1920 watt | 1035 ah | Bushtracker off grid setup, Air conditioning, microwave and more

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:28]Hey guys, Manny Extreme Auto caring and camping. We are in Streaky Bay, which is about 8 hours from Adelaide on a very large off-grid setup. This is huge.

[00:00:38]Check this out. All right, what's going on here? Well, there's a lot, but it looks all simple, and believe me, it's not when it comes to what we have to install. There are three solar controllers here. These are the 50 amp Victron charge controllers, the smart charge controllers.

[00:00:54]Now, the reason for the three charge controllers is there are three arrays on this roof almost maxed out. We have a 660 W array on one solar controller. We have another 660 W array on the other.

[00:01:08]And we have a 600 W array on the other controller. So, you add that up, that's over 1,900 W. 1920 W of solar on this Bush Tracker. Nuts. What does that mean?

[00:01:20]Well, it means we are almost in the winter, the bottom end of winter, and we were getting over 900 watts this time of the year. That's really, really good for this time of the year.

[00:01:30]>> Wow.

[00:01:31]>> When these guys go camping, they're able to replenish this battery bank at absolute warp speed. And the battery bank is 1,035 amp. That's nuts. It's a lot of energy storage on this thing. So, 1920 watts of solar, over 1,000 amp hours of lithium with all the Victron free to get these guys off grid. We have vehicle charging.

[00:01:54]We've done the 50 amp Orion DCDC charger. Old mate's already got another um 50 amp DC charger in his tow rig. So, we didn't want to load that system up too much. So, we've got the 50 amp Orion taking care of that. Funny enough though, with the combination of that while you're driving and the solar that's going to come in, he'll be able to run the aircom while driving and charge these batteries at warp speed.

[00:02:16]Nuts. You can do that with these systems. So cool. Victron Multiplus 12 3000 128 inverter charger. So it's a 3000 VA inverter. It's about 2 and a half thousand watts of continuous power.

[00:02:29]Contrary to what you'll read online, people say they are a 3000 watt inverter. that wrong. They're actually about 2 and a half th000 W at um you know nominal temperatures and they derate as it gets hotter and hotter. Um if we zoom in down here we've got the servo GX, we've got the touch 70 all of our breakers. So here's our PV isolators here. These no breakers there and our busman LMI busman fuses up here for light loads. Now these were extra loads like the original 12vt circuit that's in the tracker. Old mate's got an Anderson plug. uh we've done a spare for him cuz he wants to add stuff later on. Plus, we've left room here to extend it out.

[00:03:08]Uh we've also left room for another battery. Should he decide to upgrade, he can. So, there's the batteries all down here. 95 mil cable using the heavyduty extra big bus bars on them. This one, because we had the space, we've chosen to do the links distributor as well as the Lynx V can shunt. So, this is it's basically the shunt like a smart shunt except this here, it's got a fuse, it's got a whole bunch of stuff on the one.

[00:03:32]It doesn't run on the V direct system.

[00:03:34]It runs on canvas. So, still got coms to the servo GX as well as if a fuse blows on one of these. These are really good.

[00:03:40]So, if a fuse does pop, you'll get an indication to, you know, which fuse is gone. Everything's labeled, nice and simple, ready to go. Yeah, there's not really, you know, that's the thing.

[00:03:52]There's not really too much to go through down here because it is quite basic. This is all set and forget.

[00:03:57]Realistically, the only thing you can do down here is turn the solar breakers off or, you know, put them up if they trip or whatever reason. And your battery isolation, that's that's all you really need to do down here. This is this is just done. It's it's done properly. So, yeah, I'll take you up to the touchcreen. I'll show you what's going there on the Serbo GX. Pretty standard format. This is running the the latest firmware. So, as you can see, the um the format's kind of different to some that you've seen in the past, all the different colors and whatnot, but in its simplest form, it's going to show you battery.

[00:04:30]It's going to show you when you're plugged into the shore, when you're plugged into the grid, like a caravan park or a station say, basically when you plug your power lead in. This is your solar, what you're getting in the solar. So, all of your solar controllers going to be shown here. We've got three arrays going at the moment. We're coming into shade from the shed at the moment.

[00:04:48]So there's all three solar controllers and if you want more info on that solar controller, you just go into it and you've got it right at your fingertips.

[00:04:57]So if we go into history today, so the front array, the best the front array did is 395 watts. That's shown there. It will show you the time it's been in bulk, absorption, and float. And basically, you know, it's going to show you if you've filled up the batteries in that day. You'll get to see it. Plus, you've got like a month's worth of history here. You can break up a chart. It's pretty detailed. You can get right in there and press that one.

[00:05:21]Oh, there's no chart because there's no history. All right, back to solar alternator. So, you you're when you plug in the vehicle, that's what's happening here. Now, if you click that, you're going to see your input and output voltages. You can see the amount of current coming from the vehicle when it's running. So, that's just plugged in now, getting a little trickle charge. If we get into AC loads, this is what the air con is running at now. So, this one here, this is the Dometic Fresh Jet 7.

[00:05:50]So, the FJZ that we've just fitted on this, these things are super efficient.

[00:05:54]It's got an app where you can control the input current on it. So, if you've got one of these and it's got that little barcode on it, make sure you download the app, get onto it, and you can control the amount of current that this pulls as at a maximum from the grid.

[00:06:12]When you're free camping and you want this to thing to run really efficient, you can set that current limit. I think it was four four amps on the input. So, this thing can really run at a at a low output and still keep the caravan cold.

[00:06:26]Really cool to be able to do that. As you can see, it's running at 325 W and that's pumping out cold air. Like really cold air. So, good. So any that means even on a crappy day and you're only pumping in, you know, 5 600 watts, you're going to be charging the battery while running the air con at the same time. Really cool to be able to do that.

[00:06:47]Now any information you want on the screen, you just got to touch the little square. So if we go into the inverter, we can see what's happening at the inverter. Speaking of the inverter, because it's a automatic switching inverter, if you go into mode, you're going to have a bunch of modes here. On charger only, inverter only, and off.

[00:07:06]I'll explain these modes in simple form.

[00:07:08]On is automatic. That means it's ready to sense the grid. So, we're off grid at the moment. If I was to plug in my power lead, my 15 amp lead into the side, after about a minute, it will sense that and flick over to the grid. You got to be careful in that mode cuz it'll flick over to batteries. If someone pulls the cord out or the power goes out of the caravan park, you know, it's not for everyone. You just understand what that mode means. So that's what on is charger only means your caravan is what it was in factory. It means you have to put power on for you to get power. When I speak of power, I'm talking mains power here. So you would have to plug your 15 amp lead in and then your aircom will come on, your microwave will come on. Uh the battery will charge from the mains charger. That's charger only. Inverter only is exactly that. If you're free camping and you're you want to put the air con on, you don't care about the auto sensing, which most people don't when you got a system of this size, you just put it to inverter only. Inverter only will allow microwave, air conditioner, everything to run exactly the same motors on, except it's not auto. If you put it to inverter only and plug the grid in, like a caravan park, you'll be like, "Why aren't we charging?

[00:08:17]What's going on?" Oh, you got to put it on. It must be in that on mode uh for it to sense the grid. So inverter only just ignores the grid. So if you had it on inverter only, you plug the generator in, it will not see the generator. It will not do anything. It's just inverter only. Off is off. Off is for service. If you're going to drop this van in to get the bearings done or or any insurance work or any work on the van, you just put it to off. That way if they plug power in or, you know, they put a device on and leave it on, it's not going to drain your battery cuz off is off. Off is what I call service mode. So that's what that means. And then you obviously click set once you've selected it. Now the only other setting on here really to play with is the shore current limit.

[00:09:01]Now this one here might be a bit tricky for people to understand, but let me try to smooth it over as easy as I can. You set that number to where you plug into.

[00:09:11]So if you go to a caravan park, that's your standard 15 amp supply. Set it for 15. If you go to a station state and you use one of your little amphibian converters, you know, little 10 amp converter, set it for 10. If you've got a Honda generator that's, I don't know, like a 2.0, uh, they're about 8 bit amps set of 8 amps. What it means is it's a current limit. It's a choking device. It will not pull more from the grid than what you set it at. If you set it at eight, it will not go above eight. If you do run a device that pulls more than 8 amps like a kettle, it will use the battery power to supplement it. So eight will come from the grid and whatever will come from the batteries. The rest of it, it's this is like a generator on top of a generator. It's very smart system to be able to do that. So set it for 10 amps, it's going to pull 2 and a half,000 watts from the grid. Set it for 15, there's your 3 and a half thousand watts. So it just maximizes what you can do. It also stops people's circuit breakers going off. So if you go to a caravan park and you know they've got a pole like your power pole that you plug into and it the circuit breaker keeps tripping and even if you got it set to 15, we just dial that back to 10 or 12.

[00:10:25]It just means you're not pulling as much energy from their power pole. Very cool to be able to do that. Same thing with station stays. You I mentioned in one of my old videos we're in Yardi Creek and when you check in at Yardi Creek Homestead they give you a a form to fill out and it says do not pull more than 6 amps because they run a big generator at that station and you know I'm out outside with the induction cooker with my air fryer cooking like all this fish I caught and I'll mate come around the quad and he told me off and I said it's okay mate I've got a a Victron smart system. He straight over his head. I said, "It's okay. I've set it for 6 amps. I'm only pulling six from the grid." He still didn't understand it.

[00:11:07]So, I just had to shut down what I was doing. Anyway, the point is I was only able to set that at 6 amps because I've got a system like this. So, I could still run the whole show. I had the air con going, air fryer, running everything, and I was only using 6 amps from the grid. Really cool. This generator loved it. That's that one pretty much. The only other things to tell you about this is if you add sensors and stuff to it, like if you add Mopa water tank sensors, if you add Groovy tags like temperature sensors and stuff, you can go to town and put them all over this thing. If you want one in the fridge, freezer, draw fridge, wherever. It'll show you the sensing.

[00:11:45]Now, we as a standard will always put one in the system area, which is reading 21° at the moment, which is pretty much what it is in here. So, that's the area down there. All right, let's do some stuff. I might whack on the microwave.

[00:12:00]We got the air con running. We'll keep it going and we'll put something in the microwave. We'll get a toaster here, too.

[00:12:08]In there. We'll go. So, air con's on.

[00:12:11]We'll go put that on.

[00:12:16]Toaster on. So, we got toaster going, microwave going, air con going. Let's look at the screen.

[00:12:24]So, our AC loads here are 2170 W and the actual energy coming out of the batteries is 148 150 amps.

[00:12:35]There we go. We got three pretty heavy devices running at the same time.

[00:12:42]Oh, this hasn't been used in a while.

[00:12:43]Bit dusty.

[00:12:46]Let that run.

[00:12:53]That's microwave off.

[00:12:58]And that's toaster off.

[00:13:00]There we go. Few devices at the same time.

[00:13:04]This screen has another different another screen. You've got a brief. It's just another way of looking at it.

[00:13:08]You've also got a little setting up there if you want to see it that way as well.

[00:13:17]All the factory stuff remains in the Bush Tracker. So, if you guys or for those of you that have the Bush Trackers, if you're familiar with them, they're built very well. These are all the factory DC breakers. This this caravan came with this. We basically just fire this up from our system. So, the old system used to be down here under the cafe lounge area. So, all all through here, we had 3120 amp full rivers, which are like 36 kilos each.

[00:13:43]And we had the old Xantrex inverter over here with a beast of a battery charger.

[00:13:48]Great system for back in the day. Very heavy. Very heavy. There's over 100 kilos of batteries there. And you know the new ones are only like just over 20 kilos each. And that's over 1,000 amp hours of energy there. So massive difference. All of this now becomes storage. We have completely cleared it out for the guys. I reckon about four four cartons maybe five cartons of beer in storage size which is perfect for round the wheel arch. Compressor fridge factory on this one. that's going to run endlessly on a system like this. So, when these guys are running this air con, that's the only real time you want to look at your battery monitoring just so you know where you are. But at 12 volt, forget it. There's that much energy storage in this thing. There's that much solar replenishment capabilities in it that even if you to work out what your pumps and your lights and your fridge drawers, even another reser fridge, it wouldn't matter the number it would get to, this thing can replenish it like in like an hour or something. It's It's nuts. It's a huge system.

[00:14:49]Well, I'm going to take you on the roof and show you the solar. I'll point out what's what and that'll be a wrap for me. Little hard to see because I'm standing on the roof of a vehicle.

[00:15:00]There's a panel at the back there. So, we have three 200 xatronics up the front. Two 220s, two more there, and there's one tuck behind the air con if you can see it there. And then three more 220s.

[00:15:15]That's a beautiful looking setup. It's a 1920 watts. Check out my shadow.

[00:15:22]So, it's only like just past like, you know, almost 2:00 or something and it's um this is the thing with winter or approaching the solstice. It's the sun is very low in the sky. So, your solar yields, even if you've got you're nearly 2,000 watts, we're only getting like 9 960 was the peak we saw out of this whole system today. But, hey, 960 watts is pretty good for almost at the bottom of winter. Love to see what this thing's going to do when that sun gets higher in the sky or these guys head north. There we have it, guys. This is a beast of a setup. Absolutely nuts. We're really, really happy with how this has come up.

[00:15:59]It's It's so good when you work on a bush treker cuz there is so much room.

[00:16:03]You know, we have done the big offgrid setups where we've done them in the cafe lounge area and they work a treat. We just have to absolutely vent the nana out of them. Uh with this one being in the open though, it is completely open.

[00:16:15]This whole section is just all airflow.

[00:16:18]So cool.

[00:16:20]Very happy. Thanks for watching, guys.

[00:16:22]I'm going to get asked. So, the venting.

[00:16:25]Sorry guys, I totally forgot. It's really hard to see cuz it's right at the back. Right at the back corner. There's You just see the tip of them. So, there's three vents there for these battery enclosures. I'll take you outside and show you. they they drop straight down through the floor and all sealed of course to um to comply with the lithium standards. So if those questions come in, this is completely not part of the habitable area because these enclosures are vented.

[00:16:53]All of the big companies are doing that now. Great to see. I'll take you outside if you can see. There we go.

[00:17:02]Easy.

[00:17:07]Beautiful rig.