Day #60 Van Build – 8/20/25

Another cooler day and I was able to spend the day working on installing components into the electrical cabinet. In the morning, I finished wiring up the solar isolator (I had begun work on that the night before). The solar isolator allows me to disconnect the power coming from the solar panels, which may be needed if I was working in the electrical cabinet. Then I wired up the system ground wire and I connected the 24V air conditioner to it’s power supply.

I wired up the DC to DC converter this component is needed, because my electrical system operates at 24V. This component drops the voltage from the 24 volt system voltage to the 12 volts that are needed to run all the DC circuits. This component is what sends power to the 12V fuse panel, which I also installed. In the future, all the 12V circuits will route into this fuse panel.

After lunch, I wired up the inverter compenent. This is one of the more complicated components to install. The inverter serves a few purposes. First, it converts the 24V DC power from the batteries into 120V AC power for the 120V AC circuits in the van (e.g., the standard wall outlets). Second, if I have my van plugged into shore power, the Inverter will convert the 120V AC shore power into 24V DC to charge the van batteries. The inverter will also allow shore power to directly power any 120V AC circuits and bypass the battery. It does a lot, but it is also a big heavy box with lots of wires to attach.

Since the inverter feeds the 120V AC circuits, I installed the 120V AC circuit breaker box and connected the power from the inverter to it.

So, in summary, today was a lot of cutting wire, stripping insulation off of wire, crimping connections onto wires, applying heat shrink to the ends of wires, and attaching wires to various types of terminals. Here are a couple of pictures of the electrical cabinet now. The first one shows some additional components in the box, and the second one shows the back wall with the 12V fuse box, 120V breaker box, and the solar isolator.

I still have a lot of cable management to do to make it neat…

Tomorrow is supposed to be another nice day, so I’ll probably continue with the wiring of the electrical cabinet. I have two more components to add to the electrical cabinet and I can also connect all the branch circuits into the 12V fuse box or the 120V AC breaker box.