In terms of placing lights, I waited until I was fairly certain where everything in the bus was going to end up, and then I did two things:
- I planned a run going down the middle of the bus all the way to the end, as I wanted a switch/button at the front of the bus I could hit and illuminate the whole bus, even if it was a little more dim than optimal.
- I placed additional lights in certain zones.
Zones:
- Hallway (described above)
- Driver seat
- Front door
- Four separate lights for the bedroom/living room area
- Two zones for the office, one for my desk and one for hers
- Laundry area
- Bathroom
- Three zones in the kitchen: Sink, counter, and door.
- Unused: Lights in clothes closet and right
- Unused: Lights directly over bed
Including the main "hallway", each lighting zone represented an
activity- if I were bringing groceries into the bus I would want to be able to quickly light up the whole rig. I would want to be able to light up my desk in the office space if I were to use it on its own. If I were doing laundry, or washing dishes in the sink. Or making food, each lighting zone corresponded to something I knew I was going to want to "do".
#NoRegrets.
For one, I ran more outlets than I thought I would need. I ran all double-gang boxes with 20A GFI. I put a GFI in each box- so that I would not have a bunch of boxes tripping if one box turned out to be problematic for some reason. In several places, I used a GFI outlet combined with a 4x USB outlet- up high these are extremely useful. I did however place some 4x USB outlets near the floor- these are close to useless. I will probably move them elsewhere.
Can you clarify on "house vs shore power"? Are you planning on outlets for shore versus outlets on house power? My rig, shore vs house is a mode of the whole build. I flip a switch, everything switches from shore to house / vice versa, with the exception of DC appliances. Speaking of which:
I have several electrical appliances that use DC electricity directly rather than AC shore or inverter power. These include the water pump, all my lighting, NAS, DVR / surveillance system, diesel heaters, speakers. Its good to separate out devices you want to survive power failure this way.