This installation was completed in February of 2024.  The owners of this travel trailer lived in Southern California, but contacted me for a possible installation.  We had several discussions about the system design and they ultimately decided to bring the trailer to me for a complete installation.  The customer did some prep work for the installation before bringing the trailer to me.  He installed four Li Time 230 AH lithium batteries under the bed in the trailer.  The batteries were simply mounted there, but did not have any cabling installed.  He installed plywood backing to the rear wall of the pass through storage compartment for equipment mounting, along with two equipment grounding studs.  Finally, he ran 10/3 SOOW cord (from behind the main power panel, up to the front storage compartment and back) for the inverter AC connections.  This prep work saved almost a days worth of work for me and was well done and appreciated.

The customer dropped the trailer off to me on the allotted installation date.  The installation took me three days to complete.  The installation went pretty smoothly.  We originally planned for a SmartShunt for the battery monitoring, but I discovered the trailer had an OEM battery monitor with a round display installed in the wet bay area.  Because of this, I opted for a BMV-712 instead of the SmartShunt.  The BMV-712 display was installed in place of the old OEM display in the wet bay.  We also originally specified 200 watt solar panels for the system.  I had a previous customer that wanted 220 watt panels, but they ultimately didn’t fit on the roof space he had available and I had to use 200 watt panels for that installation.  This left me with some extra 220 watt panels, so I used them for this installation (where they fit without issue).  There was one problem that came up during the installation.  The Multiplus 12/3000/120 had an issue with the internal battery charger and it was not functioning properly.  The charger was continuously varying the charge voltage in a random range between 12.xx and 16.xx volts.  I double checked all the charger settings and conducted several tests to determine the cause of the issue.  I ultimately determined it was something faulty within the Multiplus itself.  The Multiplus was brand new, so I simply exchanged it with my distributor under warranty.  This was a bit of a hassle to uninstall and reinstall the unit, but everything went smoothly and it added very little actual installation time.  The replacement unit’s charger functioned properly once it was installed.

Once the installation was completed, the customer returned and I went over everything with him.  I showed him the Victron Connect app and how to use it to connect to all the individual components.  We went over the GX display and all the screens and menus for it.  I also set the customer up on the VRM portal and showed him how to use that.  Finally, I set the customer up with a VRM widget on his phone to instantly monitor the system at a glance.