Never Need Shore Power again. EGON 48V is now available @4xoverland

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]A very warm welcome to you. I'm going to begin this video by saying that if you are building a topend 12vt system in your 4x4 or for your caravan uh and you're thinking about upgrading your original equipment alternator, you need to stop what you're doing because what I'm going to show you now is going to change everything. So, of course, now it's the launch of the 22 months in development, the Egon 48 volt system. What I'm going to do now is explain to you how it works. Big picture, how it works, and then some of the details within that big picture. And then in a video linked at the end, a cost comparison comparing two very well-known common uh 12volt installations, one by Red, one by Victron, commonly done in Australia with the 48vt system. And the cost comparison, I have to warn you, by the time you get to the cost comparison, you need to sit down because this is going to blow your socks off like it did ours.

[00:01:11]This is going to be a good one.

[00:01:14]>> So, this is just in,000 RPM. The battery will be full in no time.

[00:01:19]>> This is the first proper drawing of our DC hub 48 volt. Back in April, Hiner and I drove the Hias four-wheel drive all the way from Perth to Melbourne, testing our 48V system. It's now mid June, and Hina has gone to collect it to drive it from Melbourne to Brisbane. With the prototype successfully crossing Australia, it was now time to fit a second prototype and drive it all the way back to Perth. And now with a series of early adopters seeing what this can do.

[00:01:57]>> What are we getting there now? 4,000 >> 4,000 watts.

[00:02:01]>> And imagine being able to charge that from zero to 100% in 1 hour's driving >> and our testing regime complete. We're ready to share this with the world.

[00:02:13]Let's start with whose lives are going to change with 48 volts. Now, if you're an average four-wheel driver, you've got a couple of you maybe fridge in the back and you a little travel buddy and uh some lights and you charge some camera batteries, 48 volts is complete overkill. You don't need it. All right.

[00:02:31]But for those of you who are stretching uh the ability of your system to charge the batteries because perhaps you're pulling a caravan or you have very high demand uh on your electrical system, for example, your induction cooking, then 48 volt is for you. So what I'm going to do now is go through the basic architecture. With a regular vehicle, you have an alternator that is charging your start battery which is then feeding the vehicle obviously 12 volts. And then that start battery is feeding a DC/DC charger which is regulating the voltage and making sure your house battery gets topped up with a nice healthy charge.

[00:03:14]And of course that charge happens while you're driving. If you have some solar panels on the roof, that supplements it, adds to it. So you now have alternator energy going into your house battery.

[00:03:25]And if you're using separate MPPPT controllers, you also have solar going into your house battery simultaneously.

[00:03:36]Now the 48vt system does it a little differently, and this is one of the reasons why it's so efficient.

[00:03:43]The 48vt alternator is necessary for this purely because when taking voltage increasing voltage from 12 to 48 or whatever the losses are very very high.

[00:03:57]But if you start with a higher voltage and then drop down the losses are very very low. It's very efficient. So the system works like this. You have a 48vt alternator. It charges the house battery directly.

[00:04:13]The house battery has a converter from 48 to 12 that now charges the start battery which runs the car. It has a second 48 to 12 DCDC converter that is not necessary but most of you will have 12vt systems as well. That second converter runs the 12vt side of your system. So what does this actually mean?

[00:04:45]It means that losses because you're now transmitting 48 volts instead of 12 volts. You there are fewer losses. You can use much much thinner cable. You can much use much longer reaches stretches of cable because of the lower losses.

[00:05:04]So it's more efficient generally but because you've got such a high voltage it means that the currents come down.

[00:05:14]Now, typically and the and in the cost comparison linked, you will see two systems where the absolute maximum I don't care how big your alternator is, if it's 12 volts, you're not at the end of the day going to get more than 100 amps into your house battery. It's just physically impossible because of the losses of 12 volts. 48 volts is four times 12 which means the amperage the current can drop by four times to make it equal. So if you raise the amperage up with 48 volts, you can feasibly, not this is not theory, this is what we've proven, you can get 400 amps into your house battery. Actually, even more, but let's work with that. Four times the charge rates. Now, one of your questions might be, okay, um, if it's if it's so complicated, uh, what happens if it stops working? Well, the great part about this is what happens if it stops working?

[00:06:29]Nothing. Okay, in your 12volt system, I'll give you a If your 12volt alternator stops working, what do you do?

[00:06:37]Okay, please answer that question. It is a rhetorical question. What do you do if your 12vt alternator? You've got to make a plan because your car will soon run out of it because your car will continue to run until your house your start battery is depleted and then the car will stop. Then you have to have a means to charge that start battery. Typically our highest van is using about 200 watts just to run the engine and basic systems to drive. So the battery will be depleted fairly soon with this system. If you think about it, if the house battery is charging the start battery, then if the alternator should fail, then you have got the entire reservoir of the house battery that will charge the start battery that will run the car. We estimated with the high ACE we could drive with a 100 amp hour 48vt house battery we could drive in the region of 24 hours without having to concern ourselves. So in that situation with a 12vt system you could run for a few hours. With this system you could typically run for 24 hours. Could you find help in 24 hours of driving? The second part of this is if you have a solar system supplementing the charge to your house battery. Think about it.

[00:08:14]You've now got if the alternator should stop working.

[00:08:20]You have got a house battery that is being fed by solar that is charging the start battery that is running the car.

[00:08:31]feasibly with two with more than 200 watt solar output sunny day. And if the alternator stopped working, you could drive as long as the No, you could drive.

[00:08:50]You could drive until it got dark and then you would use the energy stored in the house battery and then when it got light again you would use the the energy from the sun to drive your car. And the reality of that is with a system that's working perfectly a good portion of the time because charging the batteries is so fast. You could be driving with, and this comes to the third video we're going to produce in this little series.

[00:09:20]It uses less fuel to charge at 48 volts than it char does to charge at 12 volts with similar size batteries, okay? Because of reduced losses.

[00:09:35]So, in a situation like this, you've got a sun shining, your batteries are charged, fully charged cuz it does that really, really fast. And uh so is your start battery. Your alternator is idling. You'll be driving along and your alternator is doing no work at all because the sun is running the car.

[00:09:58]Think about how much fuel saving you're going to get from that. All right. So now let's talk a little bit about the idea of towing. So now the idea this is where the system is amazing.

[00:10:15]Your tow vehicle becomes the powerhouse.

[00:10:18]You put a fairsiz battery in it and you charge it with 48 volts using the 48vt architecture that I've explained. And then you run a cable from that vehicle 48 volts into your caravan.

[00:10:35]And because it's 48 volts, as I've said before, fewer losses. So the amount of energy actually reaching the caravan is a lot higher than it would be with 12.

[00:10:46]So you've got a nice healthy current going into your details later. Not important right now.

[00:10:53]Going into your caravan. Your caravan is 12 volts.

[00:10:56]You can upgrade your caravan to 48 as well, but there's not a massive advantage in doing that. A volantage, yes, not a massive advantage.

[00:11:06]Not if you're doing the tow vehicle. Do the tow vehicle if you have a choice.

[00:11:12]Convert the tow vehicle, not the caravan.

[00:11:16]Doing the caravan first, waste of time.

[00:11:20]Such a such a small advantage. It's honestly not worth it.

[00:11:26]But upgrading the tow vehicle becomes worth it when a when you're driving, you get much more current into your caravan.

[00:11:36]You could easily get 100 amps into the caravan battery easily. Okay. Without breaking a sweat. All right, but here's the magic.

[00:11:49]When you disconnect the caravan from the tow vehicle and perhaps you go up the beach for a fishing trip and it's a 20-minute drive up the beach and it's a 20-minute drive back.

[00:12:04]In effect, you're charging your caravan batteries even though you're not connected to it. And it works because charge rates are so high that you could ch fully charge a 100 amp hour 48vt battery. That's equivalent of 400 amp power in 12 volts.

[00:12:26]In 1 hour from 1 to 99% in 1 hour. Think about what that could do for you. So now you've gone for your little fishing trip. You've replenished your battery.

[00:12:38]By the time you get back, get back, even if it's a short little trip, your battery in your tow vehicle is at 100%.

[00:12:48]And you back to your caravan and have some breakfast and make some coffee and plug in the tow vehicle, what happens? You get that wonderful 100 plus amp charge straight into the caravan. So every time you use the vehicle, you're gaining lots and lots of energy really really fast to come and plug into the caravan. Now when we say in our publicity off this is proper off-grid. This is properly offrid because shore power the need for shore power is a thing of the past.

[00:13:26]Think about what I've just told you.

[00:13:28]charging rates so fast even solar starts becoming optional. I mean, it's nice to have of course, but you don't need it anymore. This system idling produces twice the energy that a topend 12vt system will produce going flat out on a cool day.

[00:13:56]On a warm day, the 48vt system produces more energy than plugging in to 220 240 volt 15 amp AC plug at the caravan park.

[00:14:11]Quite a lot more actually than that while driving.

[00:14:16]And this is why it is such a gamecher.

[00:14:20]Imagine never needing shore power ever again. never needing to think, "Yeah, we better get uh we need to charge up. We better get to a never having that conversation ever again." Because while you're driving, thinking about the idea that we should probably get to a shore power so we can charge up and get a hard charge into our system.

[00:14:44]By the time you finish thinking about it, your battery is fully charged and so is your caravan.

[00:14:53]Okay, I think I need to talk a little bit about alternators.

[00:14:59]Now, the alternators available that we've made available, we've gone looking for 48vt alternators. The ones that Egon are selling, they are made in Australia.

[00:15:10]We are doing our very, very best to support Australian family businesses.

[00:15:16]It's important to us.

[00:15:18]and they are available for several vehicles. If you are looking for might is see if one is compatible with your vehicle. Best thing to do now is go on to egon.com.au and see if your vehicle is there. But I need to say this. If it's not there, don't panic. There is a and there are some links on the website. a company in Australia making mounts for air conditioning compressors, adding second air conditioning compressors for vehicles that want to run heavyduty compressors and therefore refrigeration systems. And these brackets allow one to add a second alternator because there are two options. You can either replace the original equipment alternator with 48 volts or add a 48vt alternator. It's a little more complicated, but not much.

[00:16:14]And it's certainly doable because the generic alternator will run off the back back bracketry built for air conditioning compressors. Same mount.

[00:16:27]Very very simple and really quite clever. We are developing and we are working hard at this. We want our next uh goal at Inos Grandadia and Ford.

[00:16:40]Those are our two next ones. But at the moment you'll see Isuzu, you'll see um Mercedes Sprinter. I think certainly a lot of Toyota engines. Go and have a look and see if your vehicle is included in that list. On the website, you'll also see the DCDC converters. These are specially made for us. They're heavyduty units. They're solid straight. They're as reliable as can be. And they have a trigger cable. So, some of you might be uh tempted to go and look for other ones. They have a trigger cable that turns them on and off. Makes the system more efficient overall. And they come with that trigger cable. And so, they can be ordered directly off the website as well. And because there are two of them, that's an additional redundancy because, as I said, one of them is needed to feed power from the house battery all the way to the start battery which runs the vehicle. What happens if that fails? Well, you would have a second one to run your 12vt system. The un the reliability, they're fantastic, really reliable things, okay? They're they're solid state and um really we've done a great deal of testing and they're very very high quality. All right, but if you had one fail, you have a redundant one in the vehicle that you could simply disconnect and swap over in the meantime. The third way of sorting this problem out would be well, if you're worried, continue carrying your 12volt alternator with you and just take the 48 volt out uh volt alternator out and put the 12vt in and just reconnect the vehicles. We don't cut we don't cut cables in the car. It's very very straightforward. We don't need to cut cables in the car. So your original equipment stays intact. That was very important to us.

[00:18:33]The system we have chosen to monitor all this is the very wellrespected Soobo GX uh with this small screen and you use this for monitoring your system like you would in any other way. Now canvas is used in this part of the equation but our system only uses canvas for for setup and monitoring. It does not rely on canvas to operate. So if there was a major canvas failure, charging of the batteries would continue. It just wouldn't be optimized.

[00:19:12]It would still continue. It would not could not stop your trip.

[00:19:19]Last component, very important, the system is built around controlling the alternator. We use a product called a wake alternator controller.

[00:19:32]It basically allows one to set up parameters and we in the instruction installation manuals provide all of those parameters to you to how to set up the alternator to how to set up the smart battery battery with smart uh battery management systems. all of those parameters. The parameter guidelines are basically this.

[00:19:57]When it gets too hot alternator wise, it'll ease back. So when it's a very very hot day in the Pilbur, it's 44 outside and you're towing a caravan and then those under bonnet temperatures are skyrocketing and your 12vt system at l if you're lucky is giving your battery 30 amps.

[00:20:18]Okay, our system will ease back to protect the alternator. It will also get the battery to ease back saying, "I don't need quite so much because I'm getting hot." Ease back on that. You'll still get two or 300 amps on the hottest day imaginable into your house battery because of this wonderful thing called 48 volts where those losses due to temperature are so much less than with 12 volts. Before we get on to batteries, I need to say that all of the components that I have mentioned so far wire directly to the 48V hub.

[00:21:01]All of them. The instruction booklet and instructions online show you how to do it. It's as simple as plug and play.

[00:21:13]Okay. Everything including the batteries, including the inverter. We'll get to that in a minute. Batteries. Now, the battery that we have selected for sale on the website now is made in China. It is a Western Australian company. There were also companies in Queensland making batteries in Australia that are fully compatible with the system. Here's the thing. Those batteries that are indicated as Egon certified means that they have been preconfigured.

[00:21:47]That doesn't mean that you can't use another battery. All you do if you do get another battery is use the configuration tables supplied with the instruction manuals and off you go. It works perfectly. Particularly important for those of you in other parts of the world. We don't ourselves don't export batteries. You can find 48vt batteries where you are at. Use the tables and configure them. Remember that the battery we've been using is a 105 amp battery at 48 volts which is equivalent of 420 amp in 12 volts.

[00:22:30]Remember multiply everything by 4 for the equ equivalent energy storage.

[00:22:37]48vt batteries are not uh any smaller or lighter uh than 12vt batteries with similar energy storage. So uh this this equivalent of 400 amp and 12vt 105 amp in 48 it's about the same weight. It's about the same size. All right.

[00:23:00]But because it's 48 volt, you're cabling to everything. It's far far lighter. So you save a lot of effort and work and money in the reduced cable sizes. Now let's talk about taking full advantage of 48 volts. You're probably going to want to do induction cooking, my guess is, or certainly run an air conditioning. So at the moment 12 volts you're kind of limited to about a 3 kW inverter and to run that you're running very heavy multiple very heavy cables to that inverter. Now because going from 240 to 12 is a lot more work than going from 240 to 48.

[00:23:50]Inverters are smaller, lighter, and cheaper. And it means that because you've got a larger inverter, you can use that energy. Now, for example, if do you have a caravan where you would love to be able to uh to run the air con all day?

[00:24:06]Well, what do you do? You run an extension lead. You put the inverter, a big 6.5 kW inverter. Again, as I said, wired directly through the hub. 6 and a half kow.

[00:24:20]And you run an extension lead. Just plug it into your car and plug it into your caravan. That's in effect what you're doing. Shore power from your tow vehicle. Let's just wrap this up with who can't use 48 volt in their vehicle.

[00:24:34]It really comes down to finding uh a 48 volt alternator. For example, we had a request could we could we fit one to a FTE? That's the multi- valve Toyota engine. And our initial response was, well, no, because it doesn't have a serpentine belt. Serpentine belts used in all modern vehicles uh allow an alternator of a much high power to be run.

[00:25:02]And the client came back and said, "But I found a 48vt alternator. Will it work?" And the answer is, well, yes. The only thing is that you might not be able to get the maximum power out of it.

[00:25:16]You'll still get much more than you would ever get out of a 12vt alternator, but you might not be able to dial it up all the way to get your 5 plus kilowatt charge energy out of it. You might have to ease it back because the alternator is not is going to cause the drive belt power the fan belt to slip because it's asking too much of that part of the engine.

[00:25:47]It's still worth trying out because it's still going to be a massive improvement.

[00:25:51]It just might not be quite up to the specifications. At the end of that, if you can find a 48vt alternator and if you can find a 48vt battery, because of course shipping of batteries is incredibly expensive.

[00:26:06]So find one locally and an alternator and we can supply all of the other components of and if you go on to the website now egon.com.au you you'll be you'll see a a list of products and what for the system to work you are going to need the uh the DC hub that's 48VT DC hub you're going to need the wake controller you're going to need a serbo GX and you're going to need the 12 the 48 to 12vt converters and an alternator and a battery but if you want to source the alternator and the battery yourself go ahead and do it'll still work. All right, the next video and it might not be public yet. And if it's not public, click the link above. So the link will be where it'll be it'll be o over there.

[00:26:58]Reverse camera. It'll be up there.

[00:27:00]There's the link there. All of the things similar comparing apples with apples. Trying to give you the best possible idea of is it worth the investment. Right now, of course, the biggest question of all, price.

[00:27:18]Take it away.

[00:27:20]So today I can talk about numbers.