Offgrid Power Tips & Resources
If you follow us on social media, you’ll know that we recently bought a second-hand Nissan MV400, which we intend to convert into a camper over the next couple of months.
It can be so daunting buying a vehicle second-hand to use as a base vehicle for your van conversion, but in this article, we’ll be covering some of the things that we look for when we buy second-hand vehicles, which help to reduce the risk of buying a lemon!
We often get asked what tools we recommend to build offgrid power solutions in vans. Over the years of working with building electrical systems in vans/boats/cabins/overlanders, we've used a wide range of tools to build our solutions. A lot of these tools are not common tools that you can just buy in your average hardware store and unless you live in a big city that has specialist tool stores, it's likely that you'll be ordering the products off Amazon (or online) as we do regularly. We know what it's like buying tools from the internet - you find one that has good ratings, read the ratings and often take a punt and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out and other times it flops.
We decided that we would list some of our favourite electrical tools that we use when we build custom offgrid power solutions for the campervans and boats that we work on.
There are a gazillion options when it comes to purchasing LifePO4 (or any other Lithium-based) batteries. Some (maybe even MANY) of the options are so well priced that they are too good to be true. There are certainly good deals to be had, but if a deal is too good to be true it probably is.
Why is this?
Put simply there are great differences in the quality and build of batteries. There are different grades of cells that make up the batteries and of equal importance, there are so many options of battery management systems (BMS) that are of varying quality and functionality. So in a nutshell: Cells and BMS!
Inverters are handy when you are offgrid and need to use appliances that run on normal grid power (110v AC in the USA, 230v AC in most of the world).
After all, just because you’re offgrid it doesn’t mean you should be without good coffee!
Basically, an inverter converts 12v DC to 110v or 230v AC. There are inverters that use other input voltages (24v, 36v) but in this article, we discuss only 12v.
If you are looking to upgrade your motorhome to lithium, install solar onto your motorhome or build the best possible offgrid electrical system, you should join all the thousands of adventure lovers that are benefitting from our exclusive tips & how-tos that we share in our regular emails.
