Hi, my name is Brett Phelan and this is my 1973 solar electric VW Bus.
About 12 years ago I built a solar-powered
golf cart. It was an absolutely amazing vehicle and I always imagined wow if I
just could build a large one that could go on the highway. Getting the bus was
quite interesting they still want four or five thousand dollars for these
older buses even with bad motors in them. The solar power was just two hours a night
after work chop saw cutting aluminum drilling until finally I was able to
mount the cam and hinge them and then there's actuators that needed to be
wired up so that it could tip up. So the idea of having a charging station so
to speak right with the vehicle obviously allows you to go far beyond
where you would need to possibly use a charging station. So you can really get
out into nature and and stay there because you have plenty of power to
keep all your life support systems going while you're out there. So it
really just gives you the ability to get out beyond civilization a little bit and enjoy nature.
So as you notice we can tip up our solar panels and really get the most out of
the sun. There is a canvas that attaches to this velcro right here so it starts
there and it goes around, has a window in the back, and you access it from the
bottom there's a little ladder that you put in there. Me, my wife, and my two kids
will sleep up there with plenty of room to spare. You can stand up so if you
wanted to play some music off the back or have a little dinette set to hang out
and have a coffee it's totally possible and it's really nice. It puts you up above
your campsite or the creek or whatever you're parked next to. So if you notice
up here you'll see a little piece of wood there that has some holes in it.
Those are actually fans and each panel has to have its own little controller.
One of the challenges with doing a vehicle like this is there's just not a
lot of components available to accomplish this so we have to get kind
of creative and each panel gets this voltage of 32 volts maximum power kicked
up to about 55. So otherwise, this panel even if I series all those panels it
only ends up being about 120 volts and I need at least 200 to charge 144 volt
battery banks so those little controller step up the voltage on each panel to
about 50 volts and then when I combine them in series I get 200. There's still
probably 10% of the energy is lost in heat and such with these small
controllers so being able to design a controller, and we are in the middle of
designing one, will give me just all the more power. So if you take a look at the
dash there you'll see a gauge which represents the voltage on each battery
so if you take the voltage of your total battery bank you don't know what's
happening in between and sometimes the battery can drop really low. We can't
push a battery further than it wants to go so when we see that one battery start
dropping down to the ten nine volts we stop and do a little solar
charging or plug in. In the center there you can see that's the the -2 is power
coming in. When we're in the full sun we'll pull up to 8 amps
so that would be times 150 volts, 1200 watts of the system. So that ends up
being 40 and 50 miles in one day pulling out the sun. So let's take a look at
the electric motor. So there you can see it's a hundred pound motor so it
replaces about a 250 gas guzzling oil spurting situation with
this super easy little hundred pound motor. Even the transmission is only a two
hundred pounder so pretty much anything on this vehicle is just really
manageable to work on and deal with. Where the gas tank used to be we have
the motor controller, the chargers, and a bunch of other little components like we
need 12 volts to run all the normal accessories on the van but the electric
battery bank is a high voltage battery bank so you need to step down that high
voltage to run kind of the typical accessories on the van. We have some
pretty basic batteries in here they're just golf cart batteries essentially.
There's 12 of them. They're all in series so you just keep adding them up and you
end up with a nominal 144 volts so you need higher voltages to really get the
power out of these banks to run a heavy vehicle like this. I made my own
interconnects because I found after studying lead acid batteries for a lot
of years doing off-grid power that some of the main issues with these batteries
come from just having poorly connected terminals and bad crimped connections so
I made my own wires by smashing some copper rod and making sure that each
battery has a perfect torque connection and and you really notice the difference.
Each battery then can contribute evenly and and much more efficiently. I'll get
about 80 amp hours per battery pulling anywhere from 100 to 250 300 amps out of
each battery and that gives me my 50-mile range. A lot of people like to
talk watt hours so that would be anywhere from 150 to 300 watt hours per
mile. I also have an inverter which comes off of this 144 volts and that gives me
2,000 watts to run my electric chainsaw if I need it or larger things like
heaters and air conditioning units and things that require more power. There's a
lot of power here to do other things besides drive the vehicle I mean driving
the vehicle takes so much more power than it does to run even an air
conditioner so. One question I get a lot is is this thing top-heavy? When you put
the canvas up there you have this huge sail however with a thousand pounds of
lead ballast near the center of the vehicle we haven't really seen a problem.
We came through some pretty high winds on our trip and even though it
blew the canvas around a little bit, the thing won't budge. So I have a
level two charger so if the solar is not putting out what we need to be traveling
then I can plug in. I can also plug in this with a regular 110 cord
anywhere I want that has an available 110, but the charging stations are
typically two twenty thirty amp service and that will charge this particular
battery bank up in about two and a half hours. One thing I'd like to mention is I
just put this in a couple days ago it's a power steering unit so it's an
electric assist basically steering column.
As you can see and if I was to normally normally turn this wheel it takes a
little grunt but if I come over here and put on my power steering now I can just
turn it really easily. So this is a 1973. It is a transporter which means it
didn't originally have any camping package associated with it so that's all
been added. Mostly my wife Kira made the kitchen here and the fold-out tables and
the floor. It really made the the bus feel a lot like more like home. The sink
has a little pump in it so we have a dirty and a clean jug. It seems to serve
us for a week or so. It's pretty good, we conserve on our water. So for cooking we
have a small induction burner that pretty much serves all of our needs.
You're just parked and you're pulling power off the sun it's pretty negligible
even what you're what you're pulling off that burner. It ends up being just about
the same power as the panels put in so if you cook for an hour it doesn't take
too much out of your range. For refrigeration we have a small Dometic
refrigerator that is amazing it takes so little power we don't even notice it. I
pretty much just leave it on all the time. The seats are out of a Sprinter.
They were actually brand new about four thousand dollars so that's something if
you didn't want to spend a whole lot on here you might eliminate but they are so
nice it's like having two lazy boys in the front and we were able to then get a
custom seat built over the top of that battery box. It was two years of work two
hours three hours a night. Phase one was to do it cheap because depending on who
looks at the vehicle some people can't imagine only going 50 miles a day. Other
people it's like satisfies all of their needs. But phase two, however, is kind of
the spare no expense stage when I'll be putting lithium batteries in there to
give me a couple hundred miles of range and solar awnings which will be a very
interesting mechanical feat to be able to get enough power up on top to pull it
out as awnings and then pull 100 miles or so off the sun each day.
The message is Slow Down. The message is you know if you go forty and fifty
miles an hour with a vehicle like this your range goes up so dramatically you
have everything you need with you so there's no reason to go fast. There's
nowhere to get to. It's the ultimate nature enjoyment vehicle. You could come
into nature with totally low-impact quiet transportation stay there power
yourself up and move on and enjoy enjoy all the wonderful spots in America or
the world for that matter. Let's slow down. You'll enjoy it more. The vehicle
likes to be driven that way and you'll get way more performance that way as
well. So it's kind of naturally built into the bus is the idea of relaxing
and letting go and being healthy and happy.