Lights, Lockers, Onboard Air, Dual Batteries And More! FULL Off-Road Wiring Guide!

to dendrite lifestyle we're gonna cover a topic that many of you have been asking for for a long time and that is a complete guide to wiring all the different off-road systems uh for those of us that like to do over landing or rock crawling or whatever we're gonna cover dual battery setup we're going to cover compressor wiring locker wiring all of it we're going to wire up a switch panel this is going to be a good video for those of you that are new to this world and you want to learn some stuff about 12 volt wiring so anyway this video is going to be huge it's going to be very comprehensive so we better get started it's taken me almost six months to collect all the parts and pieces to do this video a system like this is very expansive and it takes a lot of work and a lot of careful planning to make sure you have everything whenever you start as we work our way through the system i'm going to tell you where i got each part in piece and how to install it and the first thing i want to start with is going to be this dual battery setup these are the two most common ways to install dual batteries and this first way is how most vehicles come from the factory if they come from the factory with dual batteries so like a one ton diesel truck or something like that now there could be some exceptions to this rule but the average diesel truck at least here in the states um it's gonna come where the alternator is tied into the first battery and then there's a little jumper that goes from the first battery to the second battery super simple it makes it to where whenever you need to start that big diesel motor with that big diesel starter you've got a big well of juice to turn that starter even after it's after it's been sitting for a little while because that's the whole concept here your 100 percent voltage level is going to be 12.6 but after a week of sitting or whatever it's going to diminish it might get down to 12.4 volts or 12.2 and since you have both batteries hooked up you have even with the lower voltage you have a deeper well of amperage to pull from to start that engine which is why even though you could turn over that diesel motor with one fully charged battery they give you two because they know in the real world that thing's gonna sit every once in a while and you still gotta be able to start it even though you have a lower voltage in the battery i really hope that all that makes sense and you can follow me so anyway this is a completely viable option for a lot of people um but for me it's not going to be and for a lot of you watching it's not going to be if you have like a fridge that's going to be running all night and you're doing more than just running like a you know a light so you can read or something like that because what happens is if you drop the voltage of your secondary battery it's also going to drop the voltage of your first battery and this could make it to where you can't start the truck to get out of wherever it is that you're camping so we're gonna add an isolator and the way that this is gonna be wired up is essentially the same but we put an isolator in between that jumper so we're gonna have an alternator that's gonna charge the first battery then we're gonna have a jumper that's gonna go from the first battery to the second battery with an isolator in between the two and this isolator will keep these systems completely independent unless it sees 13.3 volts why is this important this is important because if we we come up we come up to camp we turn the vehicle off we have all of our accessories hooked up through the second battery so we're going to be dropping our voltage all night so we're going to go from 12.6 to 12.4 to 12.2 to 12.0 and this battery is going to become very dead it's going to be hard for it to start a vehicle well because this isolator keeps these independent unless the vehicle is running it makes it to where even when you key the ignition on to start the vehicle the next day you're still going to have less than that 13.3 volts so it won't even connect the two batteries together until the system is running because once it's actually fired up and running and the alternator kicks on then that's going to bump the juice up to 14.4 and then once the isolator sees above that 13.3 from the alternator it knows that it can basically turn on and open up and it'll start charging both batteries so this is exactly how we're going to wire this up today and we have a kit that i got from a company off of amazon i'm going to show you right now i contacted keyline chargers about working with us because their kit checks every single box this is a very easy to install it's very affordable and you can get it on amazon so you don't have to go search around for something that meets all these demands but the first thing i need to do is to drop both new optima batteries in place and then we can tie everything together using this kit from keyline every good house starts with a solid foundation and these batteries are absolutely the foundation we need for this build [Music] [Music] we are super limited on mounting locations underneath the hood of this land rover so i'm going to do is i'm going to build a bracket out of some scrap material i've got laying around and hopefully we can mount this in a place that makes sense later on in this video we're gonna be installing a couple of high amp relays and need a place to mount those two so we're just gonna try to hit three birds with one stone and put it all in this bracket when you peel the lower cover off of this isolator you'll notice that there's a couple of knockouts on each side and this is so you can route the wire in and out of the isolator in a clean way and pick a route that best suits your needs we've got one post that connects to the starter battery one post that connects to our secondary battery and then one ground so i'm gonna connect the wire to the isolator run it out to the length i need trim it and then crimp a new fitting on the end [Music] [Music] as you just saw wiring this isolator was super simple it went in extremely easy and this is one of those jobs that i truly believe just about anybody with basic hand tools can do so um this is something that we're gonna test at the very end of the video to make sure that the isolator is working because i did skip one step in the instructions and we'll get to that at the end of the video i don't think that it's necessary for this setup anyway for those of you that are interested in this isolator because i get questions about the products you use in every video just click the amazon shopping cart there's an amazon link in the description this video click it then click the title of this video and there's gonna be a whole list of i'm gonna put tools that i use today and there i'm gonna put spade connectors i'm going to put this isolator i'm even going to put the batteries speaking of batteries people are so opinionated about batteries almost as bad as they are about tires that i've discovered this since i started youtube channel and i want to give a little explanation as to why i use optima because i've been asked this a number of times over the last two years of me having a youtube channel i have a battery on the table over there that i bought in 2005. it's an optimal red top and it still holds a charge i then about five years ago i took it out of my jeep and i put in a yellow top and both batteries have been great i've got i've had optimas in so many vehicles including my tow truck it'll sit for three weeks it'll still start i've had nothing but great luck with them so because of that i just continue to buy them i've even used that red top in like a boat for a trolling motor i've used it for all kinds of stuff and now i just use it to like bench test lights and if i get a used car that needs a battery that i'll just throw that in there temporarily until i buy a new one so anyway the experience has been good so i'm going to continue to use them the reason that i reached out to optima and asked for these blue tops specifically is because they have extra 5 16 studs that poke out of the top and the reason that's important is because whenever you're installing all these extra off-road accessories you need a place to wire that and if you just have a one standard two post battery you're having to wire all your accessories and everything to just two little posts and if you get one of these blue tops it has these extra 5 16 studs and you just doubled your ease to install this extra stuff and in our case we quadrupled it because we added an extra battery on top of that so we have eight posts instead of two which is going to make it so much easier for us to cleanly install all these accessories so that the next thing i'll install is probably going to be our switch panel four wheel parts sent me the switch panel from pro comp and these have gained a lot of popularity over the last few years and for good reason a switch panel like this is easy to mount all the wiring's pretty much done you just need to plug in the various harnesses and then you have six outputs that can go to various accessories for us it's gonna be lights compressors things like that and although in the past i've mostly used just regular rocker switches this method saves so much time and so much space in the cab that it's just really a no-brainer [Music] i buy these firewall grommets in bulk off amazon as a clean way to pass wire through your firewall without cutting up the edges of your wire i'm going to use this point of connection as a pass through for multiple wires throughout this installation today [Music] you can definitely install this kit without cutting or trimming any wire you can just roll up any access that you have and zip tie it together but i like to have everything mounted as cleanly as possible so i trimmed this wire to fit crimped a new end on and hooked to the battery [Music] with the power in the ground hooked up for this control box we just need to find an ignition source and luckily for me right behind this battery is a fuse panel so we're going to do is try to find a place to use a fuse tap that we're just going to basically plug in a fuse that we determine it only turns on whenever the ignition is in the on position so i'm using my power probe to test which ones of these fuses turn on and off in the on and off position and then we can tap into that power with our fuse tap which will then energize the control box and now with all this hooked up we're ready for the next step for those of you who are brand new to wiring up 12 volt bear with me on this part there's gonna be a lot to digest but it's very important information that you need to have whenever you size the different parts of your system that you're gonna be building for your 4x4 so i drew everything out to kind of give me like a visual aid to hopefully convey these concepts to you and make it to where whenever you build your system you can kind of reference back to some of this stuff it'll give you an idea of what kinds of things to look for and what kinds of things you might run into anyhow we've got a control panel if we push the rock light button on the control panel it would send a signal down into the control box which then sends a signal down to our rock lights very simple this is how this system is supposed to work for but we had to make a slight alteration to the system and i'll show you why so with the rock lights we're at 0.4 amps per light and so that's 2.4 amps for all six lights together there is a peak threshold on each individual circuit in this box and that peak threshold is 20 amps so 2.4 we are way below that peak threshold and that makes it super easy to install something like rock lights especially with something like this pro comp control box system thing whatever you would call it but if you are adding electric electronic devices that use a lot more juice than that 2.4 amps then you might go above this peak threshold making it to where you have to add a larger relay to sustain the load so for our compressors this is just like the best example ever these smittybilt 2781 compressors are super fast for a 12 volt compressor but that speed comes at a cost and that cost is that they use a lot of juice so we're at 45 amps peak load for each one of these peak amp load which gives us 90 amp total draw because they're both on the same circuit so whenever we push our our button on the control panel that then tells the relay inside our control box to then send a signal through our 90 to 120 pressure switch and this is in our tank and that basically makes it to where it kills the compressors anything above 120 and then it actually it excites the compressors it tells the compressor to turn on at anything under 90 psi so once the signal goes through our pressure switch it then goes into our relay and this relay is a 200 amp continuous output relay so the continuous part is very important this is essentially a starter relay that is built to be able to have a continuous load on it which is perfect for our application here so we have a 90 amp draw we have a 200 amp relay so we're well within the threshold of that relay and we now have a safe system it's a bummer because there's a basically a relay in here and a relay in there and there's a little bit of redundancy here but in order to keep the simplicity of having all of our switches on just one panel this is just the easiest way for me to do it now we had to do the exact same thing with our baja designs lp6s because these lights are insane bright and those of you that own them know these are crazy bright but that brightness comes at a cost and that cost is electricity so even though they're led and they do use very little current for there are very little amps for the amount of uh light that they emit they still at the end of the day use quite a bit of light so for all four of these lp sixes at 6.5 amps a piece we are at 26 amps for the four lights on the roof and that is over our single uh our single current threshold number whatever it's 20 amps so we're six amps above that and personally i would want to have a separate relay if we're anywhere even close to this if we're at like 16 amps i would start to think maybe we should do an external relay but at 26 amps the decision has been made for us so what i decided to do is just get to the exact same relay these relays are actually really affordable plus a little bit of redundancy goes a long way if i wanted to carry one spare 200 amp relay it would be a replacement for both systems and it gives us the ability to add more lights later on if we want to so uh the next thing i want to talk about is going to be our wire how do you know what size wire to use in what system what i recommend you do is you go on google just type in 12 volt wire sizing chart something along those lines and you're going to come up with a whole bunch of results and they're all going to be about the exact same numbers and that is going to be these numbers over here so for our rock lights 2.4 amps is what the total draw is going to be for the whole system and as you're going to see in these charts the longer distance your last light is away from your source it's going to make it to where you need to upsize the wire more and more the farther you get away from your source so for 0 to 10 amps that would be the range that we're in with 2.4 if we go all the way to 10 to 13 feet which by the way this chart goes way bigger i just had to make it small enough to go in here so i'd say it's probably 15 feet or so from the source to where the last light is going to be in the system and that makes it to where we need 12 gauge wire in order to meet the demand of 12.4 amps and have it travel that long of a distance however and one last thing to consider whenever you're sizing everything is that not all of the you're going to be knocking away amps along the way for that distance so that doesn't mean that we need a 12 gauge wire to go to the last light it just means that you need to use this chart to make the decision on when you neck down that wire because the last light is only 0.4 amps so you get what i'm where i'm going with this you don't have to make it to where you have a 12 gauge wire going from the source all the way to the last light you just need to size it using this chart based on what the data says here and then just make your best judgment so everything that i have bought for this system and everything that i've designed for the system is all based on these charts because i'm not an engineer but these charts make it to your average joe like you and me can safely size an electrical system and make sure that you don't have a bunch of problems or fires in the future [Music] [Music] the first thing i want to hook up is going to be the wiring for the front and rear air lockers this is actually extremely simple there's two wires coming out of each solenoid and you can determine which one is positive and which one is negative so i'm gonna hook up the positive wire for each solenoid into the harness plug that goes to the control box and then i'm going to tie both grounds together and just cram them to the chassis [Music] the next thing i want to connect is going to be our compressor relay to the battery and then our compressors to the relay and then after that i'm gonna move on to all of our lighting and everything that's on the roof and for the roof lighting i'm gonna use that heavy duty relay like we talked about on the drawing board and once i get a game plan of how i'm gonna get all these different wires onto the roof we'll go over what i did and how i overcame that challenge but for now i've got a ton of work to do and so i'm just gonna get to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] [Applause] i promise this is the last time we're going to the white board in this episode i just want to make sure we're all on the same page for each one of these little things that we're going to be installing so now that we've installed everything for uh or everything that i want to use whenever the vehicle is running i want to talk about everything we're going to use while the vehicle is not running and then we're going to go and just install this stuff and then we'll do like a walk around and we're just gonna push buttons and test systems and and just make sure that all works so our overland power that's what we're gonna call this system all is being pulled off of our secondary battery and if you remember whenever we key it off this isolator is going to see a voltage drop and then it's going to isolate the two systems so we're going to go from the battery through a 25 amp circuit breaker and again all this stuff just amazon stuff anybody can get it i'll put it in the shopping cart and the reason i chose a circuit breaker is because i don't have to carry a separate fuse um and i'm protected so if i'm in the middle of a trip and for whatever reason uh this circuit breaker blows on me i can go through and make sure that i'm not grounding out anywhere and i can reset the circuit breaker and then boom my fridge is running again instead of me fumbling around trying to make sure that i have the right fuse or whatever the situation may be i just like circuit breakers for that kind of thing so we're gonna go from a 25 amp circuit breaker through eight gauge wire to a fuse box that we're gonna mount in the rear of the vehicle and this fuse box is gonna then uh supply power to each one of these systems individually and it's gonna give us a layer of protection on the small scale so if like we have a if we ground we have a ground somehow somehow our power wire grounds itself on the way to power this light it's just going to pop a little fuse it's not going to take everything out but if we have a really big problem and our 8 gauge wire wears through somewhere else we have this second layer of protection with this 25 amp breaker and that's going to help keep us from like catching on fire the stuff that we really don't want to happen in the middle of nowhere so the way that i size this 8 gauge wire is just using those charts we talked about earlier this this 8 gauge wire is good for up to 35 amps at 22 feet the vehicle is less than 22 feet long we won't have that much wire but that's we have a built-in buffer so uh but our breaker should pop 10 amps before we reach that maximum amp rating and we were not even 22 feet long so you see what i'm what i'm getting at here so we have two different things that are tied into our camping um our camping wiring that isn't necessarily camping related but kind of camping adjacent and the reason that i did this is just for simplicity of install so our micro mobile radio is gonna be tied into our fuse box just because i don't like those little tube fuses i never carry spares and i don't want it to be like tucked in a dash or something and i have to like if the radio goes out i'm having to like check a fuse under there i would way rather just go pop the golden window look at this thing and then see if i've got a blown fuse it's so much simpler so we're gonna wire this directly into the fuse box and what's kind of nice about that anyway instead of it being on the system that relies on the vehicle running is that if i'm waiting for someone to get to camp i can leave the radio on and then if they're getting close and i start to hear them then i can communicate with them because this is just all pulling off of our secondary battery the other system that's going to be not really camping related that we're tying into this fuse box because of ease of install is going to be our air controller so we've got the air switch controller that controls the rear air bags and one it's it doesn't use a whole lot of juice and it's only just enough juice to like open and close the solenoid and that's it so that's not really going to wear the battery down anyway but for the same reason i just want to keep it simple and have a fuse for that right here in the back of the the vehicle the way that i sized all this up is i just added the amps for each device all up to make sure that i had a big enough wire to supply these different systems the biggest one of course is going to be our fridge it's a fridge freezer combo it's air b 0 fridge thing is super rad it actually doesn't use a whole lot of power but whenever it turns on that compressor it spikes pretty high so it spikes i've seen spikes as high as uh up to 12 amps and i just want to make sure that we're protected and so i sized everything accordingly so then we have two lights that we're gonna install back there under the goldwing windows i say gold wing under the goal wing windows and it's basically these little baja designs lights are just like they're rock lights but they have their own independent switch so there's no relays or any of that i literally just wire this into our fuse box and then whenever i open up that goal wing window and i need it i just push the button then whenever i don't need it push the button again and it turns off super simple and again these are only 0.4 amps so these barely draw anything anyway and then we're going to have this little 12 volt charge port so if i want to charge something overnight um or this is actually going to just be our 12 volt power 2 for the fridge but either way i've got a way that i can turn this on and off if i just want to kill the fridge whenever the uh whenever we're done with the trip i can just kill this whole system right here with the switch so this is just a nice way to simplify everything again more amazon goodies nothing special here so the first thing that i want to do is i want to can make our connection well i need to build a bracket i guess to mount our breaker and then we're going to make that connection from the battery to the breaker and then we're just going to start running wire back and tying everything together [Music] i like the way our brushed aluminum bracket turned out on the passenger side so i'm going to replicate that for something a little bit smaller on the driver's side to hold this breaker up out of the way and give it a clean place to mount [Music] mounting this gm rs radios just as easy as you think it would be the only thing that i'm going back and forth on is where to locate the antenna i think for now i'm gonna locate it on the hood because the bracket that i have makes it super easy to do that but long term i might figure out a way to get this on the roof i decided to repurpose this factory power port so instead of being wired into the ignition it's just wired into the secondary battery like everything else we're using back here [Music] [Music] like we talked about on the whiteboard we've got juice coming from the battery into our circuit breaker so now we should have power to everything and then that wire runs through the firewall where we have that grommet that we installed at the beginning of the video and it powers all of our various systems i guess we could start with our little air solenoid here you can hear the relays clicking so that is going to be able to fill and empty our rear airbags and we can check this guy this turn on boom we've got power so that's good news so we can keep working our way back uh i know i'm gonna get questions about why i chose this unit and everything i like this one because it's got all the controls and everything right here in your hand and so you can remote mount these guys like the seats can actually be forward a little bit and it's going to be kind of hidden back there and i don't have to access anything on it to turn this on and off that's why i chose this specific model and we are actually uh we have an affiliate program going with midland so if you guys are interested in these make sure you click the link in the description anyway the wire runs underneath this piece of trim right here well the couple of wires but the big one that powers all this stuff the eight gauge wire runs underneath all this and then back into here and to the fuse box just like we talked about and this fuse box is impossible to film when you're working on it but there you can you can kind of see it a little bit so i've just got everything tied in i haven't labeled any of it yet but this cover comes off we've got access to all of our fuses right here and in theory everything should be on so let's check it all out we're going to start with this light boom we've got a light it's very exciting oh and actually we've got a voltage meter over here i'm curious what it says 12.9 i'd say that's pretty good we'll zoom in so you guys can see that too so this has a voltage reading on it which is awesome because it's just a convenient way to check the voltage of the battery as we're camping and whatnot um also i ended up plugging the fridge into a factory um it's a it's a factory like not i want to say usb port sorry i'm so tired guys uh factory cigarette lighter charge port back here and this usually goes into the main battery but i pulled the wire and everything off the back and i plugged this into the system that we just installed so that way i took advantage of something that was already here we wired it into our new system and now i have two of these 12 volt sources so i can plug this into something else in the future if i want but basically our fridge is just gonna be permanently plugged into this bad boy so anyway turn that off um i guess we go see if the fridge works looks like it's on to me sweet it's running so the other thing would be our other light what else do we have to check guys i think that's pretty much it isn't it yeah pretty simple all the wires tucked in nice and tidy i'm very pleased with what we put together here today there is a couple more things that i do want to address because i know i'm going to get questions on it and one would be our our drl's our daytime running lights which is for me it's just chase lights so if we key this on we push drl i know i'm gonna be getting questions about this i put some extra lights back here nice and high and they're amber and this one's it's halfway behind this but uh it you can still see it i mean it's still emitting light up there my hands yellow but anyway the reason that i did this is because when you're going off-road and you're in a group and you're just hauling on these dirt roads it gets really hard to see the guy in front of you because of all the dust and so i tied all this in i tied these two lights back here uh into this drl system just to make it so if someone's trying to follow me they can see and they don't like run into me because they think that they're just driving into dust and they're actually driving into nate same thing up here i've got these lights there's a these this is like a two-stage light so we have the really bright led and then we have the backlit portion and i have the backlit portion tied into this drl system and same thing up here so if someone is leading the group and i'm behind them it's going to be harder for them to lose me if they look back and they see these lights they know that i'm still following so it's just one of those things you don't necessarily have to have but i really wanted to have whenever i built this system let's do one quick walk through under the hood so i can show you guys exactly how all this came together it's so hard to make this much wire clean but i did my best just giving everything long swoops you know i think these brackets look halfway decent they at least match the other aluminum stuff that i've built and yeah it all seems to be functioning so far so we'll see once we actually do a real off-road test i don't get questions about these i don't like this style connection into the battery but this is what came with the vehicle and i forgot to order uh the upgraded like something that we could actually like crimp so there's there's gonna be some more work that i'm gonna be doing behind the scenes in the future to clean some of this up but in the meantime we at least have a functional electrical system thank you very much for making it all the way to the end of this video these are such a labor of love for me i don't get a lot of views on any of the stuff where i'm building like this people usually like to watch my adventure but i like to get this information out there so if you do enjoy any of this work that i'm doing here in the shop make sure you hit the thumbs up button every once in a while and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already because that really helps us with the algorithm it just helps the growth of our channel overall if you wanna help support us in other ways you can go to thedirtlifestyle.com we have t-shirts hats netgators all the stuff i tell you about at the end of all these videos and my wife just redid the website with a web developer and they did a beautiful job so if you haven't seen it yet definitely go over our website and check it out we have a patreon link there as well if you want to follow me on social media i'm at dirt lifestyle nate we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 125,008

Rating: 4.9874897 out of 5

Keywords: dual battery install, dual battery system, air compressor, dual battery, onboard air compressor, onboard air tank, dual battery setup, dual battery system installation, off road extreme 4x4, arb compressor wiring, arb locker wiring, arb air locker wiring, rock lights install, rock lights, rock lights on truck, rock lights jeep, rock lights on silverado, rock lights install jeep, how to wire multiple off road lights, how to wire multiple off road lights to one switch

Id: pb7U2JPDvqM

Length: 33min 44sec (2024 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021