Dual Battery Setup with Detailed DIY Install

in this episode we'll be installing a complete state-of-the-art dual battery system it'll keep our Hot Stuff hot our cold stuff cold and help us light up our world now we're putting it in our Toyota 4runner but this system will adapt to virtually any vehicle if you have any questions or comments please leave them below [Music] no no we need a reliable source of energy to power our fridge some work lights charge our camera batteries even when the engine isn't running and it is crucial at that time when the engine isn't running that no power is drained from our starter battery we need this engine to start in the morning when it's time to move out we also want a system that possesses the latest technology but it's still simple enough to be extremely reliable also it needs to have safeguards in place to protect our rigs electrical system just in case there's a short or an overload on this project we enlisted the help of a company called Overland power solutions after talking over our wants and needs with them they've engineered a system that's super reliable we'll perform everything we needed to do and won't start our rig on fire they also built the wiring harness the cables and connectors are perfectly sized for the amount of power that will be flowing through them this is the heart of our system it's a red arc dc-to-dc charger why a DC to DC charger instead of an old-fashioned relay or solenoid system most newer vehicles have what's called a smart alternator because of this a simple battery isolator won't allow the second battery to come to a complete charge only about thirteen - thirteen point eight volts instead of the full fourteen point eight volts for an AGM battery now that might not sound like a huge difference but in battery speak that's huge the good health of any battery depends on it coming up to its full charge and not dropping below a certain charge in the video description below we'll provide a link to a video that can describe it far better than we ever could but watch this video all the way through before clicking on it so basically how this works is after you start your engine the alternator will charge up the starter battery up to its full charge and then switch over to charge the secondary battery and maintain that charge when the ignition is turned off it completely separates the two batteries and it's all done automatically with this controller for our application we're using a hybrid or a dual purpose battery it has all the benefits of a deep cell but it still has the cranking amps necessary to do an emergency jumpstart now the tray we're using to mount our second battery here is from c4 fabrication it's extremely strong and credibly easy to install now it utilizes the two studs coming up from the fender well a bracket that goes to a stud on the firewall and then two bolts going into existing nuts on the fender now the base plate for our charger which doubles as a battery hold-down is a piece of half-inch ABS that we found on Amazon and then cut to fit the top of our battery now this right here is our circuit breaker this is going to protect our alternator and starter battery just in case something goes horribly wrong what could go horribly wrong nothing nothing's gonna go wrong trust me so this is how the wires coming out of the charger get hooked up red wire connects to the starter battery through the circuit breaker Brown connects to the second battery positive black connects to the second battery ground post yellow is for our future solar panel for now it's just dead ended now there's no need for any additional solar controller or anything it's all taken care of inside the red arc charger orange wire tells the controller what type of battery it's charging depending on where it's hooked up positive or in our case with an AGM it stays unattached just dead ended green this is for an optional - mounted LED that comes on when the second battery is charging this blue wire will go through the firewall to the fuse box under the dash there will tie into an ignition on circuit this will tell the charger when the engine is turned off and it will completely separate the two batteries all right as you can see maybe we have the cables connect that connect the two batteries run up against the firewall zip-tied up nice and tight we don't have anything connected yet we're gonna wait until the very end to do that we do have this wiring harness that comes from our charger this goes behind the dash it's going to power that that indicator light that we talked about earlier and it goes to the ignition on circuit in the fuse box now to get it through the firewall down here there's a rubber grommet and we're just gonna simply poke a hole in it and run the wires through it okay so there's that grommet that we want to get the wires through this is under the dash by the way if you can't tell to fish it through we're gonna take a piece of wire and poke it through the hole and tie our wires to it underneath the dash and pull them through setup pushing them through [Music] [Music] okay so here's that little indicator light what we did was we found this on Amazon I think well we'll put a link to this in the description below we just took out the blank out of the - drilled a half inch hole pop that in there it's just held in by a little bit of hot glue so here's that green wire we brought in from the DC DC charger and a ground also I brought all the way from the charger I probably didn't half to but we did anyways and we're just gonna do a simple butt splice on these now to tie into an ignition on circuit in the fuse box we're actually just using a simple add a circuit buy these anywhere and we found a fuse in there that says ignition and the fuse box cover so we're going to tie into that and hopefully that works [Applause] so this is how we have our secondary battery wired up it starts with the positive cable coming from the starter battery going into the circuit breaker comes out of the circuit breaker with the red wire goes into the charger comes out of the charger with the brown wire hooks up to our positive terminal on our secondary battery the ground from the starter battery comes in it goes directly to the post on the secondary and then it comes out of there with the black goes into the charger and this cable right here is actually a chassis ground and it grounds to the body right here using the same bolt that we bolted the battery Traian wiring up the starter battery couldn't be simpler it's just you hook up the positive the positive negative to the negative and very soon we are gonna change out our battery terminals because this I don't like this we have a bunch of stuff going in here we have our relay panel wired in we have our winch wire down got our headlights we need to clean this up so we're gonna get some different terminals really soon now we have pretty much everything done under the hood we even have the two batteries wired together no sparks nope now the next thing we need to do is take these wires and put them through to the back so we can install this panel okay here they come [Music] we're sending both positive and negative cables back to our outlet panel now we'll just run these cables along the frame making sure that we're nowhere near the exhaust or anything that moves and zip tie it down real good well before we call it quits last night we've got the cables run all the way to the back we encased it in split wire loom and zip tie it and nice and secure up to the frame Toyota was nice enough to put this big rubber stopper right where we want the wires to come up into the cabin to make it easier to put in and take out the outlet panel we added an Andersen plug on the main cables an Andersen plug is a heavy-duty plug made for large gage battery cables here is the power outlet panel they'll be going in the back all right to start our main positive cable from the battery comes in to another circuit breaker that will also serve as our main power switch back here then it comes out of there and goes to what's called a safety hub that's a fancy name for a fuse box and we put this up on these stilts just so we could fit the outlets and switches underneath it from here the power gets distributed to our outlets our high speed USB chargers and these switches that we'll use for future add-ons like lights water pump hot tub since there's a small amount of power loss by going through the 12 volt outlets Overland power solutions thought it'd be a better idea for us to wire our fridge cord directly to the fuse box this is just a typical volt gauge it tells us how much voltage there is here at the outlets this is our monitoring system it's going to tell us everything we want to know how much power we're using how much we've used how much is left and a bunch of other stuff it gets wired into the ground side through this shunt from there the battery ground is sent right to the fuse panel a data cord connects the shunt to the gauge itself and this little wire right here provides a little bit of positive power from the fuse box the coolest thing about this monitor is that it's Bluetooth we can bring up all that information on a phone or a tablet while we're up front driving the charger itself also has information that can tell us this set of LEDs tells us what type of battery the charger set up to charge with our AGM profile a is lit solar and vehicle just tells us where the charge is coming from the status LED tells us what stage the charger is in either boost absorption or float boost happens when after the starter battery comes up to it's complete charge the red arc will then throw the maximum amount of charge at this battery after a short time that charge will reduce down and turn into absorption phase then once this battery comes up to his complete charge it then goes into float maintaining that charge and powering our accessories and if there's ever a problem they'll blink an error code that you can look up in the owner's manual now we made the panel itself out of eighth inch ABS plastic cut to fit this opening right here to secure it in place we simply made some aluminum brackets pop riveted to the panel itself and then we're going to use these automotive fasteners to bolt it on with if you don't want to mess around with all this custom DIY stuff over land power solutions can wire it all into an electrical box panel which you can then bolt on to a storage panel like this one made by orange box fabrication all you'll need to do is just plug it in yeay still no sparks the monitor needs a little setup info entered it's all spelled out in the owner's manual okay we're gonna turn it on and the green light comes on so that tells us something's working it says the state of the charge is at 98% voltage is at 13 point 16 and that's voltage output yes yep well the fridge just kicked down output current is negative 3.5 and that's what the fridge is drawn right now power is at negative 51 watts I don't know what that means consumed amp hours is negative one and time remaining says 18 hours and 11 minutes but I think it's because we don't have enough history what's what this history say there's a also history on another page but since we don't say you have your glasses on it gives the deepest discharge the average discharged the last discharge and the cumulative amp hours drawn then it says for energy the discharged energy and the charged energy for charge it gives the total charge cycles the synchronizations the last time since the full charge and the number of full discharges cool then it gives the battery voltage the minimum battery voltage the minimum starter voltage the maximum battery voltage and the maximum starter voltage and then it has alarms too for low voltage alarms and high voltage along so you turn on the alarm on I guess so it's been parked and not driven it all for 20 hours let's see where we're at yeah the fridge and the freezer both at the same tip that we set it at steaks are still frozen ah beer still cold when we shut it off it was around 13 and a half bolt yup now it's down to about 12 volts okay well 54 percent at state of charge is 54 percent so we're going to keep experimenting with this testing its capabilities and limitations and learning the app a little bit better for any updates tune into us on Facebook and Instagram and before you leave be sure to subscribe we forgot to thoughts States what are we gonna have for dinner

Channel: Wanderlost Overland

Views: 358,691

Rating: 4.7997355 out of 5

Keywords: Dual battery kit, dual battery isolator, second battery kit, second battery, fridge battery, fridge battery setup, fridge battery power, dc-dc charger, redarc, dc-dc power supply, overland power, overland dual battery setup, overland dual battery system, dual battery system, auxiliary battery, auxiliary battery system, battery relay, battery solenoid, battery isolator, fridge power, victron, dual battery, dual battery kit installation, how to, agm battery, 4wd action

Id: 1JkH8sH_uK0

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2019