are you ready to hear the newest item that keystone has added to all of their products
stick around we'll tell you about it
that's right on all new keystones made after 2020 2022. where jimmy and lisa will find us camping
where it's all about the people and the places so the place we just were was the 2021 hershey crv
show we met all kinds of great people but today we want to share with you the meeting we had with
jeff rank who is the district sales manager for the arcadia brand if you haven't check out those
arcadias you really really need to check them out they're awesome so that's just a side note
but what we were going to talk about today is something that as keystone brand ambassadors we
kind of got the heads up a while back and we haven't been able to say anything it's been hard
but we think it's really exciting we're excited of course we have a toy hauler so we boondock so it's
really exciting for us but i think what's most exciting is it's not just on the fusions it's
not just on the toy haulers keystone is gonna put on every keystone product it's gonna come standard
with 200 watts of solar power now 200 watts is of course the base but it's upgradable
um you can upgrade to 400 watts or 600 watts or you can keep it 200 it just depends on
you know what's right for you 200 watts is going to help you out a lot because it'll keep
your battery charged most of the time that's the biggest thing the batteries do not last that long
if you don't keep them charged if you're sitting for a winter and your batteries die you have to
buy a new battery next year so at least now it's like a trickle truck so like on a boat
battery or whatever it's like a trickle charge having that 200 watts so it's going to keep
your battery going it's going to make it so that when you run out and you're packing up
to leave you can turn your lights on because that battery will be charged up you can run your leds
for a little while while you're you know hooking everything up and getting together so we were able
to get a quick tour with jeff an exclusive tour so he got to walk around with us so we got to video
it he's going to explain the whole thing to you um he's going to explain the 200 and the 600 kind of
the differences what you get and we're certainly no experts we've asked questions every day we've
been here we've asked different people so that we can learn more about it but if you have questions
post them below if we don't know the answer we certainly you know we have jeff's information
we have some other people's information that we can contact directly and say hey
somebody wants to know the answer to this and we don't feel confident that i don't
want to give up right now yeah i don't want to give you the wrong answer i'd rather say let
me check and get back to you but we certainly have made some contacts of people that we can
you know reach out to and say hey you know one of our one of our peeps has a question about this
and you know we can get back to you but we're super excited about it and thank you jeff for
spending the time to go through it with you but without further ado let's turn it over to jeff
take it away jeff so this is our solar flex 200 so it's sort of our entry level base solar system
uh that's standard on all of our arcadias and a lot of the other keystone products
with that you're getting a 200 watt panel up on the roof you're getting a 15 amp charge controller
so you're getting the basics of a solar package um there's some other features that we'll talk about
when we get inside but you're getting the basics of a solar package but what i love about this is
that the customer if they choose to after market can easily expand it into an even more robust
system for instance we've inverted seven outlets in this unit so we've done all the heavy lifting
we put the wiring in place for these outlets to run on a solar system and then what we did is we
took the wiring and actually put it behind that cover so all that you have to do after market is
pop off that cover access the the wiring loop and install an inverter aftermarket and those
outlets are now part of your solarflex 200 system so with all of our packages there's a lot of great
features but all of the package also packages also have the ability to be expanded after market
to make them even more robust and configured for what the customer really uh needs to do in
their particular case because there's nothing like getting something and then not being able
to upgrade it right right right so obviously you noticed this unit doesn't have a battery
and we're not plugged in so you're getting all of this essentially from the sun right now um
that's cool but when the sun goes down you don't have that you don't have this right this is all
100 solar being converted to this um because we're not storing you know there's no battery
um so one of the things that we often talk about particularly with customers who are not
as initiated into solar and the benefits of solar is what we have right here
um customer 24 7 has the ability to turn their lights on and in some instances if
you're getting enough sunlight actually operate your slides without the battery
being installed so for a lot of folks and i know that this is how it's working for a dealership
too because they never have they can show units without having to hook up that's smart yeah um
yeah that's the wholesale side and retail side of our business um so that's what we teach this sales
guys at the dealership hey you can come out here you've got lights on 24 7. with showing you 24 7.
oh wow 18 hours what we actually encourage them to do is install the battery at the dealership and
then they do um so you install the battery at the dealership it's almost fully charged they can come
out they've got lights they can operate everything not a lot of dealerships won't do that they don't
do it for theft and different reasons but if they choose not to they still have this ability which
makes a world of difference when i show it to a retail customer and i can turn the lights on
yeah um but then at that the house so the customer says hey i'm never gonna go off the grid what do i
care well you still have this functionality which is really nice and when you're packing up getting
ready to go right off right now i mean at my house i pull it into the driveway gotta drag out the
power cord hook it up i put it into this outlet by my garage and then like half my house like you
know goes off because i blow i blow the circuit and it's just super frustrating and hot and yucky
so as long as you do have a battery here it's also charging the battery because that's what happens
a lot of people they go out after the winter yeah and they didn't put a trickle charge on there so
that's where i was going with this so as a rv owner your battery usually for many rv owners
goes through this charge discharge cycle all the time and if that's you as a customer you recognize
that the life of your battery it's not going to dramatically reduce the lead acid battery is going
to give you two years or so topped now you've got a fully charged battery all the time um and we
estimate that that's going to extend the life of this battery four five six years in some cases so
just that benefit right there alone pays for the cost of solar flex 200. um yeah so
that there's a lot of benefits to this even if you don't anticipate ever going off the grid
so 200 baseball will do your lights keep your battery charged are you getting a tv
um so we've uh inverted uh seven outlets on there um actually
if they're not listed yeah there's one that outlet is inverted every floor plan is a little
bit different uh this outlet here is inverted bathroom bedroom outside so uh so you can go
outside during the day watch tv have your lights on stay away from the kids watch this so when you
need some me time or you're in a timeout you go out to the camper and kick the lights on the tv
and you guys cost me a dime at the house to run it because it's on the solar on it just and that's
just off of 200. just off the 200. um now i know when the sun is shining i can operate the lights
uh and obviously the stereo is on i'm not sure if i'm going to get the tv to come on or not because
again i don't have any stored power it's only what the so you just see the battery then you can just
yeah because that outlet is inverted but i don't have enough power to kick on the tv in this case
that's pretty cool yeah so let's go back up to the 600 which is more of an interest to me this
is why i love the 200 though just this demo right here without a battery shows it so they're coming
standard with 200 though yeah so correct okay so this is kind of the guts of the 600 system up here
in this particular one we've got three 100 amp hour batteries we're going to be transitioning
to a single 270 amp hour lithium battery on down the road as soon as it gets its ul listing um
but they're dragonfly batteries it's sort of the creme de la creme of the lithium batteries um your
inverter is up there at the top you've got your battery disconnect and all of that this is the
so for us when you look at this there's obviously a lot of wiring and a lot of functionality going
into this thing i think our engineering and manufacturing teams did an amazing job when you
look at this it's all really easy to access it's easy to use you pop off that black cover there and
a dealership or a technician can get in there and all of this is really sort of plug and play you
can see the big connections there where everything has been connected so it's really easy to service
easy to diagnose and troubleshoot and all of those things if you need to
that's all right you're demoing the teeth see he's running right now
well this one has the battery in it so it's got a lot of functionality lots of stuff
so this is full of 600 this is exactly so here's nothing correct this is full 600. so this
uh both the 400 package and the 600 package which is what we're in right now offer from
victron connect a from victron an app called victron connect and this is the smart shunt
and basically it is an app that shows you what your current state of charge is for your battery
how much energy you're collecting and how much energy you're using basically a net amount right
now even though with this unit we have some lights on and the tv on we're doing a great job
of collecting energy it's a very efficient system uh so it's got two 300 watt panels on it
but we're currently adding five over five amps to our battery right now even with these lights
and the tv on and quite honestly less than ideal conditions it's a little bit overcast
out there yeah it's plenty hot but uh plenty hot but if he could run the solos yeah no kidding
so it's plenty hot but the sun is not ideal but even with that um again a lot of that has to
do with the components that we've used uh higher end components are going to work more efficiently
gonna do a better job of collecting uh the energy and and storing it so this app here is super cool
because typically customers always are asking us what can i do with it um the reality is you can do
a lot but you can't do a lot infinitely so that's where an app like this comes into play as you use
different components you can instantly see what it's doing to your battery charge uh right now
we're doing all of this and we're actually adding to the battery charge but if we were to turn on
a couple more things or maybe a hair dryer things that suck up right but they don't have a number to
put one or for sure to turn the air conditioner on yeah you're going to see exactly what it's doing
to your total output and what your battery charge is looking like so you can manage it on your own
absolutely all up to you so the one question everybody asks the same thing i asked uk and run
one ac for a sort of sort of for an amount of time yeah so with the 600 package we're standard
with all of the wiring uh your 3 000 watt inverter is part of the package so and we install a soft
start 15 000 v2 air conditioner so yes you can run the air conditioner um how long again it depends
uh we recommend that don't run it at 68 run it at 74 or 75 what you want to do is allow it to
cycle on and off and the more that it's cycling on and off the longer it's obviously going to
to work um a lot of that's going to depend if you're using the air fryer and the blow dryer
and the tv and all these other things well your air conditioner is not going to work at 82 drop
pretty quickly yeah exactly exactly like suckers are like i've learned what i can and can't and we
don't have solar but i've learned what i can and can't run at the same time yeah without upsetting
just the regular system so but it doesn't tell me that i've learned right by trial and error
yeah so that's the conversation that we were having earlier and to me uh it applies to
solar and and what we were talking about earlier is as an experienced rver you know when you go
to the campground and you've got 50 amp service that there's only so many things that you can
use at the same time you're going to start blowing breakers even in your own house even in your own
house you can't run through the way it is right you trip a breaker all the time yeah so the answer
uh to a customer's question is well you can do all that the 50 amp post is capable of handling
right the reality is this is exactly the same thing only this tells you this tells you without
flipping the breaker without having to go outside and change something yeah so energy management
is a huge component of a solar system um that we are really working hard to try to explain to the
customer hey this is what a system is capable of doing and this is what it's not capable of
doing and here's what your expectations should be our marketing group has really done a great job
on the keystone rv website of explaining the packages and what it's capable of doing
and to us trying to make sure that the customers our retail customers know exactly what it's
capable of doing last thing we want to do is for them to have a disappointing experience
right no no no and the reality is you're not even running your whole rig on a 600
but man you can go and you can have a great boondocking rv experience with a 600 package
right that's where we're headed because what we'll do is i'll fire the generator up to get it cool
right then once i get to where it needs to go then i'll shut the generator down and at night when you
don't want the generator running all night then hopefully we'll have enough we have a battery
operated fan you know yeah they don't have enough storage that i can get through tonight let's see
and so those are the the kind of i guess for lack of a better trend the kind of compromises
that you got to make if you're going to go off grid uh the perception that this thing
is you're going to use everything and you're going to use it all night long the reality is
that just doesn't happen those are those are the one in a million types of rvs that you see on some
channels that they don't tell you the whole story that it's a fifty thousand dollar package uh no
this costs more than your rickety exactly exactly um and speaking of money what we're super excited
about is we're giving the customer an opportunity to get into an entry-level solar system with 200
all the way up to 400 600 1200 uh with our montanas and it's super affordable any of
these packages that you were to do it after market you're going to spend a whole lot more
money doing it after market and then you're not tearing apart why uh walls to run wires
you've already laid the platform for you yeah you don't have wires coming off your roof and
wrapped around your rear ladder and going into your underbelly and crazy stuff like that we
like to thank jeff again for taking us through that awesome tour he really explained to you
the 200 the difference in the 200 and the 600 the 400 is just a little bit different you know just
in between it gives you between the two and the six hundred so we are super super super super
excited to know that all keystones now will come with at least some solar um these get you out and
get you started with this give you an option and you can build from there because everybody's not
interested in solar um we really like it because we boonduck so we're excited about it but you know
you can kind of take it in at whatever level you want uh if you're enjoying these videos and you're
getting some um value value out of them be sure to subscribe give us a thumbs up don't forget to
ring the bell so you don't miss the next video um and just again if you have questions if if
that was enough to just make you really think and it made my head explode i got a lot of questions
it's a lot to take in so once you process a little bit you're going to have more questions be sure to
post them below we may or may not know the answer but we will find the answer for you and until
the next time you find us looking at solar or keystones or wherever you're at safe travels y'all