Off-Grid Skoolie Electrical Overview
Our client’s goal for their Skoolie was to live as a family of four on the road. Not only would they be traveling south and exploring between the mountains and the valleys, they would be helping build off-grid permaculture communities. The vision of being on a property, kids playing free, and building permaculture sites was the motivation. They would need enough power to not only wash their clothes and keep everyone fed, but to also charge and run power tools for building projects. There was also talk about the potential of moving the system to an off-grid cabin in the future.
Knowing our clients goals and the vision really helps us when we start talking about designing the system. To break down our system design we use four categories: power consumption, travel style, power input, and space.
Power Consumption:
How much power is truly needed to live sustainably?
Based on the appliances that our client was planning to have in the bus with the expected usage time per day we estimated that their family would use on average 600-800 amp hours a day, depending on the day.
Travel Style.
Where are you traveling to? How long would they be off-grid? Are you driving a lot?
Our client's goal was to be mostly off-grid. They would be able to find shore power, but didn’t plan to rely on it fully. They would be headed towards sunshine. This travel style gave us a great opportunity to install a larger solar array.
Power inputs.
Not all power inputs are used equally depending on how the individuals will be using the vehicle.
Due to the travel style of being a bit more settled in one spot at a time, off-grid in sunny places, this gave us the opportunity to rely on solar as the main power input, with the option of shore power.
Space.
Where will all of the components go? How are these components going to be secure and stable as your tires roll over the pavement and dirt?
This was a fun piece of the build as we were able to be more creative with our space as we had a larger canvas, a 40 foot school bus. At the same time we wanted to be aware of keeping components in a compact space to keep wire lengths manageable.
The Full Review
With all of the above information in mind, we designed this Skoolie’s off-grid electrical system!
The electrical system we installed in the Skoolie included 1080 amp hours of battery power wired in a 24 volt array. We used four Battle Born’s Game Changer batteries. They were truly a game changer in regards to space and efficiency. We leaned heavy on solar charging, including 1800 watts of solar on the roof of the bus with an additional deployable solar port. The solar array was built with (9) 200 watt 24 volt Rich Solar panels. We installed two separate MPPT Solar controllers, one for the roof and one for the deployable array. The deployable array consisted of a Bluetti PV 350 flexible panel. We also installed shore power charging. We installed Victron’s Quattro 5000/24 Volt inverter charger.
The full component list
The brain of the electrical system lived in the under-bus storage compartment and we wired the AC and DC panel along with the Victron BMV-712 battery monitor inside the bus. We included all of the safety features we do with every build, including proper fuse and wire sizing, dedicated solar disconnect switch, master disconnect, and shunt and monitoring components.
Joule Adventures is a certified installer for Explorist.life and every build that we install follows American Boat and Yacht Council standards.
This was such a fun system to build! We hope you enjoyed walking through it with us!
If you are interested in working with us on the installation of an off-grid electrical system please get in touch via our contact form on our website. We look forward to connecting with you!
Cheers!
The Joule Adventures Team
