Hello guys, my second question here. Like the first – which was about the practicalities of wiring – it’s general. So, no photos of the inside of my Peugeot Boxer, but I’d appreciate informed opinions from people who’ve done this stuff before.
Here goes. A couple of years back, my wife an I bought a 2003 Autosleepers conversion of a Peugeot Boxer delivery van. It’s a caravan-style conversion with gas cooker, lighting, chemical loo etc etc. The wiring comprises a leisure battery running 12V lighting and power circuits, plus a “hookup” to allow you to connect to mains power at caravan parks. There are 240V sockets (UK mains) alongside the 12V ones, plus a converter that charges the leisure battery from the mains when available. The van is pretty much as it left the Autosleepers workshop except that the previous owner slightly changed the mains-leisure battery connection (extra switch) and I swapped out the 12V Clipsal sockets for 5V USBs.
Last year I took the van to a local specialist shop to add a Victron MPPT unit and a medium-sized solar panel on a stand. If we’re offgrid for more than an evening, one of us will pull out the solar panel and plug it into the Victron, gaining some extra power for lighting and fans.
As I wrote in post #1, the Victron has been great but I’m unhappy with the quality of the wiring. I’ve decided to re-do all the new wiring with proper ferrules, cable clips, crimped-on terminals and so on in line with the helpful response I got to post #1. It’s not a huge task but will take some thought; I’ll make a start shortly.
When I looked at the job, I realized that I wasn’t sure the MPPT was hooked up right. Classically, an MPPT has three pairs of terminals: panel, battery and load. In our case, the MPPT has been set up with just panel and battery connections. As a result, the leisure battery has multiple connections coming off its terminals: the fat wires going to the 12V circuits and two pairs of thinner ones from the MPPT and (presumably) from the mains charger.
The present setup has worked perfectly well, but I wondered if there might be any advantage in moving things around, connecting the 12V lighting and power circuits to the MPPT’s load terminals and the mains charger leads (which are 12V not 240V, remember) to the MPPT’s solar terminals. That way the Victron would handle all battery management tasks, rather than just those related to the panel.
???