Suuuunssshhhheeeeeeiinnne

What you are about to read here is possibly the most ambitious part of the build so far.  Install a solar panel that will charge the leisure battery.  This has taken some very long conversations with Dave who has also undertaken this modification - albeit in a slightly different way.

Ya see...  when we pitched up at Camperjam, Dave got himself busy setting up and materialised from the back of his van with a solar panel which he placed on the roof of his van and fed the wires in through the window.  Whoa , whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.  Erm... excuse me?  I hadn't really thought about it much until that weekend but this is the stuff of genius and from walking around the trades section of Camperjam, solar panels were everywhere.  The ones I was most impressed with were the flexible panels like Dave's - didn't really care for the glass one's in an aluminium picture frames as they are way too bulky.
As Dave puts it - free electricity when you camping for a few days!!  I needed to get involved.

From chatting over that weekend a few thoughts and ideas were discussed :
 - A lot of people were bonding them to the rook of the van.  What happens when it breaks?
 - Bonding does give an invisible look.  You can only really see the connectors.  This, we agreed, was they way to go.
 - PWM or MPPT?  Dave had clearly done a lot of reading and was trying to explain to me the difference between the 2 types of charge regulators.

After that weekend, I really wanted to find a way of introducing this to my van but really didn't fancy bonding it to the roof.  Low profile was definitely preferred.  My van has the roof rack gutters already fitted and I was hard at work conjuring some kind of bracket that would allow me to bolt it into these channels.

This is where I got to :

1.  I'd need some kind of L shaped aluminium strip.  I figured L shaped would hopefully give some rigidity and stop it drumming onto the roof of the van at high speed.

2.  I could glue the panel to the aluminium strip and curve them to profile of the roof.

3.  The front channel would need to be bent over so as no to just be square into the wind.

4.  Each aluminium strip could them be bolted into the roof channels by using upside down bolts that would slide into the roof channel.

5.  Oh and I'd probably want some foam sticky strip on the aluminium strip to protect the roof of the van.

So, I figured, I would prototype something and see how it goes.  

Here is a picture of the back of the panel being glued onto the aluminium strips.  The fancy tool work you see is old bits of wire holding the ends together.  This was singularly because when I bent over the L of the front strip it curved the ends in the opposite direction - I hadn't anticipated that.

And here it is in position on the roof of my van.

The other modification that I had to make to my design was to trim/shape then ends of the strips so that they joined into the roof channels properly and to keep them as low profile as possible. 

I think it looks pretty cool and is happily charging my leisure battery - at least I think it is!