming out of the unit.
Now, in the process of doing this we actually replaced the entirety of our 120 cables
with brand new 6/3 Romex, so we have all new wiring
coming from our shore power inlet to the inverter/charger,
and then from the inverter/charger on inside to our distribution panel.
I wanted to replace the wiring.
I figured that perhaps there was something funky with the wiring
that was leading to the problems I was having with the Xantrex unit,
and as long as I was going to this much trouble I might as well
replace that wiring and start from scratch.
In addition to that, keep in mind that with the Xantrex we were only powering
one side of the distribution panel because it was only a single phase inverter,
so our split-phase coming into the RV was literally split.
I had one phase going directly to the distribution panel and
the other phase going to the inverter charger,
so replacing all that wiring with some nice fresh 6/3 Romex was probably a good move.
So here inside the RV we installed the Victron color Touch 50,
which is a 5-inch touchscreen. It lets us see everything that's going on inside the RV
including our shore power, with the amount of current coming in both on line 1 and line 2.
This is our MultiPlus. Right now it's float charging.
This is showing you the AC loads that it's servicing on our distribution panel.
This shows the state of our battery, and that information it's drawing
from our Victron BV-712 battery monitor with smart shunt.
This shows you the 12-volt loads that it's powering,
and this is our Victron SmartSolar solar controller showing you
what the solar controller and the solar panels are contributing to our electrical system.
Now here's where you can definitely see that I'm not an electrician by any means!
It's not the cleanest installation job I've ever done.
But we still have our battery bank of six lithium iron phosphate batteries,
but right here is the brand new unit that we added that works with the color Touch 50
and that is the Cerbo GX. The Cerbo GX is a communication unit
and that allows everything including the MultiPlus, our smart shunt and battery monitor,
as well as our solar controller all communicates through this Cerbo GX as a central unit.
And also connects the RV to the internet. Let's walk through that now.
So here on Victron's VRM website we get a real-time view of everything
that's going on with our RV's electrical system.
Right now you can see in real time over here on the upper left
our shore power is currently putting in 1,046 watts ... well 1,040, it keeps changing,
and just down below that you can see where it's split between line 1 and line 2.
So we're getting voltage, we're getting amperage, and we're getting watts,
on separately line 1 and line 2 right there on the display.
You could see from that moving, uh ... blue "dot" I guess you would call it
across over to the right, the shore power is feeding our MultiPlus-II inverter/charger
and output from the MultiPlus is going in two different locations.
If you look to the right it's feeding 920 or 899 watts of AC load in the RV
and again that's split out between lines 1 and line 2,
but then also down below coming out of
the MultiPlus-II it's float charging into our batteries.
Our batteries are currently at 100%.
They're receiving 8 watts from the inverter/charger to help make up
for the 109 watts that it's powering on 12-volt loads that are currently underway inside of RV.
Also you can see what's going into the battery is coming from further to the right,
our solar controller, our photovoltaic or PV charger.
However, right now the sun's going down and that now, that's on zero watts.
Over here on the right you can see where we've configured the input current limit to 50 amps
and you can see a number of temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors from Ruuvi.
They're called RuuviTags, and they are a third-party product
that integrates with Victron's system.
We have them set up in our kitchen area. We have them set up in our bedroom.
We have one outdoors. We have one in our basement area.
We have one in our freezer and we have one in our refrigerator.
Down here you can see we have weather information for our current location
as well as you can see fresh water, propane tank 1 and propane tank 2.
These are Mopeka Pro sensors. They also communicate like the RuuviTags,
they communicate via Bluetooth with our Cerbo GX
and all that information is presented to us in our Victron VRM portal.
Finally, if I scroll down below here, we can see right now it's set for today but
we can set that for any other day or any other time period.
We could see our consumption from the shore power and we can see our solar contribution,
as well as a forecast, a future forecast for solar production
based both on our geographic location and the sun angle at that location,
as well as the weather forecast.
Over here on the left menu, one other thing I'll show you in the advanced category.
You can see different configurable graphs.
Now these are highly customizable.
You can set these to display any information that you want over time.
These just happen to be the ones that we've set up for our own knowledge,
but you can track your electrical use, you can track your water use.
You can track your solar production.
You can even track temperatures from those RuuviTags over a period of time.
Very useful information that you have about the workings in your RV's systems
that you can access from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
Victron also has a mobile app that lets us see the
exact same information that we saw on the web display.
Here's everything that we saw there, including all our different components
and how they're functioning together right now in real time,
as well as our temperature sensors from Ruuvi
as well as our weather forecast, our Mopeka fresh water tank and propane tank sensors,
and our usage and forecast information.
And if we go up here to the hamburger menu we hit "Advanced"
and we can see the exact same graphs that you saw on the web interface ,
so we can keep track of things over time
from anywhere in the world with an internet connection,
either by cellular or by Wi-Fi.
While we're talking about what's new and exciting at Grand Adventure,
how about our new tow vehicle?
We decided to get rid of the F-350 pickup and get a Jeep Grand Cherokee to tow our fifth wheel around.
Yeah, right.
You may recall when we made our very first stop of the 2023 season
on the Burr Trail in southern Utah, we had a minor mishap with the F-350
and caused a... it didn't look like a substantial amount of damage,
but financially it turned out to be a substantial amount of damage.
And right now the truck's in the body shop getting fixed and this is a rental.
Now I'll tell you, we tried all summer long to get those repairs done on the road.
You know, there's parts ordering time to get vehicle parts in,
and we kept calling shops three or four weeks down the road saying,
'Here's an estimate, here are photos. Could you please just order parts
so that way when we roll into your town we can get the repairs done?"
And I tried for three or four weeks. We couldn't find a single shop willing to do that.
Eventually I just threw up my hands and said,
we're going to deal with that when we get back to Salt Lake City.
So that's what's taking place right now with the truck.
Just like everything that we use and like in our RV life,
we're going to put everything that we've shown you in this episode
on the Grand Adventure Shop on Amazon.
It costs you no more to shop Amazon through Grand Adventure;
however, the channel does receive a small commission on each sale
that helps to defray the costs of running the channel.
We'll put a link right here on the screen and down below
in the video description to the Grand Adventure shop on Amazon.
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Finally, coming up later this month we'd be thrilled to have you come camping with us
in the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona in Quartzsite,
where we are co-hosting the Q24 RV rally.
There, check out the merch! Everybody's been ordering their shirts,
and we're going to be heading down there, having a great time.
We've got well over 100 people already registered for the event and we'd love to have you join us.
If you would like more information about the Q24 Rally,
we will also put that down below in the video description.
So until next Wednesday please remember,
life is nothing but a Grand Adventure! We'll see you then.