I choose the negative.

Connect solar panel to charge battery, in our case it came through at 5 amps charging the battery. Well worth the 700$ I had to give to a hippy to acquire it.

Peter suggested we use a battery charger that you plug in, that’s just what we need an alternative energy device that you have to plug in to the wall in order for it to work. Eventually I caved and bought one, comes in handy encase testing needs to be done and the sun isn’t shinning.

Use a voltage regulator to regulate the charge form the panel to the battery. Mine is rated for 20 amps

connect chord from inverter to switching box and connect start and run caps to the prime mover junction box.

It is advisable to first acquire rotation and proper function of the prime mover coupled to the generator with out a load first. This is important to get a feel of what you are doing and experience in the tuning of the run cap of the prime mover.

Connect start and run caps to your rig.

Solar panel is to the left. Connect your volt meter onto the shunt before powering it up so you can tune and monitor the LOW current draw from the prime mover for when a load is connected to the generator.

Pictured here we have the battery with meter on the shunt, plus the inverter with the chord running to the switch box. Run the prime mover first to get a feel with the performance.

Next step is to connect caps to your alternator. Construct a cap bank for this. Have your cap bank with adjustable switching for tuning the values. An example and guide line for these values is presented further in the next sections.

The whole thinking around the concept of the RV is to tune to the most efficient individual performance of your motors. It is therefore advisable that you have a vast array of cap values to experiment. The idea is to get the prime movers run cap down to the lowest draw from the load of the generator.

Cap bank with switching.

Dans advises

One STRONG safety advice I have for you: put insulation around the switches (the metal handle). When I drive my RV to 800V I even use good rubber shoes and isolating thin gloves (the medical type).My diode plug goes even to 1200V. With such a high voltage, you can be dead in sub-seconds

Below is a basic configuration with the cap, inverter battery and shunt connected

Prime mover is right, alternator is left. The alternator is left.

RV input being 11 volts and 30.6 amps

Rv out put being 165 volts at 10amp ACA

Connect up volt meters and she is ready to go. Refer to the step by step guide for alternator trouble shooting below if your alternator is not generating.

For a next generation tuning cap bank, it is advisable you build a binary switched bank and have values of 0.5 uf and 1uf. Here is one a friend made for me with extra switches available to put in 0.5 uf steps. This bank is perfect for tuning the RV prime mover as it can switch from 1-uf to 127uf in 1uf steps!.

The 2 versions of binary value cap box shown in the pictures were made from block mount, motor run, poly capacitors, 450VAC, arranged to give the binary values, so a wide range of capacitance can be selected.

This was the first one made, and allows 0 to 127uF in 1uF steps.

Next we made three of these smaller ones that allow 0 to 31.5uF in 0.5uF steps.

Same type of capacitors, but smaller box. These caps were only available in a few values, so some combinations were needed to make up the needed values.

The 0.5uF value was made from 4 x 2uF in series.

The 1.0uF was made from 2 x 2uF in series.

These 3 were made with reduced value range to keep the cost down, but can be paralleled with other caps to give fine tuning at a higher capacitance value. If a 20uF is hooked in parallel, then the box becomes a 20 to 51.5uf box.

Here are some ideas for the construction of a smooth-switching cap box for simple, electronic tuning……

The idea of making a binary cap box that can be adjusted by a simple

turn of a knob, or automatically by the motor current is a good one,

but there are a couple of things to bare in mind about it.

We are dealing with large inductance and voltage, so switching of the

Caps needs to be very robust, and there should be no time when a cap is not

connected (ie switching down from 8uF to 7.5uF should be smooth - no gap

between). This tends to rule out using a binary sequence, unless you

use some very fancy switching.

Instead look at using a heap of small value caps that are just added

in parallel. Say use 20 x 0.5uF caps to make a 0-10uF box in 0.5uF

steps. To switch the caps in, use cheap and simple relays. Use a

couple of cascaded bar-graph chips to drive the relays, and you have a

pretty simple voltage controlled cap box. Reasonably cheap as well

since the caps and relays are common components

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Now you are ready to connect a load. Best advice I can offer is to start with a set of bulbs on the alternator connected as outlined in the ‘Connecting your load to your alt options’ in the index. But First start to search for maximum voltage out put from your alternator by adding and or subtracting cap values. Do this whilst doing the same for tuning the lowest capacitance from your prime movers run cap. This will change when you connect a load, so make sure you have some values on your bank enabling you to be able to switch back up on the prime movers run cap(s). This is so you can start to tune from the lowest setting when your load is connected.

After you are confident that you have acquired maximum voltage and the lowest run cap with no load, take a magnet up to the alternator and see if it vibrates when approaching the LC. This will tell you that you have radiant energy and resonance in the alternator LC which occurs when maximum voltage is attained.