Update 10-23-11

Well good news / bad news. OK its really all good news, I'm just a little peeved, you'll see why later.

Well got do work on the bus 10-22-11. I have had it at an RV repair shop because of a deal I made with an gentleman, we'll call him Mark. Anyway, the deal is I will trade him my 15.5 foot Deckett deck boat for helping me wire my bus for electrical, as well as supply a good generator for the bus.

Needless to say it has sat, untouched for over two months until this weekend. I took off from work Sat and Sun, to work on the bus, and here is what was done.

Breaker box installed and wired.

  Here is how the day went. Pulled the bus into the bay and took out the converter breaker box to test. 110v side good, 12v side good except the charger portion was not working. took charger out, and it consisted of removing it from the breaker box. The charger portion, slides out of the breaker box and is contained inside its own galvanized box. Drilled out rivets and exchanged charger. Replaced rivets checked for proper operation, and placed back into breaker box. plugged it into outlet via 30amp cord, checked for proper operation, and charger would not work. Took out of breaker box, re-drilled out rivets, looked over charger. Checked wiring, placed shrink wrape over wire where the protective rubber was cut. Checked for proper operation, re replaced rivets, placed back into breaker box, plugged into outlet via 30 amp cord, checked for proper operation, have good operation.

I  cut out the opening for the breaker box in the long couch seat on the driver's side. A portion of the area under or within the seat will be used for storage, however the area where the breaker box is will be only for the electrical.

OK here is how the electrical is being set up. Service power will get to the breaker box by plugging into an 30amp outlet ( it's being wired for 50 amps and will have the 30amp chord replaced once I get a second AC unit). The 30amp cord was cut from the breaker box and wired into a junction box.

This pic taken, looking from the driver side, facing the rear of the bus.

 This is inside the underbelly storage. The cord will roll up and sit inside the bin. Once I fix up the underbelly storage with carpet and lighting, I will have a nice built in box for the cord, and an access door for just the cord.

At the junction box a coax cable is attached and runs along the top of the underbelly storage to the front of the underbelly storage and enters into the inside of the bus just behind where the refrigerator will be.

This is before the wire is secured to the top of the storage bay.

The orange wire is how I am going to connect my house battery bank. That will be later down the road but I wanted to wire for it now.

Service power enters into the back of the breaker box and powers 110v and 12v. I will have a second leg that will go to an external breaker box. This breaker box is a small house breaker box, and I will power the refrigerator, both AC's, hot water heater, and GFI for the restroom area (hair drier, not me....wife / daughters) with this smaller box.

But aren't you going to tie in your generator? you ask. Why yes. Simplicity and functionality is my middle name... uh names. I will have a female outlet next to the junction box that is wired to my generator. When I want to use the generator, I will plug into it with my shore power cord. When I have access to shore power, I can unplug from the generator, pull out my cord and plug into the shore power outlet.

I could put in a transfer box (about $200.00), and it can go out and I can replace it. Or I can do it this way and do it manually. Later if I get lazy, I'll do the transfer box.

This is looking down inside the seat area. I will be cleaning up the wiring and making it neater. You can also see the back of the small house breaker box.

Sooo, once we had it wired up, we needed to test it, and we did. and guess what. 110v good. 12v not good because charger was not working again. So I got to take out the charger re-re-drill out the rivets, take out the charger, but this time I had to remove the entire electrical board and charger from the galvanized box and figure out how to mount the replacement charger because the second replacement was a different type of charger. Once that was done, I had to re-re-rivet the box, and re-re-reinstall the charger into the breaker box.

I started at about 9:45am and worked non-stop until about 6:00pm. It does not seem like a lot was accomplished but, this is one of the major things that needed to get done. This is one of the areas I was a little concerned about doing myself. Most of the work was done by me with Mark jumping in once in a while as well as also giving me instruction. I have to give a lot of thanks to Mark for his expertise, ideas, and help.

I am glad that I did a lot of the work so I will be familiar with it in case I have to troubleshoot it. 

I had already run most of the wiring to the areas where 110v and 12v will be needed. All I really need to do now is start putting in boxes and wiring up outlets and switches.

Now for what peeved me. I had taken my AC unit to the RV shop about two weeks ago, so it could be put on my bus. However when working on my bus this Sat, I walked by and found out my AC's compressor had been cut out. What the ****. Well I was told by Mark that it was done by mistake. Supposedly it will be taken care of by the owner. We will see.

The other thing was that I had taken off  Sat and Sun to work on the bus. Sat was an good day, but Mark was suppose to meet me at 12:00 or 12:30pm, Sun to do more work on the bus. Well he did not show or answer his phone. So I wasted a day off for nothing. Oh well I just hope he has a good excuse.

So that's the update on the bus. I still need to run wire from where the generator is going to be mounted to the rear breaker box. I need to wire up the second leg for the small house breaker box, then starting hooking up outlets and switches for 110v and lights for 12v.

Thanks for reading and well see you next time.