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Your home was stolen? Its been stressing me out a bit. I have no other place to go, no money to start over... Someone else on this forum had their van stolen like a week ago, so its made me think. I ran into this wretched homeless couple tonight and talked with them for a bit. They were broke...

I'm not "finished" by any means, but I've reached a point where I am living comfortably and sustainably in a vehicle. My costs are low enough that I could potentially work a minimum wage job for 4 months out of the year and be free the remaining 8. So I guess, now I don't know where to go from...

Austin, TX until October. I've got some stuff I've got to sort through then. From there... nooooo idea. I want to go exploring but I don't know where to start. Maybe somewhere along the coast?

I've been fulltime for 31 days now. The first week was really hard. It was just blindingly hot during the day time, and I didn't have any way to shower, so I felt awful and miserable. No electricity. I also lost my phone, so I had no way to contact anyone. It was pretty scary. But I was...

Meh. Two years ago, I had some issues with PTSD and tried to off myself. The army wasn't too happy about that, and I got tired of trying to justify myself to all the hyper patriotic people that used to make up my life. I paid for college by becoming a murderer for the government, and no one...

I use an mppt500. I managed to blow it up in a ball of blue fire the first time I tried to set everything up, but the dude who runs BZ replaced it for me for free. Got it working now, and it's pretty awesome.

Sounds like overkill to me. I have 300 amp hours of batteries and 240 watts of solar power, and my batteries are full by 10 in the morning every day so far. That's running my gaming laptop at full blast, charging my phone, and 4 amp fans for a good 12 hours a day. I'm planning to add a...

Hah.<br /><br />I just drilled holes in my roof and used a lot of calk.<br /><br />I am not a clever man. But it doesn't leak!

Alright, I get that CO is dangerous. Any suggestions though?<br /><br />I'm trying to improve my stealth. Part of that is being more careful about where I spend the night, but apparently I stick out. A security guard walked up and talked to me literally the second day I stayed somewhere and said...

Alright, I'm one week in and I'm learning fast. Immediately, I know that I'm going to need an air conditioner in this insane heat. Currently, I have a solar panel, 230W, 8.06 amp, 29.16 volts, two agm batteries for a total of 300 amp hours, and an mppt charge controller. This is all in an e-150...

No, the solar panel wires were connected correctly. I checked them twice before hooking them up. The input on the charge controller was clearly labeled, as were the wires from the solar panel.

So...&nbsp;<img border="0" align="absmiddle" src="https://vanlivingforum.com/images/boards/smilies/rolleyes.gif">&nbsp;Yes, that happened. I hooked my mppt charge controller up to my batteries, and it was only showing .4 amps from two full batteries, and zero volts. A little odd, but I left it...

&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">If you are in the market for a new MPPT controller, I recommend the BZ 500 mppt controller.</span><div><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial...

Oh geez. That changes everything. I thought amps was fixed based on the ratio of watts to volts, and without an MPPT charge controller you'd be getting less than 8.5 amps for that panel. My average power use that I calculated was only about 60 aH, so at 25 amps, even if I just get 5 hours of...

Interesting... how could you be getting more power than the panel is rated for? That may mean I need to get a new charge controller... the one I got is limited to 15 amps.<div><br></div><div>It's all theory at this point for me. Don't have my panels or charge controller yet. Yes, it's...

And that graph that shows power falloff as the panel angle to the sun increases is just a guess. I was reading that flat panels can lose up to 25% of their potential in North America, so I just made a linear equation extending that out. The actual line is probably a lot more complex than that.

I've been doing some math to study how much power I can get at the summer solstice and at the winter solstice, and from my calculations it appears that I'm only getting 0.59 of my solar panels power output in December at my latitude. Combined with the change in the length of the day, the number...

"<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Did I read that you're using a 1/2 ton van?&nbsp; You might want to economize on any extra weight.&nbsp; I've got my 3/4 ton Chevy loaded down enough to...

So, I would like to get an antenna that can increase the range I can&nbsp;receive&nbsp;wireless signal and the range I can broadcast back. There's a catch though. The device that I will be using internet on cannot connect to an external network adaptor. So I need to have a repeater of some kind...

My life has been the perfect storm of disasters up to this point. Whenever things got bad, part of me has always dreamed of escaping, going wherever the wind takes me and depending on no one. I kept on trying to make it like I thought a "normal person" should, and it kept on ending in disaster...