Redarc RedVision Total Vehicle Management System with Manager30

Video Transcript for Redarc RedVision Total Vehicle Management System Review

Hey everyone. Shane here with etrailer.com. Today, I have a product that I'm excited to talk to you about. It's the REDARC RedVision, and what it does, it allows you to take all of your 12 volt power in your camper RV and use it off of one panel or control it off of one panel. This is going to be designed for more of your boondockers. Maybe you have a van or something that you have converted into a camper, or maybe you have say a box trailer, which I see a lot of now.

You have an enclosed trailer that you're converting over to a camper. So, you're kind of designing your own camper. This gives you a 12 volt power source that gives you a single panel to be able to control it on.Now, another nice thing about the system is with having the single panel inside the camper, we don't have to go around searching for light switches or anything like that. If you have a cell phone, tablet, computer, you can control it all off of that, also. Maybe we pull in somewhere at night, we pull into a campsite.

We take cell phone or our tablet out, open the app up, and we can turn on our inside lights and any other power that we need to turn on so we can see what we're doing without ever having to go inside the camper.Let's go over some of the other things that the RedVision can do. As I mentioned, we can control all of our 12 volt power off of a single panel or single screen. But what about our water tanks Things like that. A black water tank, gray water tank, and our fresh water tank. We can actually set monitors up or gauges up.

We can control our water level. So, we can set an alarm on our screen. Then, when our water level gets so high, say our gray water tank. Our water level gets so high, it's going to tell us, or set that alarm off to tell us we need to empty it before we start seeing our gray water start coming up through the bottom of the shower. Or, it's not draining anymore.

We can set our water temperature. So, we can hook up a meter or hook up a gauge into our fresh water tank to tell us what our water temperature is.Now, you're probably asking yourself, how do you charge your batteries If we're out boondocking, we're using the power from our batteries. How do we charge it Well, that's where the Manager30 comes in. When we combine the Manager30 with the RedVision, now we not only have the control of our 12 volt power sources in our camper or RV, but we also have the ability to charge your batteries while we're using that power. Manager30 allows you to use solar panels, connect them through the Manager30. They run to your batteries to charge them again while we're using the power. On top of that, with having the Manager30 along with a RedVision, we can hook up to our vehicle and charge our battery from our vehicle. Maybe we we're out at a campsite somewhere. We have no shore power to hook up to. We back our truck up. Our kit for our Manager30 and RedVision has come with the Anderson plug that we hook into our vehicle and our trigger wire for our Manager30.Our power and ground, ground goes to the frame. Power is going to run into your Manager30. On the vehicle side, ground is going to ground to a good frame ground. Positive wire is going to be routed up to your engine compartment, close to your battery. On trucks, this usually is pretty easy. You can usually file the frame rails, some factory wiring to get it up there. You just want to make sure you're staying away from anything hot or moving. Once you get up to the battery, you're going to mount a fuse. You're going to connect the wire to the fuse, and then from the fuse, you're going to go to the positive side of the battery.Then, we have our trigger wire. What the trigger wire is for, it's to activate the Manager30 from your vehicle when you turn the ignition on. Now, you may or may not need this. This wire is designed for vehicles with variable voltage alternators. So, you need to make sure you check your owner's manual to determine what alternator you have, because you may or may not need this.This is what our control panel is going to look like inside our camper. You want to make sure that wherever you're going to mount this, your RedVision is mounted within a proximity. So, the R-Bus cable that comes off of this is about 13 foot long. You just want to make sure you kind of plan that out, where you're going to mount it. You can see, we kind of have ours mounted here next to our radio. Here, we have our on and off. You'll notice the icons. Now, you have to set this up once you get everything hooked up. But again, this allows us to control everything. We can turn on our lights with a push of a button. Turn on our radio. We can turn on our outside lights, our water pump, our fridge, and anything else we may want to set up on there. So, it gives us a lot of adjustability to control different things a lot easier.Now, we go through our screen here a little bit. This is our Bluetooth here. There's a lot of stuff to go through, so I'm not going to go through all of it. I'll just kind of go through a few things. This kind of allows you to set your screen up the way you want. How you want your back lights, stuff like that. Set your date and time. You can change your temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, depending on where you're at. You can do 12-hour or 24-hour clock. This is going to be our battery level here. This little icon up here, it's the car. When we're hooked up, you can see it's green. So, if we hit solar power, the sun would be green. If we're hooked up to shore power, the plug would be green.Being hooked up, you'll notice that our Manager30 is lit up. This is showing that we're getting power from an outside source and putting it into our battery. In the same, whether we're using a cell phone or a computer, we're going to have that same screen. As I mentioned, I don't have water tanks hooked up on my main screen, but this is what your water tanks would look like. We can go into our control panel and we can do the same thing off of our computer or cell phone.As far as when we have our camper or something, we're parking it for the season. We're not going to be using it. What we're going to do is we're going to come to this screen. You have your left and right arrows. You're going to come all the way over, and then you're going to use your up and down arrows. You're going to come to System Settings, and it's going to tell you Touring mode. When you set it up and you're using it, you want to be in Touring mode. This has the ability to go into Storage mode, and what storage mode does, is the Manager30 will maintain your battery while it's in storage. It's not going to allow it to drop down past a certain amount. It's going to maintain that level so that when you come to your camper, you're ready to use it the next time. It's ready to go.We can also set up the system so that once our battery drops down past a certain amount, it's going to shut our power off so we don't drain our battery all the way out. We come to this screen again, we use our up and down arrow, we go to BMS, which is our Battery Management System. We can set an alarm to whatever level you want. For instance, ignition. As I mentioned before, we have it set to on. We can do a voltage alarm. Once our battery drops down past 10 volts, or gets down to 10 volts, it's going to set a voltage alarm to tell us we need to either hook up our vehicle or plug into shore power, either one, because our battery is getting low.The load disconnect, we have it triggered for voltage. So for instance, whatever load we want to disconnect when our battery starts running low, we can set that. For instance, if we have our lights, we can set it to disconnect at 10.5 volts. When our battery charges back up to 12 volts, it's going to automatically allow us to power them back up. Now, again, it doesn't necessarily have to be the lights. You can set it up for any other 12 volt power source that you're wanting to disconnect.Now to set up your battery, you're basically going to come to the BMS setting screen. You're going to hit your soft key. You're going to use your up and down arrow to toggle between these three. This is going to tell you what battery you have. You're just going to scroll over with the left and right arrow, pick whatever battery you have. Once you pick your battery, you're going to use the down arrow. You're going to set the amp hours of the battery. Let's say you have a battery bank, you have more than one battery tied together. You're going to set the total amp hours for the whole battery bank. Then, you're going to set the maximum current amps. Once you get it set up, press the checkmark. It's going to show it there.If we go scroll to the right, use your right arrow, this is going to be our charging. If we hit the top one. Go back here. We hit the top one. It's going to tell us our state of charge per hour, and that's for our batteries. This is going to tell you state of charge per day. This is going to be charged from solar power per day. It allows us, if we have solar panels, tell us how much power we're drawing from our solar panels and charging our batteries.Now, in order to get all this put on your screen, the icons and everything, it's going to have to be set up on your phone first, or your computer. You're going to download the program. You're going to set up the icons the way you want, put in all of your battery information, stuff like that. Then, you're going to have to have Bluetooth capability. So, Bluetooth on your computer and Bluetooth on this screen or on this unit in order for everything on your screen for your phone or computer to transfer over to this screen. Once you have both of them set up, you'll be able to use either one to control your power.This is what our system's going to look like once it's installed. This is just a general idea of how I installed it on this particular camper. It doesn't necessarily have to be installed in this area. This is going to be our main control unit for our 12 volt power sources. It's going to come with all of your fuses. We have 10 amp and 30 amp. Anything we run through this, we want to make sure we're not going over 30 amps. You can also do, as I mentioned, your water tanks. You can do an inverter and you have two temperature sensors that come with this system. You can hook up the charger, which we have here. That's going to be our Manager30, which is going to allow you to maintain charging your batteries with solar panels or off your vehicle. This is where all of our stuff is being powered in, all of our 10 amp circuits. For instance, your radio, your lights, your awning, your outside lights. Then, of course, our 30 amp circuits, refrigerator, and then our water pump.Having a clear pain along here makes it very easy because if a fuse happens to blow, the one that's blown is going to actually light up to make it very easy to determine where the situation is or where the problem is. Each one of these is marked. These are actually stickers that come with the kit. So, once you get each wire installed, you can mark it with the maximum amp and what you have it powered to. You'll notice the digital I/O or in and out here. It allows you to hook up certain circuits that will be triggered by the ignition off your vehicle.For instance, if we want to hook the refrigerator up and leave it running while we're traveling to keep our food cold, we can hook it up so that when we hit the ignition, the refrigerator stays on. Saying that, we can also hook our lights up to it. So, if we have the lights on in here, we turn the refrigerator on, the lights on, we're loading it up, getting ready to leave early in the morning or later in the evening when it's dark. We hit our ignition. It will shut our lights off, we'll leave our refrigerator on, and that all can be set up through your panel.Our two temperature inputs here. What those are for is it comes with two temperature gauges. We can take one, plug it in, and we can hang one inside and it will tell us what the temperature inside the camper or RV is on our screen. The other one, we can actually run it through with our wiring, hang it outside, and it'll tell us what the outside temperature is. It allows us to gauge both from your panel.As I mentioned, we can hook up an inverter. If we have an inverter on our camper, we can hook our inverter through the RedVision and be able to monitor it through our screen. What our inverter does is it basically takes 12 volt DC power and switches it over to AC. For instance, we're boondocking, we're just running off our battery. We'll be able to switch that power so we can use our microwave. Maybe we want to use a coffee pot or something like that.As I mentioned, we have the RedVision and the Manager30 tied together. You can get each one of these separate, or you can get these as a kit. You can find each of them or the kit here at etrailer. Let's talk about our Manager30. Manager30 is a battery management system. With the RedVision, the RedVision allows you to control all your 12 volt power through one panel. The Manager30, what it does is it allows you to charge your 12 volt batteries, whether that's through solar panels or plugged in in 110 power, or 120 power, or even charging from your vehicle. When you combine these two, you not only have the control of everything 12 volt power inside your camper or RV off of one panel, but you also have the ability to charge your batteries while you're using them.Now, as far as the installation, the installation process is going to be pretty straightforward. It is a little time-consuming, it's not something that's going to be done in an hour. We actually installed it on this Keystone Hideout. They we're having a little bit of problem with their converter and decided, "You know what We're going to do the RedVision and be able to get all of our 12 volt sources or power into one spot to make it a little bit easier. As I mentioned before, this going to be more designed for somebody who boondocks a lot. Maybe you're designing your own camper or you're converting something over to a camper.That's going to do it for our look at the REDARC RedVision.