07 5479 6652 info@amae.net.au

If you’ve just bought your new age van and you want to go off-grid, and it’s only got one battery, one solar panel, I’ll show you what we’ve done with this one.

I’m just gonna give you a quick run-through of a lithium conversion we’ve done to this New Age Oz Classic.

So the customer came to us, it only had one 100mAh battery and one 150 Watt panel on the roof. So basically no off-grid capabilities. He wants to go off-grid, wants everything to work, as in air con, microwaves, washing machines, obviously being the Oz Classic, it’s fitted out with everything.

So yeah, we’re getting this working for him off-grid. 

BATTERY SYSTEM

So what we’ve done, we’ve removed the 100ah from the outside, brought the cables inside and then we’ve fitted this monster Invicta 300Ah battery. So, Invicta obviously goes with the New Age, that’s what they’re using now in the new vans. It’s a full Bluetooth battery so you can monitor it with an app.

And obviously all ties in with this current BMPRO HA with Odyssey display. So, when we’ve reprogrammed the HA, which it already had, so that makes it very easy and obviously cost effective conversion. We’ve added a DC-DC charger. Most of them don’t come standard with a DC-DC charger so we’ve added that again to make the alternator charging from the vehicle lithium compatible. 

And then the other thing to do, so basically that’s our 240 charging which is just reprogramming. That’s our DC-DC charger that we’ve fitted. And then the third way to charge it obviously is solar.

SOLAR

So we’ve added another two 150 Watt Red Arc panels. They’re on the roof. That gives us a total of 450 Watts.

We’ve also got space maybe for another panel. If we remove the aerial, this thing’s got satellite. But we’ll run it with the 450, see how it goes. If he needs more solar then we’ll look at removing that aerial.

But hopefully 450 Watts, 300 amps of solar will keep up with the usage he wants. 

INVERTER

To get all that to then run all his appliances, we’ve fitted a quite large inverter that I’ll move over and show you in a minute. It’s a 3000 Watt Red Arc one. Up here we’ve installed a remote switch. So basically on/off there.

Once you fire that up, everything will go beep and then we’ve basically got full 240 volts in the van.

Down here is the 3000 Watt inverter. Basically the Redarc one, the footprint, is quite short and it’s tall. So that means that we could get everything here in these two under bench seats. We spoke with the customer. He didn’t really utilise these for storage. He more uses more of the under bed area and so on. So this became the perfect fit. That battery fits in to there. And the inverter’s pretty similar. So it keeps it all away underneath, unused space. And yeah, pretty much gets everything working so he can expect air-con, microwave and washing machine all to work off-grid. 

So yeah, these are actually New Age’s are set out very well, especially if you’ve already got the HA. They lend themselves very easily towards lithium conversion. So we’ve done a fair few of them.

If you’ve got any questions on this one or any other vans, then you’re welcome to send us photos so we can give you ideas where to put things. Give us a call on 1300 227 353, email us at info@amae.net.au or feel free to drop a comment below.