PUSHING My Vans Electrical TO THE MAX. Let's See What It Takes To DRAIN THIS SYSTEM.

In today's video, I'm going to plug a bunch of things into my van so I can see what it's capable of pulling. Just to build some confidence in my van's own electrical system with myself, I want to plug tons of stuff into it that my van would never have plugged into it just to see what it can handle. Anyway guys, we're heading off to the shop right now, but I stayed at a campground last night for 13 bucks. Pretty good deal. That's a full moon or just just about a full moon up there anyway. It's so bright. It lights up all the road out here. Yeah, can I get a large coffee, one cream, one sugar? That's it. All right. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. We should probably put this coffee in the cup holder. All right, guys, we got to go to the shop here this morning. We have some more packages coming in today, and I think this is the last of the packages for a while. We got a delivery coming in today, and while we're here, I thought we would do a pretty fun experiment. I don't know if I want to call this an experiment. It's more of just a fun thing for me. So during the summer this year, we did a monster upgrade to the battery banks inside of my van and also a ton of my electrical stuff as well. I changed over from two 100 amp hour lithium batteries to now running four 100 amp hours, doubling up my battery capacity in here, and prior to doubling it all up, I used to have days when I wasn't moving around very much and it was like poor solar quality, and I would practically drain those things quite often because I do a lot of video editing and charging cameras and drones and laptops and stuff that if you're not moving around generating your own power, you can drain 200 amp hours pretty quick. So now that we have 400 in here, I have an insane amount of battery power, and I've never seen my system in here go below 65%. I don't think I have anyway. It's 65%. That's like just about draining my other two batteries completely dead, leaving me over 50% capacity still to play with. So today, right now I got my laptop charging, my drone batteries charging, every single light in my whoops, except for those ones, every single light in my van is now on, my heater is running, and I want to see how much we're going to yank out of here. So what are we pulling? Let's pull up that trusty Victron app. So right now with all the usuals on, we're pulling 99 watts. Oh, let's turn on my speakers right there. Turn those on, and let's turn on my Starlink. That will pull power even though the dish is not up there on the roof. So what are we pulling now? 101. So think about that. 114 watts. My laptop's not plugged in though, but I am charging drone batteries. So 122 watts, this would take me like one full day to drain that. Let's go to my shop. Yeah, let's do that. Let's go to my shop and start running things off of my van and see how long it takes for us to drain this fully today. What kind of power we can yank out of my van, what we can run until this thing is dead. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm waiting for a package and I thought this might be a mighty fun little experiment. So let's go start grabbing things. This could also be a fun experiment too, so I know how much these items are running when I plug them into the shop, because I don't know how much these fans run or how much some of my tools and stuff run. So this just could be a good power experiment for the shop itself. So starting draw right now is 121 watts. Let's turn that fan on low. 218. Let's see what it pulls on high. So what, like 120 watts or whatever that works out to? 230. That's 100 watts. That fan only pulls 100 watts. Are you insane? 233. And if we shut this off, yeah man, like a little over 100 watts on high. 313 watts. Now we're running two fans off of my van. All the lights inside of here charging my drone battery, my Starlink is on, and my speakers. My inverter only pulls up to 700 watts and then it stops. What else can we run? What else can we charge? Hello? Anything else in here we can run? I could plug that in outside, but that pulls more wattage than my van can handle. Let's try these lights. So in the shop these are the same as those. There's two of them there. Let's take one of these out and see what this this runs. So currently at 299 watts. Let's plug that in. What are we at? Let's go bright. 299. So 100. These lights pull 100 watts. Now we could run all this stuff for 10 hours. That's a long time. If you think about all the things that I'm running, fans and lights, 10 hours. This stuff's pretty cool to know. When I'm in the shop here, how much we're actually pulling, which is great, that I know when these lights are running. A lot of times we run one or two of them if we're busy working on something like that. Now I know that these pull 200 watts off the grid. What about a little hand sander? 289 watts. 506. I could still run this for 10 hours, 9 hours. Hey sorry Cruz if I woke you up. He's like, bro really you bringing the tools into our home? Look at his face. This is our home dad. Put the tools back in the shop. This is a fun one. Here's my DJ gear. Let's plug all that stuff into here. Maybe this will blow the system. That's it? You're really not moving anywhere? That's insane. 350 watts. It's plugged into that power bar which runs my DJ gear, my LED lights, my two speakers that are right there. Let's check the back to make sure the speakers are on. The speakers are on. That's like 60 watts to run all my DJ gear including the LED lights. That's impressive. Mind you there's no music on. I bet you when these things kick in a little bit the amps and the speakers will probably have a bit more of a draw. But if this is anything like the sound system that's in my van they barely pull anything. So in my van I have the smaller versions of these and in my van these only pull 50 watts for both of them. So I'd be curious to know what these things run. I don't want to unplug all that stuff to plug it into my van because that's running into my computer and I'm worried about my computer jumping offline because I don't remember the password for the internet around the shop. But that's insane. So my DJ gear inside the shop's running. Two Dewalt fans running outside and all of this stuff. So we're back here at 293 watts. Let's plug this one in. Now let's go to the other side. This one I'm a little worried about. So I'm running my heaters in the shop right now off of a 12 volt battery because it's just more power conscious. We're at 367 and let's turn this on. Now we're charging. Oh that's going to knock my inverter out and it probably did. My inverter only lasts 700 watts. No the fans are on. Yeah everything's on in here. Oh I wonder if those batteries are full. That's probably why. Yeah it says flow on the front so I'm guessing that they're just charged. So oh maybe not. Maybe it's oh it's in float. That would make sense. So we're at 390. Let's unplug it from here. Yeah so it was pulling a little. That's probably what the flow is. It probably means it's in float. Take these off. I set this up the other day because running a 12 volt heater off of a 12 volt battery is way more power conscious than converting wall power to 12 volt and then into here to run that. You know what I mean? So I've always wanted to have a place or a bench or a workstation in the shop where I have a 12 volt system set up and ready to go so we can test things. So I'm going to set up my old can bat batteries over here as a 12 volt testing station and also use these to run the shop heaters. We'll charge them every week or so off the grid and then just run it the rest of the time off of these batteries. What I mean about having a little test station is building a stand there with those two batteries mounted in it. Have a couple terminals on the top so if I ever need to test a light I go over there take the protective covers off the terminals plug it attach something on to the terminals and then I can test things. So right now what I want to test what made me think about this is I have the police or ambulance siren for this thing. I bought one. I bought the speaker. I bought the control unit and I don't want to play with it but I don't have a way to connect that to 12 volt without pulling a battery out and doing it and then it got me thinking well I have two 100 watt can bat batteries which used to be in my van before we did this battery upgrade. I want to set up over there on a little cart that I can use for you know connecting lights to or you buy something and you want to test it before you put it in your vehicle well then I'll have a full-blown 12 volt system there ready to go and set up. I'll put a little circuit panel on there with a fuse block on there so we can connect things via fuses but you having that set up over there I will run each individual heater off their own little fuse that way they're all fused up and then my heaters in the shop will run a bit more power conscious than running them off the grid here. Not like those heaters pull anything I know off of 12 volt they pull about 25 to 40 watts each off of 12 volts and I don't know what that converts to running it off of 120 and how much that little converter unit pulls itself probably another 25 watts or so. All right here we have the Jackery Explorer 1500 let's uh let's plug this one into the into the van. Whole thing right now currently pulling 280 watts 430 500 560 600 oh my inverter kicks out at 700 okay there we go we have a jacker right here that's inputting 285 watts off of my van it's at zero percent state of charge so this is perfect let's leave that jackery there let's leave everything running and uh let's drain this beast but if you look at it man 630 watts is a pile of power all my lights my fridge my charging my speakers my starlink jackery battery and two giant fans like you'll ever run those in your camper van but uh I don't know why I'm doing this guys I just thought this might amuse me while we're waiting. Now we're leveling it all up now we're charging a jackery off the inverter because the inverter can't take any more wattage now and then we're charging this jackery off of the front of this jackery and my batteries and all my lights and everything else and two fans outside let's go let's dig into the analytics here a little bit so it's been six yeah holy cow it's been six days since my battery system has been at a full charge last full charge six days ago so showing you that when we started today I was not at a hundred percent I've been playing around for about five maybe six hours now draining everything I can out of here trying to crush these things nothing are you serious I'm done we out I'm done only at 32 so in total we've pulled 274 amp hours of power that's that's insane to know I have 400 amp hours of power in there we got lots lots of juice left don't ask me why I did that it was it was unnecessary door shut there we go a test like that doesn't prove anything it does one thing for me though it gives me confidence in my van's electrical system knowing that I can tax it to the max pull everything that it's possibly capable of pulling and those batteries don't have a hiccup they don't stop they don't shut off they don't say this is too much so I pulled the maximum capacity from my inverter which is not much I only have a 700 watt inverter and I pulled from every single plug in my van the USB plugs everything charging laptops drones GoPro batteries I had two Jackery's charging at the same time and in that six hour span I charged three Jackery's not from dead to full I topped them all up but that is an insane amount of power to be pulling from my home and to know that after all that I have way over a hundred amp hours still in there and I started at 84 when I arrived here meaning that I still hadn't used a pile of it already stuff like this is just for me it's fun I enjoy plugging in an industrial fan off that thing and to know that I can run my full DJ system that's in my shop off that plus everything else all at the same time and still be okay I think it is a good idea in your electrical system to put them to the test you know what I mean especially after the beginning when you get them started so kind of knowing what your limits are with it and limits are pretty easy to figure out if you have an app like the Victron battery monitor app or if you have like the SOK batteries the ones that I have in my vehicle out there they actually have an app for the batteries themselves so internally you can see what each battery is doing from the battery level in a bluetooth app but it's just great to know what's leaving your system what you're capable of doing and it gives you confidence so now I know we could rock a pretty hardcore bush party and some fans to keep the people on the dance floor nice and cool with my system