Planning the solar
There hasn’t been much physical progress with the van over the past week due to Ben and I being ill. We were at it for six days straight last week and I think it’s finally caught up with us.
Last weekend we all did an excellent job fitting the fan and a window, this coming weekend we plan to get the roof rails and solar panels on board. Despite feeling pretty grim my research efforts were focused on finding an appropriate way to fit the panels to the roof and Ben was on the hunt for the panels themselves. A big portion of a van build is the behind-the-scenes research that goes into it, which can take tremendous amounts of time. You find yourself constantly thinking and even dreaming about the van and ways to solve build problems.
Solar panels
Ben’s solar panel research went rather well, now that the fan is in place we have a greater idea of the space that’s available on the roof. This gives us confidence when choosing the panels, alongside the sizing Ben had been looking into the latest data regarding solar panels and found that a new technology called Percium Cells has come into play.
Percium panels are said to have better performance in low-light and on cloudy days. Given that solar panels only have a 20% efficiency rating as it is, bad weather is going to prove a problem when on the road, particularly in wintry Canada. It was now time to scour the internet and find a reputable manufacturer of these particular panels. We’d heard good things about JA Solar, who are one of the leading manufacturers in this technology and decided to go with them.
The next thing to do was find the appropriate sized panels with the highest amount of wattage. In the end we went for 3x 305 watt panels, this will overhang the van slightly at the sides as the top of the van curves in, but the panels are not wider than the overall footprint of the van. They also come with a black frame allowing them to blend in a bit more. In order to maximize power we also found a couple of small 50 watt panels to go either side of the fan, in total we will have a large solar setup of 1015 watts.
Roof rack
In response to our solar panel purchases I started the arduous task of looking into suitable roof racks. I hadn’t imagined at the time that it would be so problematic. The roof of the van is actually slightly lower than it appears as there is a lip on either side which is impossible to realize from the ground, but thankfully we’d noticed this when fitting the fan. This caused some problems when looking into roof racks as we needed one that would clear the lip so that the solar panels can clear the edge and over-hang the van.
Mercedes provide a factory roof rack but it’s outrageously expensive for what it is; £500-600 for two small slim aluminium bars. They have been designed to be rather discreet and barely come as high as the the lip on the sides, which causes a problem as we do not really want the panels resting directly on the edge of the van. In addition they seemed hard to get hold of in the UK, and would need to be imported from either Germany or the US, which was also unsuitable given that we only had a week to research and have the rails delivered.
I then focused on various aftermarket options and found that none of them were quite suitable, they were either ginormous things that added a lot of height to the roof and really stuck out or they have sides to them, which adds a width limit and means the panels wont fit. None of the full length rail systems would accommodate the fan we’ve already fitted, which needs to have free air to raise and lower itself, it also has a large footprint due to the rain cover.
A more custom solution was sought after and I went on the hunt. I found this to be quite a common problem among the community and that many of those who also had quite a beastly solar setup had resorted to making their own custom rails. Not keen to have something welded due to time and budget, I finally settled on a solution I found from a popular you-tuber. The solution involved using Unistrut channels for the rails and using unistrut brackets and clamps to hold the panels onto the rail.
Unfortunately, the research stalled here, as our colds developed and we both ended up in bed for a day trying to shift the illness. The headache made it hard to really look at a screen, much less concentrate properly on reading or ordering. By the time I was feeling up to purchasing all the parts that we needed I realized we wouldn’t be able to get the brackets to hold the solar panels onto the rail in time, I was still able to get the rails and thought we’d be able to pop to B&Q or other hardware store to find a solution on the day. We concentrated on feeling better as earlier in the week we’d already booked in an appointment to go and collect the solar panels and really needed to be fit for that.