the heart and solar

There's 3 essential components to a solar system.

1. The solar panels
2. The charge controller
3. The batteries

The solar panels consist of an array of photovoltaic cells. They turn light into electricity and send it to the charge controller, which uses the electricity to optimally charge the batteries. 

I had to pick out components that were cheap and would fulfill our needs. Mostly lights, water pumps, laptop, and phone charging. This is what I bought:

2x200 Watt Renogy solar panels [link]

1 Renogy charge controller [link]

2 110 AH deep cycle batteries. [Discounted from Interstate Batteries]

Our system is going to run on 12 volt direct current (DC) power. Some systems also use an inverter to generate 120v AC. Inverters introduce more inefficiency in a system, as there's some energy loss during that conversion. Because of our limited budget, both with time and watts, we decided to try to power everything on 12v DC.  This introduces some complexity when searching for appliances, since most consumer items are sold for 120v AC.

Running a test on the solar panels shows that we're getting 18 volts~. Just as expected. :)

the purchasing

We have $7,000 USD to work with. We estimated $600 for solar power, $400 for plumbing a rain catchment system, and $1000 for interior redecorating. That left us with an upper limit of $5000 to spend on the actual bus.

We exhaustively searched a wide swathe of craigslist postings via SearchTempest. We looked at bus after bus until we settled on a 1990 GMC school bus located 3 hours away from our landing site. A deal was struck, and we found ourselves with a $4200 work-in-progress project.

Exterior: 

Interior:

 Bed + Dinette

Bathroom/Shower

Kitchen Area

Not a bad start, but still needs a lot of work! Mostly everything pictured is non-functional.

A dream, a promise, a bus

Hi! This is where the blog begins. A blog detailing an ambitious project to turn a bus into an off-grid domicile, capable of housing two lovely people and providing all their electrical and aquatic needs. We're not actually building the bus, just providing some serious modifications.

My name is Hila, and I'm 1 of 3 people working on this. I have rudimentary circuit knowledge and not much experience with making things in any of the physical worlds. So if you're a professional in any of the labor we'll be doing, our results may not be up to your usual standards. We're also working with some other hard constraints: money and time.  

At the time of this writing, some work has already gone underway. I'll do my best to retrace what's happened this far. Thanks for reading this introductory statement, and hope you enjoy!