Sprinter van: A big day

It was just about a month ago the first orders of equipment for our electrical system began to arrive. A couple of batteries. Then a battery charger, inverter, and battery monitor. It's been a fairly steady stream of parts ever since as I continued to work out the details of our electrical system. I had spent a couple weeks diving into DC electrical theory and design prior to our USPS guy, Ken, wheeling those batteries on his dollie up our driveway. This has been and will be by far the most complicated part of our conversion.

Which is why today was a big day: I crimped the final terminal onto the charger's starter battery connections. Crossed my fingers and held my breath. Went back and checked the input side of the charger for power. 12.37V! I knew then we were in business. I had K do the honors of firing up the van before flicking on the 300A kill switch to turn on our system.

Boom. Double-boom. Holy moly mother-truckin' triple boom. Everything worked!

Before calling it another late night, I tested the IKEA LED lights we had picked up last month. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, after opening and reading the labels, the sets that were 24VDC didn't work. Thankfully, the Dioder strip LEDs marked 12VDC did work.

There'll be much more to write about. For now, we're going to relax for an evening. We think we deserve it.