We were asked to carry out the following upgrades on this vehicle:
- Power Management upgrade using inverters and lithium batteries
- Continuous hot water system
- Diesel powered central heating
- Incinerator toilet
I will explain all the different systems below.
Power Management
This customer did not want to run out of power, so we installed the following dual voltage system.
The vehicle engine and habitation space both ran on 12v, but the customer wanted a 5KVA inverter. Trying to run 5KVA at 12v will generate a lot of heat, so to make the system operate reliably and safely we installed a 24v inverter. At 24v the amperage is halved, so the heat generated is also halved.
We installed 22KWH of lithium batteries, these batteries were under slung so not to take up all the garage space. The battery bank was made up using 2 x 280AH @ 24v and 1 x 628AH @ 12v. The 12v battery was installed to ensure the 12v operation of the vehicle would still work even if the 24v system runs flat, this is achieved by prioritising the 12v battery. The 12v battery charging can be disabled and enabled in the GX touch screen. While driving the 24v batteries are charged from the alternator using a Victron BuckBoost step up transformer.
On the roof we installed 800w of solar using 8 x 100w panels, this was controlled by a Victron MPPT charge controller and charged the 24v battery bank
Diesel powered Cinderella Incinerator toilet.
When travelling off grid the biggest problem people face is where to empty their cassette toilet. The usual solution is to spend a night on a camp site so you are able to use their facilities. If you would like to avoid doing this, an incinerator toilet is a good option. When using one of these toilets, a family of 4 will produce about an egg cup of ash a week, this can simply be thrown on the floor.
The toilet is powered by diesel taken from the main vehicle fuel tank. On this particular vehicle the installation of the toilet required some modification of the bathroom furniture, however we were very pleased with the final result.
Instantaneous hot water system and diesel powered central heating.
This vehicle was fitted with an Alde heating system, these are very good units but need LPG to operate, they also only have a 10litre water storage heater, so you only get a 5 minute shower if you’re lucky. We incorporated this system into a new system.
We installed a Eberspachaer Hydro-plate and a 5kw diesel water heater. The hydro-plate allowed for instantaneous, continuous hot water until the fresh water tank was empty. We used the original Alde central heating piping to allow the glycol heated by the diesel heater to heat the habitation space, this was thematically controlled. So the end result was a dual fuel system, the Alde heating system still worked in the same way as before using LPG, but the diesel system was also capable of heating the habitation space and supply instantaneous hot water.
