After several revisions and discussions on numerous forums and with some electrician friends, I think we are at a final subsystem design. Should give us a flexible system with a main large battery bank, and an emergency battery system for back-up usage for essentials, with several ways to charge the battery, including alternator, solar, and AC plug-in power from a house or generator.

Here is the new and hopefully final diagram.

In the process of laying all of this out, we also starting thinking about how to tie all of it together in a way thats simple and very intuitive, but sophisticated enough to give us all of the control we want. So we looked into another industry for some inspiration; boats. If you look at the average boat, its a harsher environment than a vanagon in the desert. Boats are also very tight on space.

We found a very cool system from Blue Sea Systems, that would aggregate all of our breakers, and also serve as command center of sorts for monitoring out water tank, aux fuel tank, etc. Here is a video about the panel we are looking at.

more good stuff to come… Took the front seats out tonight and started to remove carpet… Want to put something special under them! 🙂