Upgrading the inverter

[Wannabecamperman]

Most guides for the EcoFlow alternator charger connect it to the main battery terminals, but I’m betting that it could more easily be connected to the house battery, so that is what I will try first.

The EcoFlow batteries have a built in MPPT controller, and solar panels connect using an XT60i connector. The smaller Delta 2 has one input, but the Delta 2 Max has 2, which provides flexibility to have permanent panels on the roof, and also portable panels. In practice, I have found roof panels to be less useful, as we usually situate the van in the shade (I’m in Australia, so you can imagine why), but the portable panels with a long cable can be moved several times a day to chase the sun. That said, solar panels might now be redundant due to the alternator charger, which promises to provide more input on a short drive than chasing sun all day. I guess time will tell.

A decent alternator can provide upto 800w per hour, though many struggle to get more than 500-600. Still far more consistent than solar panels though.

 

[stim]

Most guides for the EcoFlow alternator charger connect it to the main battery terminals, but I’m betting that it could more easily be connected to the house battery, so that is what I will try first.

The EcoFlow batteries have a built in MPPT controller, and solar panels connect using an XT60i connector. The smaller Delta 2 has one input, but the Delta 2 Max has 2, which provides flexibility to have permanent panels on the roof, and also portable panels. In practice, I have found roof panels to be less useful, as we usually situate the van in the shade (I’m in Australia, so you can imagine why), but the portable panels with a long cable can be moved several times a day to chase the sun. That said, solar panels might now be redundant due to the alternator charger, which promises to provide more input on a short drive than chasing sun all day. I guess time will tell.

Interested to know if it works wiring it to the house battery!

 

[pluc99]

Interested to know if it works wiring it to the house battery!

The most straightforward and efficient approach would be to install a 12 volt socket wired to the "load" output on your MPPT controller (e.g. Victron SmartSolar). Once the leisure batteries reach a (programmable) charge level, the extra power from the solar panels go to the "load" output to charge the EcoFlow or whatever.

 

[stim]

Ok, back to the original question. I know there are other options (i.e. ecoflow and finding a 12v ebike charger, both of which are not 100% suitable) but humour me here.

I have 2 options:

1. Take out the existing converter. I would then need to check the cable sizes from battery to the inverter location and maybe change them for something bigger. Try and figure out how to wire a new inverter to the existing plug socket on the side of the seat (difficult I think, proprietary connections). However, my limited research of inverters seems to indicate that the output is always a wall plug socket rather than the ability to wire to a remote socket. Can anyone comment?

2. Leave the original inverter in place and add an additional one under my RH seat (which is what my local VW dealer offers at a ridiculous price). For this I would need to add new cables to the battery (or piggy back off the existing inverter terminals if the cables are big enough?) and either add in another remote socket or just plug in a standard household plug board and have it tucked under the seat. This seems like the simplest option.

On a side note...I had an "issue" with my inverter in that I plugged in my laptop to charge and after a while I noticed that it had stopped charging. When I pushed the knob on the van control panel, it started charging but stopped about 1 minute after the screen turned off. It did this repeatedly. The garage just told me it was fine but I think all they did was connect a phone and laptop (it works with my work laptop). Could this behaviour be down to the fact that the original inverter is a poor quality non pure sinewave and my quite new lenovo laptop doesn't like it?

 

[secret lemonade drinker]

Ok, back to the original question. I know there are other options (i.e. ecoflow and finding a 12v ebike charger, both of which are not 100% suitable) but humour me here.

I have 2 options:

1. Take out the existing converter. I would then need to check the cable sizes from battery to the inverter location and maybe change them for something bigger. Try and figure out how to wire a new inverter to the existing plug socket on the side of the seat (difficult I think, proprietary connections). However, my limited research of inverters seems to indicate that the output is always a wall plug socket rather than the ability to wire to a remote socket. Can anyone comment?

2. Leave the original inverter in place and add an additional one under my RH seat (which is what my local VW dealer offers at a ridiculous price). For this I would need to add new cables to the battery (or piggy back off the existing inverter terminals if the cables are big enough?) and either add in another remote socket or just plug in a standard household plug board and have it tucked under the seat. This seems like the simplest option.

On a side note...I had an "issue" with my inverter in that I plugged in my laptop to charge and after a while I noticed that it had stopped charging. When I pushed the knob on the van control panel, it started charging but stopped about 1 minute after the screen turned off. It did this repeatedly. The garage just told me it was fine but I think all they did was connect a phone and laptop (it works with my work laptop). Could this behaviour be down to the fact that the original inverter is a poor quality non pure sinewave and my quite new lenovo laptop doesn't like it?

I'd go with option 2, and yes your Lenovo adaptor is probably drawing more than 150watts

 

[yossarian]

Could this behaviour be down to the fact that the original inverter is a poor quality non pure sinewave and my quite new lenovo laptop doesn't like it?

Your inverter communicates with J608 via a canbus. Most likely this behaviour is due to J608 performing some sort of load management.

 

[stim]

I'd go with option 2, and yes your Lenovo adaptor is probably drawing more than 150watts

My laptop charger is 140W and the inverter is 300W (T6.1).

 

[stim]

Your inverter communicates with J608 via a canbus. Most likely this behaviour is due to J608 performing some sort of load management.

I don't know what you just said but sounds fun (and not to be messed with).

I just had a look at the van. The cables going into the inverter are tiny (I estimate 4mm in diameter, so maybe 6mm2?) and go to a plug rather than terminals so I would need to route new cables from the battery under the floor to the RH seat, connect a new inverter, find a way to mount it and find a neat way to store the plug board.

How does one get cables under the carpet between the two seats? I think I read there was a conduit but do I have to remove all the battery to feed it through? Is there enough space for another pair of fairly big cables?

 

[secret lemonade drinker]

My laptop charger is 140W and the inverter is 300W (T6.1).

With a modified sine wave the wave is stepped to resemble a curvy sine wave and doesn't rectify efficiently, you can halve the power rating so your somewhere close to the maximum

 

[stim]

With a modified sine wave the wave is stepped to resemble a curvy sine wave and doesn't rectify efficiently, you can halve the power rating so your somewhere close to the maximum

Interesting, thanks.

A related, but maybe stupid question. How do a calculate the wattage requirements of my various chargers (ebike, laptop, camera etc)? Should I be taking the input or output wattage of my chargers to size my inverter? A laptop charger I have is rated at 150W. Output is listed as 19.5v and 7.7A (= 150W) but input is 100-240v and 2.5A (= 600W!). My ebike charger does not give a power rating, only V and A for input/output.

 

[secret lemonade drinker]

Interesting, thanks.

A related, but maybe stupid question. How do a calculate the wattage requirements of my various chargers (ebike, laptop, camera etc)? Should I be taking the input or output wattage of my chargers to size my inverter? A laptop charger I have is rated at 150W. Output is listed as 19.5v and 7.7A (= 150W) but input is 100-240v and 2.5A (= 600W!). My ebike charger does not give a power rating, only V and A for input/output.

Inputs of devices that are connected to the output of the inverter, most chargers are quite inefficient that is why they get hot! When I have installed a 800watt microwave in a camper, the input wattage is nearer 1500 watts, so I specified a 3000 watt pure sine wave inverter, so it could handle any in rush currents required by inductive loads on start up

 

[secret lemonade drinker]

Inputs of devices that are connected to the output of the inverter, most chargers are quite inefficient that is why they get hot! When I have installed a 800watt microwave in a camper, the input wattage is nearer 1500 watts, so I specified a 3000 watt pure sine wave inverter, so it could handle any in rush currents required by inductive loads on start up

Power is current (amps) multiplied by voltage (volts). If the load is inductive, has a transformer in it the inrush current can be nearly doubled the normal power rating, this only lasts for a few seconds but can blow fuses or cause trips in the circuit, sometimes called nuisance tripping

 

[stim]

Ok so regarding my (work) laptop charger example which works out at 600W input power, this does work with my 300W inverter on the California. Going by what you said, I should in fact need a 1200W (!) inverter. My personal laptop charger (designated as 140W output) does not work very well on the 300W inverter.

Is it basically down to the fact that the laptop could potentially use 600W power by drawing the full 2.5A at 240v but in reality it uses far less for the majority of the time and therefore does work with an inverter rated at a much lower power?

Regarding the "rush current", isn't that accounted for in the peak power specification of the inverter? Victron 1000W has a peak power of 2200W to account for a rush of current: https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-Inverter-VE.Direct-250VA-1200VA-EN-.pdf

I also don't want to use one single high power item (like a microwave) but lots of lower power items so this start up rush current thing is less of an issue.

 

[WelshGas]

Ok so regarding my (work) laptop charger example which works out at 600W input power, this does work with my 300W inverter on the California. Going by what you said, I should in fact need a 1200W (!) inverter. My personal laptop charger (designated as 140W output) does not work very well on the 300W inverter.

Is it basically down to the fact that the laptop could potentially use 600W power by drawing the full 2.5A at 240v but in reality it uses far less for the majority of the time and therefore does work with an inverter rated at a much lower power?

Regarding the "rush current", isn't that accounted for in the peak power specification of the inverter? Victron 1000W has a peak power of 2200W to account for a rush of current: https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-Inverter-VE.Direct-250VA-1200VA-EN-.pdf

I also don't want to use one single high power item (like a microwave) but lots of lower power items so this start up rush current thing is less of an issue.

More likely that the charger that says 100/240v and 2.5a uses 2.5a at 100v = 250w and only 1.1a at 240v

 

[secret lemonade drinker]

Ok so regarding my (work) laptop charger example which works out at 600W input power, this does work with my 300W inverter on the California. Going by what you said, I should in fact need a 1200W (!) inverter. My personal laptop charger (designated as 140W output) does not work very well on the 300W inverter.

Is it basically down to the fact that the laptop could potentially use 600W power by drawing the full 2.5A at 240v but in reality it uses far less for the majority of the time and therefore does work with an inverter rated at a much lower power?

Regarding the "rush current", isn't that accounted for in the peak power specification of the inverter? Victron 1000W has a peak power of 2200W to account for a rush of current: https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-Inverter-VE.Direct-250VA-1200VA-EN-.pdf

I also don't want to use one single high power item (like a microwave) but lots of lower power items so this start up rush current thing is less of an issue.

Have you ever watched the film Apollo13? When the ground crew are trying to work out the best way of restarting the LEM whilst not drawing too much current? Your scenario is the same. If all of your devices are connected simultaneously and you switch on your inverter you will have a problem, if you only use the items singularly, or stagger the power up sequence you may be ok, this is called "diversity" in an electric circuit, the same applies to your circuits in your house, if everything was switched on at the same time you would blow a fuse!

 

[stim]

Thanks all for the info.

I spoke to a knowledgeable friend who said the input stats of a charger are kind of the theoretically possible max values that will never really be reached (I may have described that incorrectly or oversimplified it). The real input wattage will just be the output wattage (VxI=150W for my laptop example) plus around 20% to account for the loss in efficiency (assuming 80% ish efficiency). So the laptop input wattage would be around 190W and this is what I use to work out the inverter spec I need.

Laptop = 190W
eBike = 180W
Camera = ?
etc etc
plus some margin

Any tips on getting the cables under the carpet between the seats?

 

[stim]

found this thread https://vwcaliforniaclub.com/threads/cable-routing-under-soft-area-between-front-seats.24655/

Seems like I need to remove the LH seat, remove battery, tilt seat base up and poke the cable through and it should pop out through the carpet on the RH side.

 

[stim]

Inverter, cable and fuse sizing...

After some more research, I concluded the following...

FYI, my use case is spending the day taking photos with camera/drone, using an ebike for access, charging and editing with a laptop in the evening.

With a 110Ah battery (lithium), there is no point in having a huge inverter if I am not using high-powered items for short periods (i.e. a coffee machine). If I had a big inverter and plugged in a bunch of stuff to charge, the battery would be flat before anything was fully charged.

The things I would likely charge are (efficiency loss of chargers considered):

• E-bike 160W (possibly x2)
• Camera 10.5W
• Drone 81W
• Laptop 175W
• TOTAL: 586.5W and it is unrealistic to assume I would ever be charging all this at once.

The Victron 12/800 inverter (650W continuous power) would be more than enough and in the (very) unlikely event that it is running at full power, it would be drawing 650/12= 54A which would run the battery flat in 2 hours. Of course, the battery capacity is the limit so I would monitor this to manage what I could charge.

Victron manual here states that I need 16-25mm2 (5-3AWG) cable between the inverter and battery depending on the length (I think I can get away with the 16mm2 due to the short length between the seats) but the manual also says the max cable size that will fit into the inverter is 10mm2?! I will try and find out how to ask Victron about this.

For a fuse, I found a reference that said for 3-5AWG cable I need a fuse of 150 or 94A respectively mounted on the positive cable close to the battery.

I assume I just mount the positive and negative cables directly to the battery and there is also an extra ground cable from the victron inverters which I assume I connect to the chassis via a seat base bolt.

I would appreciate if anyone could check and comment on my logic. Thanks!