My first week of fun-employment was spent visiting my mom in Fort Myers, FL. No climbing there, obviously, so I had plenty of time to flesh out the van’s electrical system. I decided early on that I needed power in the van. I really like to cook, so having a fridge (as opposed to a cooler) was a must. I also wanted lights and the ability to charge small electronics like my phone and laptop. The ability to run a fan at night without draining the car battery was also important.

At first I wanted to get a GoalZero solar system. GoalZero is well known in the climbing community as they sponsor several well known climbers such as Alex Honnold. After doing a little math to estimate my power needs, I decided that I needed ~200W of solar input and ~100AHr of charge storage. In terms of GoalZero products, this meant that I needed two Boulder 90 solar panels (180W total) and a Yeti 1250 solar generator. The generator is an all-in-one system that includes a 100AHr battery, built-in charge controller, an AC power inverter, and a battery meter. One of the challenges of building your own system is spec-ing out all of these components individually. GoalZero has removed this challenge by integrating everything into one nice package. Very cool! The downside? Price. The solar panels alone are $500 each. The Yeti 1250 will run you about $1600. Total cost: $2600. Woof!

That price point was enough of a barrier that I figured it was worth at least trying to spec out a system with individual components. A quick tour through Amazon and I found batteries in the $250 range and 200W solar panels with a charge controller for $350. A 1000W power inverter runs about $150. Total cost: $750. Holy shit! The GoalZero solution is more that 3x the cost of building your own! Sure, there will be a few other minor expenses like a power meter, etc, but these pieces don’t really affect the overall difference in price. I’m an electrical engineer, goddamnit, time to put those expensive degrees to work!

![iVan's electrical system](/images/2016-06-05-ivans-electrical-system-01.jpeg# fr)

Here’s a list of the components that I ended up getting.

I chose components that were highly rated on Amazon and widely used by other bloggers living out of their vans. All of these components are pretty vanilla. There’s no special magic here. The nice thing about the Renogy kit is that it includes the charge controller, so compatibility issues should not be a problem. Renogy also recommends the VMAX battery.

The cost of this system was so inexpensive that I figured it was worth adding a few other nice features, like the ability to charge the battery from the Sprinter’s alternator. The Sprinter has a 220A alternator. So even if there’s no sun for days, I can still charge the battery by turning on the van. Obviously this isn’t as environmentally friendly as solar, but hey, at least my veggies won’t spoil if we get rain for a week. Basically the only component I needed was an automatic charge relay. The relay senses when the vehicle is on and closes the switch so that the house battery receives charge. When the van is off, the relay opens so that it doesn’t drain the car battery. Pretty simple. I ended up going with a device from Blue Sea. They make some really nice products for boats, but work equally well for RV’s. All of the high current switches and fuses are also designed by Blue Sea.

Here’s a list of everything else I purchased.

The switch is nice because it allows me to cut power to all devices downstream of the battery. Useful if I want to turn everything off to service some part of the electrical system. I might actually add another switch so I can disconnect the alternator from the battery. Useful if I’m worried about overcharging the battery, which can damage it.

I’m pretty happy with the design so far. The install will start next week!