The upper forward fuselage area is not attached to our fuselage yet so that makes it easier to work on the sub panel items. I mounted two 120mm fans that were bought from Newegg.com. I'm very happy with these fans. They kick out up to 115CFM at 37Db. This will help to keep the avionics cool in the summer and keep the window defrosted in cooler weather.
A major decision point was fuses instead of circuit breakers. Originally we had our panel drawn up to have breakers. Our design goal was to have as clean of a panel as possible. nearly 20 circuit breakers at $20 a pop was both expensive and would clutter up our design so we opted to go with fuses. I think this will work out for us very well because our switches to turn on devices have an LED lights so if the fuse blows then the LED wont light up so that is one type of indicator. Another detection method is the fact that we have the type of fuses that have a little led light on them that will light up when they are blown. It would be pretty easy to look under the main panel to see the fuse blocks to see if any were lit up.
We are following pretty closely the Bob Nuckolls designed electrical system called Z13/8. This system has two alternators and one battery. The second alternator is a small 10 amp that can power critical devices that feeds a separate "endurance" (emergency) bus for redundancy. Bob's website is www.aeroelectric.com/ he is a grand master of all that is electrical. One place we are deviating from the z13/8 plan is to add an avionics switch. Also, I wanted our left EFIS screen to come on with master switch but I also wanted the left screen to be available on our endurance bus.
I've learned a lot about electrical systems and am very excited to be working on this area of the build.
