Thomas C2 toy hauler build with too many batteries

[nikitis]

I still like the idea of the dome fan under the panel like you did. Maybe I can add 3 of them. One in Back, middle, and front, and just open the bus door when I want to vent the space. The door will be the intake. I'm not looking to use maxxair fans to actually cool anything, just vent the hot air, or gasses my kids may make

As for the sliding system, I don't think it would be that much of an ordeal to do. You'd just make 2 square frames that attaches to the solar rails you added, with one panel within the bottom frame, and then add a slide on top of that frame to a second frame with a second panel in it, and allow it to slide out.

You may have a point about charging when it's rolled in covering one panel, it would diminish it completely, so you wouldn't be able to charge while driving. For most people this isn't an issue though, but if charging while driving is something you need then yes I can see that being an issue.

With my deck idea. I plan to have solar panels on top of the deck, so they are all visible to the sun still and will charge while driving, and when I slide the panels out the deck is exposed but still charging. So it would charge in both states, but because in your case you're covering a panel not a deck it would severe the voltage transfer until slid out.

 

[carleeno]

Build update: Shop floor and L-track


Thanks to desrtdog who'd sent me his old L-track, I had a way to secure loads in my garage...and this week I finally got around to installing it.


Because I didn't know what thickness of floor and wall paneling I'd be using, I knew I'd have to use a router to cut a groove of the appropriate depth once I figured that out...so armed with an old Porter Cable router, a 3/4" straight cut bit, some unistrut, and a bit of problem solving, I got to work on cutting the grooves...

I mounted the unistrut the correct distance below the cut to account for the edge of the router plate to the edge of the cutter, securing it with a bit of scrap lumber at first, but then decided to screw the strut right to the hat channels to make sure it wouldn't move while cutting.




Then I threw together some makeshift dust collection:

It actually ended up working really well, the only openings left were in the router base plate so the vacuum was able to pull all the shavings in...

To set the correct position for the 2nd pass I added a small piece of 5/8" lumber between the unistrut and the router base plate, that gave me the 1 3/8" width needed for the L-track


After cutting:

The groove was cut 3/8" deep so that with the 1/2" deep L-track I'd still have 1/8" left for the wall paneling (the shop/garage is just going to get cheap hardboard for now).

The L-track is screwed directly to the hat channel where it intersects it, and will be screwed to the 2x4 everywhere else.




For the floor I just used the L-track itself as the guide, screwing it directly to the floor at the correct spacing on both sides so I could be a little more brave/fast knowing I couldn't accidentally slip out between the rails.

When it was all said and done I had 4 slots cut on the floor and 2 in the walls

The L-track has what looks like clear anodization that's wearing/chipping away, I took a wire wheel and sander to 1 to see how well it'd clean up (the clean one on the left)

However it took me probably an hour to clean it up, so I decided to do the rest later, I could technically clean them up at any point, and right now my deadline to head to Arizona is only 3 weeks away.






Next up, to cut the flooring. I decided to use rubber mat for the garage: cheap, simple, tough. I also have a feeling I'll redo this later, so I'm not gluing it down, it'll just be held down by the flanges of the L-track.




I found the trick to trimming this was to pull the other edge 5" past where the centerline seam would be, and then trim it 5" off the wall, following the wall using a couple of squares.

Then cut all of the strips out for the L-track by using the same measurements I used earlier to cut the grooves, and used the L-track itself as the straight edge to cut against.

Pretty soon it was all cut to size...

But of course it's not done, I decided that I wanted a moisture barrier to protect the OSB from potential fuel/oil spills as well as water brought in by a dirt bike, etc. I picked up the 6 mil poly film made for going between the subfloor and LVP

I was worried it'd be a pain to get it to comply with the grooves for the L-track, but since I had cut the grooves a bit long on each end (not visible once the rubber mat covers it) it gave the film somewhere to bunch up without pressing up against the rubber mat.

It's mostly done, I have to run and buy more 3" teks to finish screwing them down through the floor and cross members to maximum load bearing, and some rubber cement to close up the small bits of visible seam at each end of the centerline L-track.




I kind of skipped over some other small things I had to do before this point as well, such as painting 3/4 of the rear windows (they'll be insulated and covered), adding the 2x4s at the bottom of the rear wall (still not entirely sure how I'll frame this in, but this gave me a reference point for the edge of the flooring), and sealing off the diesel fill cavity to prevent moisture or fuel from getting under the moisture barrier. While each item is small, they definitely add time, and what looks like it would have taken a day took about 3-4 days.






Next up: shop walls (you can tell I'm eager to have the shop done so I can actually use it as a workshop for the rest of the bus). however this weekend I'm taking it easy and playing with some electrical, more on that soon.

 

[nikitis]

Hrm, A moisture barrier there I hadn't considered. I will add that to my plans.

I was just gonna paint the OSB with a waterproof layering, but I like the idea of the moisture barrier.

 

[desrtdog]

Build is looking good. That L-track cleaned up nicely - glad I could find a new home for it…

 

[carleeno]

Build update:


Boy I have a lot of catching up to do, a lot has happened since the last post but I often forget to post updates here as I'm mostly active on the Wander Rigs discord.


Door controls testing:

The parts arrived to start playing with adding my own electrical controls to operate the air door, so obviously I had to play with that :biggrin:



I ordered some custom momentary switches with my own open/close bus door graphic on them, and temporarily wired it up (with some diodes to ensure I don't back-feed 12v to the BCM when powering the solenoids)

Additionally, I wired up a rolling code receiver/relay module so I have a couple of key fobs that control the door...

Later I'll also add a lock/unlock circuit, and another open/close switch on the outside (locked by the aforementioned lock/unlock circuit using a switch on the inside or the keyfob). That'll be achieved using a bistable relay that simply controls power to the outside switch.


Next up for the door is to hook up the electric air compressor, but first I need to finish my electrical to ensure I don't drain the battery with the air compressor, so I'm back to manually operating the door like a caveman




Shop walls and ceiling, mostly:

Before I can get to electrical, I need to put up some walls to mount my electrical to, so finally time to start closing in some of the shop, at least enough to make room for the power center.


For the workshop, since I don't care about appearance, I'm just going with cheap and simple: coated hardboard and plywood.




I did have to check for window leaks (and fix some leaks), patch in some insulation below the windows, and add the lower window jamb before putting in the wall to know where to cut...Actually there's quite a long list of operations with a very specific order to them, I just hope I actually got that order right when I wrote them down

For the shop ceiling, again using the same hardboard. I'll probably use knotted pine T&G for the rest of the bus where I want it to have some visual appeal and not look like a, well, garage...but this is the garage portion of the toy hauler after all

I found some 21mm cabinet/paint grade birch ply on fb marketplace for $40 a sheet, so I immediately snagged 10 sheets of that, along with some 1/2" cutoffs for $20 per 4x8 layer...I should be able to make most of my cabinets and bulkheads with this.


After lots of scribing and cutting and sanding:

Looks kinda weird using 7/8 ply over 2x2s, but this gives me enough strength to mount some pretty heavy electrical components to, as well as a bit of gap for 1.5" foam board, as I want to thermally insulate the garage from the living area and have 2 separate hvac systems to save energy, as I'd rarely need to heat or cool the whole bus at once.




The rest of the wall went up nicely using the L-track to add clamping force to the PL Premium while it cured.

And the rest of the ceiling went up, but not so easily. Turns out, getting the edge of the next panel to slip into the divider trim when formed to the curvature of the ceiling was nearly impossible. Ended up taking a heat gun to the trim piece with a scraper to pry it open (with the heat to make it stay open) before lifting the panel into place and slipping it in. Then once everything was in, I went back with the heat gun to try to get the divider to return to it's original shape (if you look closely, you'll see it's no longer perfectly flat, oh well)


This took several days as I basically had to let each panel cure overnight before having room to work on the next piece, but I was able to get started on the electrical while that was happening (more on that in the next post).

I still have more updates to post, but to prevent filling an entire page in one night, I'll save some for tomorrow

 

[carleeno]

Build update, power and cabinets:

While the previous post probably provided the most visual change, the majority of my time recently has been final planning, purchasing, installing, and testing my electrical system. The big items were already purchased, but of course lots of little things still needed to be included, such as fuses, wire, conduit, cable raceways, etc.




I decided to put my electrical system on display in the garage portion of the bus. It'll make access easier, and given the form-from-function approach to the workshop/garage space, it makes sense to not try to hide everything behind a closed door (except when needed for safety, as is the case with the battery modules).

As I was still installing wall panels I started mounting the electrical components (since I had a lot of time waiting on glue to dry). I pretty quickly wired everything up to double check that the mental schematic I had would work, I'm glad I did this as I quickly realized that I didn't need the changeover switch as a backup to power 12v lights from the starter battery instead of the 48v/12v converter...instead I'd just power lights and other low power devices from the starter battery always, and let the 12/12 charger just keep up with it, this simplified the wiring and made everything a bit more automatic in case of a failure.

I planned to clean up the wiring later, once a few more items arrived.


Next up, EMT conduit for the workshop. I figured why not, I'm putting everything on display, and with a cheap bender, emt is kinda fun. The rest of the bus will have fully hidden wiring, but I want to keep everything as accessible as possible (for inevitable future changes), and there are not going to be many built-in cabinets to hide wiring in the back of behind false panels as is my plan for the living area, so surface mount makes sense.


This is my first time bending EMT, or any kind of tubing really, so I started simple:

And it quickly grew from there....

The conduit that passes through the floor converts to PVC and immediately enters an 8x8 marine rated pvc box, where I'll split out runs for an outdoor outlet, a feed to a subpanel that goes on the other side of the bus (I didn't leave myself room to run conduit across on the inside of the bus), and the minisplits.

The conduit through the plywood feeds immediately into a handy box that will transition to either ent or romex for a couple of circuits for the living area on the right side. This is all below the bed frame and will run behind cabinets, etc.

A couple of days later, my last couple of breakers and raceway showed up, so I could finally clean up the 12v spaghetti monster.

There's still a bit more trim to be added to hide the remaining wires at the top, but so far really happy with how it looks, and not to mention the ease of access.


I also added one more conduit on this side as a last minute change of heart about having shore power hookups. I originally figured that I'd have so much solar, and be boondocking so often, that it was pointless to have a grid hookup; but recently I realized I'd be stupid not to add it while it's easy, as one day I might massively regret not having it. This conduit runs through to a simple LB, which continues a PVC run to the left side of the bus where it'll transition into a power inlet box (the 50 amp twist-lock type)

The holes in the floor are sealed both under and above the floor to ensure no moisture can get in from either end. Being a garage, a puddle of water running to the corner wouldn't be impossible, which is why the moisture barrier runs up behind the wall panels a few inches, and is taped tightly around the conduit.


Another quick addition was a low-voltage disconnect (you can see the override switch below) and a voltage readout for the starter battery, since my new plan was to run low-power stuff always from the starter battery, and use the 12/12 charger to keep it charged up from the main house system; if any of the house system fails (solar/batteries/charger) while I'm away, I'd want to make sure I don't come back to a dead starter battery. So everything I added to the starter battery, including the cameras, is running through this disconnect.

The original switches are a touch bigger than the new LV disconnect override switch, so I cut the middle out of one of the switch blanks to act as an adapter, if you look closely you might spot it.




Cabinets:

While working on the bus recently I've been noticing that I spend an extraordinary amount of time fetching tools and cleaning up. Either I keep my tools in the tool shed organized, but constantly have to climb in and out of the bus to get them and put them back; or I let them pile up inside the bus on temporary folding tables and the floor and take 5-10 minutes just to find a tool each time.
So while I was looking at different metal cabinets as an option to safely house my batteries, I decided to just go ahead and order a whole set to organize my tools within the bus's workshop.

For the 2 fixed cabinets on the outer wall, I made some custom brackets to bolt them to the L-track (this spaces them out a bit to clear the conduit and future power cords I might run down the back as the cabinets have a power access hole in the bottom).

The battery cabinet below the inverter is just lagged to the wall with 8x 1/4 lags, and the rolling cabinet will be strapped to the L-track when driving (it'll likely go on the opposite side to balance out the weight a bit).




Then I spent an afternoon to sort through my tools and group them all by type/usage, and load them all into the cabinets...man it feels good to have everything organized and accessible

I'll save the batteries for the next post, as I'm still working on some final details of the battery install, and it honestly is more complex than the rest of the electrical combined, thanks to needing to modify the cabinet to support 300 lbs of angry li-ion batteries safely, fusing them all adequately (we'll talk about AIC and fuse coordination) and of course getting everything to cooperate with each other (I had to make a custom bridge device to get the inverter to "talk" to 2 separate banks of bms's, since these batteries don't use a standard protocol the inverter supports). So that's all for today!




Btw, is this stuff still interesting or helpful to people here? I'm starting to get the feeling that this old forum might not be the place to document my build, given the previous post-pocalypse where many build threads were (accidentally?) deleted and never to be seen again. Combined with finding much more active conversation and idea sharing on discord, I'm starting to wonder the value of continuing to post here. The 1 thing I can think of is that, if these posts aren't also lost in a few years time, at least this is searchable online, unlike discord's closed search. Let me know what you think.

 

[nikitis]

Hey been awhile. I'm catching up on old but unread threads. I had a lot to keep up on and I assume that's why people have slowed down responses. It will pick up again. We're just adjusting to the new interface of the site. Great progress on the electrical. I've pretty much stalled on my build due to a city compliance issue. They didn't want me parking my bus on my driveway so I had to move it to the side yard. and I had to rip out my sideyard and build a gravel driveway to be able to do that. I'm back now, and look forward to progress.

That tool chest full of tools btw probably weighs way too much for that bus.