SIMPLE, AFFORDABLE Dual battery setup that works! EASY DIY 12V tips you’ve NEVER seen before!

if you were to run a fridge in some camp lights in your fall or drive this is the most simple basic 12-volt system that allow you to do that we've put a post up in our forward drive 24/7 Instagram page asking for your 12 volt questions and we're absolutely bombarded with thousands of questions and most of you guys we're really keen to find out the simplest and best bang for buck 12-volt dual battery system you could run in your four wheel drive so we thought we'd put it to the test and show you two very basic setups one of the new car and one an old car plus we're also getting a couple of experts well block tips to make your install so much easier one of the main reasons we've run a 12-volt system in our four-wheel drive it usually cuz we were on a fridge or some other basic 12-volt accessories how long you need that system to run it's usually what determines what 12-volt system you need for many the majority of the camping we do is over a weekend a maximum of two or three nights there might be the odd week-long Frasor trip thrown in there as well and most of us will run one fridge some camp lights and they do charge a phone or a speaker if you fit into this category the good news is you can get away with a really simple 12-volt set up now let's first take a look at some of the gear we'll need starting with the battery this one here is a century AGM hundred amp hour battery now with all our GM batteries you typically get about half the life out of the battery before you need to recharge it so we essentially have 50 working amps we can use now put that in real terms are out in the bush you're right in the fridge that'll give you about two days worth of use before you need to recharge the battery your second battery needs to be a deep cycle battery meaning it'll keep your fridge running much longer than a normal starter battery if you fit in one in the engine bay you need a flooded battery which essentially means it can handle a heater your engine bay if you're running your second battery in the cab or canopy and AGM is best because it's fully sealed and won't leak at all now we add in the charger this will mean you can charge your batteries up when you drive and if you want with solar there's two great options for a simple set up depending on what alternative for drive runs want to know what alternators in your full drive well there's a link in the description that will help you just put in your vehicle details and I'll show you what charger you need now this one here is the iconic SBI 100 isolator from red art now it's fully Australia Mader will cost you under 200 bucks now if you've got an older vehicle with a fixed voltage alternator this would be perfect to do a basic dual battery system most vehicles before 2008 have what's called a fixed voltage alternator which puts out a constant 14 volts of charge a battery however most modern forward drives have smart alternators which vary the amount of voltage it outputs depending on engine temperatures vehicle loads and driving conditions to reduce the load on the engine which saves fuel Isolators need the volts constant to work when a smart alternator drops the voltage output too low the isolator won't kick in and won't charge a second battery if you want to learn more about choosing the right size charger or type a charger for your particular four-wheel drive we covered this in much more detail in this video the link is in the description [Music] this right here is a basic dual battery system or an isolator now look how simply it works you basically have your start battery right here you connect that to your isolator and then you have your second battery over there you've got a ground wire and of course you've got an overwrought wire it's just really really neat now over right wire means that you can repeat the circuit back to the isolator you can have a switch inside your cab now say for some reason you're flat in your start battery you can actually start your vehicle off your secondary battery so over ice the isolator essentially now you also want to fuse this wire here from your start battery I suggest you use a MIDI fuse likewise a fuse in between the isolator and your second battery you've pretty much a fuse just about every single positive wire on your vehicle anyway so that is a basic arm isolator they work really well in all the vehicles that have like a fixed voltage alternator super simple to install yet super effective for older floor drives a 12-volt set up can be as simple as this you then just run your accessories off the second battery keep watching will show you some handy tips on how to do this later in the video now we're going to be installing this little charger right here into the back of the highlife now this one here is a red arc BC DC 12 25 d now it'll charge a second battery at 25 amps it's fully Australian made it's waterproof and it also has solar input so you can run a solar panel on your full drive bladder if you want to as well now we'll be we've got all the basic stuff here we're going to mount this onto a panel in the back of the four-wheel drive and I'm gonna show you or tips to do that properly so you might be thinking why red arc now I'll get along history with red our trucks and I've run them in my forward drives for the last decade I started off with a basic isolator and moved to a VC DC I've had major 30s I'm just about to try out the brand-new red vision now the reason I keep coming back to red arc is they're Australian made and they just work as simple as that I go to some very remote places right around Australia and I just want to know that my 12-volt system is a-okay every single time a turnkey or my full will drive now with when it comes to 12-volt I really really suggest that you get the best system that you can afford because at the end of the day it's one of those things you just don't want letting you down and when you get rid are you down to think twice so we've got everything you need to install these in the back of the Hilux let's get right to it if you want the most basic 12-volt set up for your old or modern forward drive these are your two best options you can get these installed professionally but if you're like us and want to DIY install your 12-volt to save money keep watching because we're going to show you 10 basic tips that'll make the job easier ensure your system works perfectly for as long as you own the vehicle well now's the time we can start the install and get the 12 volt system fitted up in the Hilux now behind me I've got the experts from pinnacle 4x4 now we trust with all the maintenance of our four drives to make sure we can go right around the country incident 3 they're also 12-volt guru so along the way I'm going to be racking their brains so they can count the 10 and the best DLI tips to make sure you can install a 12 watt system in your forward drive the best possible way they're going to show you some of the tools are going to need to do a job like this yourself in the driveway now when it comes to tools there's a few specialty ones they're going to make life so much easier so let's have a look now firstly we've got two set of crimpers now there's two different types of crimpers you can typically get a cheap set like this or a set of crimped wires now I like the crimped ones myself they're a good set a 12-volt soldering iron now you can get one that plugs into the wall but a good quality soldering iron is a must-have for this job a set of side cutters again a good quality set aside cutters wire strippers it just makes a job so much easier now when it comes to seeing exactly what sort of voltage we're getting and charging nails two options here a basic multimedia like this will get the job done no worries this one here is a Tesla probably is a test light a little bit more than the multimeter and the bonus of this test light in particular actually tells what voltage has come in as well as a test light so it's a two-in-one tool which is fantastic but as you can see you don't need a heck of a lot of tools to get the job done properly here's a checklist everything you need to install this basic 12-volt setup charger battery cable positive an earth terminals fuses heat shrink zip ties conduit solver enter some plugs cloth tape or electrical tape now let's take a look at the wiring we'll need to run it from the start battery to the BC DC charger now keeping in mind this readout BCDC is a 25 amp charger so and maximum is going to draw anywhere up to 25 amps with charge even potentially a little bit more so we need to make sure we've got wiring that's going to be able to handle that and also why and that's going to handle the distance between the front and the back because you're going to get voltage drop of course with that sort of distance I'm talking about it out for of only 5 meters worth of distance there of one so you need over engineer the wiring get under engineer the wiring of course he's going to build up a lot of heat and potentially melt the wires melting wires in your engine bay or anywhere around your vehicle is not a good thing trust me it can cause flies and a lot of damage on the vehicle and this one here is our 8 B and s it's write it up to 75 amps now there's going to be super either engineered and also ensure that we're going to get no voltage drop across the vehicle now when it comes to fuses of course we're going to run fuses in this system and a fuse before the red arc BC they see charge up now a lot of people will go with a simple inline blade fuse with a waterproof holder now these have got their applications in for drives but certainly not when you're dealing with high amperage and higher current draws like this for our bc AC charger here so the best fuse that we can go for is a mini fuse if you ever seen one of these please form a really strong connection that's where these differ now you can put a 30 amp fuse into this one no dramas at all but the connection you get with a mini fuse is far superior it doesn't cause excess heat and I've seen a lot of these ones melt when you're running a lot of amperage and current through them that it's not up to the task so always try and run MIDI fuse and that way your system will super safe and very effective never right now I want to demonstrate two common mistakes a lot of people make when they're doing their own 12-volt and they're too very costly mistakes that could actually mean your whole food drive burning to the ground so I want to demonstrate those mistakes the first one is using the incorrect gauge wire so now the way I'm going to demonstrate using the incorrect gauge wire is running a couple of high-powered twelve old accessories off this battery and using a wire that is clearly a lot too small to run there's probably better T amps may be worth of draw coming in here maybe 40 amps and this little wire here simply won't cut the mustard so show you what will happen there's a compressor see straightaway that's getting really really hot so I'll put the compressor on but lights on as well probably running up to 40 amps off that little bit of wire yeah that why there is it's too hot to touch and it's actually starting to melt you can see he fell out that water he can't even touch it yeah I imagine you do that in your own full drive that melts through that could potentially cause a fire in your foot will drive and that's all because use the incorrect gauge wire so whenever you're doing any 12-volt projects working out what everything's going to draw and make sure you're over engineer look at that it's about to burn all the wiring on the vehicle and finally going to show you what happens when you don't have a fuse or you've got a live wire that's not protected and not fused now that is one of the quickest ways you can start a fire in your forward Drive they have a look what happens after that that scares me every time you know just imagine you've got a live wire in the back of your forward drive your forward drivers essentially earth so it's exactly the same as touching a positive on a negative and you're gonna have sparks everywhere and again that'll be the quickest way that your forward Drive will go up in flames placing a few is here we'll make sure that if there is a short that the power is going to stop where the fuse is broken now when it comes to running cables there's a lot of mistakes that a lot of people make and I'm gonna be running a lot of cables when you do your 12 volt system one of the the big things to do is of course run conduit on your cable especially any cables that are gonna be underneath the chassis like this one here this one's going up the headboard onto the roof of the canopy and coming down into the canopy I really recommend use conduit from just about every single wire going through your vehicle now underneath the chassis places like that why that's just bare on its own now well it does have some protection it's not enough for four-wheel drive use especially now imagine this is something unless either your four-wheel drive is a lot of metal under there there's a lot of sharp edges so if that wire we're sitting there rubbing on a bit of metal and you know fast-forward over five ten thousand kilometres you can imagine there's already damage on that wire that will go through in no time at all now the way to protect that of course is just feed some conduit over that wire and therefore you're never gonna have an issue so the general rule of thumb is if you're running any wires in your food drive make sure they're protected make sure they have some form of conduit over them it looks a lot neater but more importantly it's gonna last a lot longer so conduit is very important obviously but getting the length of the cable right in the first place is really important you can see the guys here have got excessive cable because the last thing they want to do is run a little bit too short and don't have to put a joiner or character in there that's not very neat end up not a very good way to run your cable so it's a good idea to have a look on your stairs here to make sure that this warren is nowhere near the bottom side of the chassis so therefore it is really bush proof when you go off-road and you scrape across some rocks and sticks and stuff like that nothing's gonna get hung up in fact these guys are gonna actually run on top of the shoddy rail so it's really protected and then use cable ties every 30 centimeters to make sure there's nothing hanging down and this system will be very very bush proof [Music] now oricon a 12-volt panel is a great idea and they're very simple to make just using a bit of plywood in a bit of marine carpet like this one in the back of the 79 series here or the one in the back of that vile ox of course this one's got a lot more stuff on it and when you come time to making your own 12-hour panel it's best to try and make it of course outside the vehicle so that step number one is to get all the accessories that you're gonna run on your panel and lay them out onto that board and try and have a think about I access my canopy from here where you're going to put the accessories so everything is very logical and easy to use so of course I want my switches for all my lights right here so it's easy to get to as soon as I open that County thing door laying it all out on the board outside the vehicles a good way to ensure that everything is laid out very nicely then of course once you mount everything onto that panel do all the wiring that you can do outside the vehicle therefore you put it all back in and it makes it nice and easy so you're not trying to deal with really tight and confined spaces in the back of a four-wheel drive this needs to go right near your second battery the reason you need the charger close to the second battery is voltage drop you can imagine if the charger is a long way from the second battery all that power it is outputting will be less by the time it gets to the battery meaning it won't charge as fast by putting it close to the second battery you ensure there's no voltage drop and your battery will charge as fast as possible so we're going to mount this one on a panel very close to the second battery which is inside the canopy here you know the other thing you need to consider is where you going to mount your fuses now if this one here is the battery charger is going in the canopy here of course it's going to be getting charged from your alternator and your start battery so you don't need a fuse essentially a mini fuse in the engine bay as close to where the source of the power is as possible you'll also need another fuse in between your charger and this battery here and of course from whatever you use your secondary battery to charge so say about something like a fridge or set of camp lights you'll need fuses on that as well so I've sent you their need three lines of fuses before you can run something like a fridge [Music] now one thing you'll notice when you say the boys do all their 12 art work is they use a lot of heat shrink and they use it really well and you should get the habit of using heat shrink and all your 12-volt jobs because it really insulates it protects a lot of connections or an exposed wire so it doesn't short out there's a trick to getting it right though especially the battery terminals as Steve taught me so you want to use the heat shrink to get it up nice and close to that terminal but make sure it doesn't interfere with the connection that the term is going to have with a battery the other thing you'll notice as well as these guys actually use a marine grade heat shrink now the difference between that and some of the cheap stuff you'll buy is this actually has a glue inside and that allows no moisture to come through that's a great level connection now and that's actually you can see the glue at the back of this means no moisture is going to get up in there and that is a really good seal another connector that's going to be very handy too especially if you're trying to run power into a canopy is something like this Glen not here now what it does of course is you're able to get a very waterproof seal when a wires coming from the outside of your canopy onto the inside [Music] ignition power is run to accessories that should only turn on when you turn on your vehicle on in modern vehicles the BC DC charger needs to know when the car is on and the alternator is running so can let the power into the second battery so you need to run a wire to a source of ignition power now chances are if you've got a new vehicle like this Hilux here it's got a smart alternator now if you've got a smart alternator your battery charger is going to require an ignition wire so to tap into your ignition system there's a couple different ways you can do it now one of course which I don't recommend is you can go in through your windscreen wiper motor you go through your cigarette socket look you get an ignition feed from that no drivers at all the problem is of course if you do put something in your cigarette socket and blow a fuse well you're also going to blow out the ignition for your charger so therefore your charger is not going to work now a really neat way of tapping into your ignition is to actually find in your factory fuse box in the engine bay usually a source from your ignition and then use one of these fuse jumpers so it runs two fuses the factory fuse will go down the bottom here and they'll be a fuse to the new which will go to your battery charger to give it a feed from the ignition now if you've got an older vehicle that doesn't have a smart alternator it's got a fixed voltage alternator well you won't even need to worry about running any sort of ignition feed one of the main things that'll let a whole 12-volt system down is a very poor quality earth and another thing you need to remember is when you're earning your battery charger Earth it to the exact same place your earth your second battery so in this case on this Hilux we've earth everything back to the chassis so make sure you pick a spot on your show see where there's no dirt or mud you clean it up nice use the proper size wiring over-engineer it so your earth will never let you down all right the next tip we want to talk about is soldering versus crimping now I've got Steve with me because Steve's actually taught me a couple of things here today and look this is a topic that will divide a lot of people how to get a good connection on your 12 volt system and this there are wrong and right answers no doubt about it and we'll go through a couple of the different ways that Steve reckons will give the best connection now Steve's a big believer of crimping / soldering and the reason is right is because and it makes perfect sense is a solder of course the solder is not designed to flex at all so if you've got a forward drive that's doing a lot of you know corrugations a lot of hard trips up in Cape York and stuff like that the first place typically where 12 12 ops isn't going to come apart is in the connection and if your soldering well that's going to get brittle in this crack gets brittle and can crack at that point just doesn't have the Flex that the copper has copper has so so technically the best Bush proof join between two wires you can get is crimping really good crimping so so double crimping using the right terminals and will soon learn as well exactly what gear we need to make sure that you know I'm talking about the right type of heat shrink you know Steve is using a marine grade heat shrink because it's got a glue inside it and it performs just a better seal as so many little tips you can get out of this which makes your whole 12-volt system come apart and be a lot more Bush proof we talk about these battery logs just quickly now stevia's crimp these armed with side cutters he uses side cutters didn't get the feel right and he's got 20 years experience under he still so keep that in mind you can actually get a proper tool to crimp these so you can actually you know it makes it easier for those of us that don't have the experience and that's something I'd do I'd probably use the right crimper if I could another little tip as well is there's a little hole in the back here you can actually get a little bit of solder down the back of these battery terminals as well for an even better connection that's just at the top you just want to solve adjust the top of that connection yeah and if you get the solder to go right down through the cable that of course is going to get a brittle connection and you don't want that so this is this can actually move around a lot and you can see there's nothing stopping those boys from moving around not that they're going to move around but you're doing this right and just want to make it through at last when we come to the other end you got a smaller gauge wire we're gonna connect two wires together here this is basically just a standard connector but what I like about these connectors is it's got heat shrink that's right built into it they're a heat shrink um connect up with the glue internally as well to seal the connection as well so if it is in a you know moisture content then that will actually seal so that's really clever little idea and again these are crimped and not soldered now you could you could solder two wires together and then use heat shrink that's that's one way of doing it but again that solder of course is going to be quite a brittle and stiff connection and we're just crimping everything here and using heat shrink on every single connection so there's no bit of wire that's exposed and that is a very good little setup mate and if you follow those little tips through your whole 12-volt build you'll have a very Bush pro setup and it's going to last the tested form so even other thing mate I've noticed that you've used cloth tape which is the first for me the first time I've actually seen it over electrical tape now a lot of people use label tape there's nothing wrong with that but this is just once that better isn't it yeah it's just a just another step up sticks to itself really well rather than the traditional electrical tape and we use it in a lot of ways but it's really great for finishing the ends of your ends of your conduit as well very our style of doing it wrap you can do rough you cross the tape around the back first run that over it and then run across tape over it that finishes the end of you dude up really nicely as well so that's really clever in a way because you basically you can seal the the wire from the conduit and also it won't pull through as well that's right it's got an RCA connection there too connected very clever Mike tell us what you think do you solder or crimp your terminals and wiring tell us in the comments below [Music] one thing you'll notice about this 12-volt setup is we've used Andersen plugs to connect the wiring from the vehicle to the canopy so if this guy ever wants to take his canopy off maybe his tray you'll be able to do that by simply unplugging the andersen plugs I also find that anderson plugs have a really good connection and you should really get to the habit of using anderson plugs anywhere you can when you're doing a 12-volt system so not just on the main wires they go into them from the vehicle I like to even cut off the cig socket on the back of the fridge and replace that with an innocent plug because I find that even if you go across corrugations and really rough roads that that will never really sleep an Edison plug has a great connection it's also rated 50 amps as well so it doesn't matter what size wires you're running through the Edison plug you know it's going to be up to the task I just walked past Steve Andy show me a cool little trick about manning a cig socket and a USB socket in the back here for drive so I thought I'd pass it on now look how he's run these wires and one of the problems that he finds with a lot of people is they'll just run there was a look odds are the same I'd run the wires just straight through the hole at the back here but he's actually loop them over the mounting points so if you do manage to pull on the back of those wires you're not going to pull the terminals off the back of the seat or the USB socket now another thing as well I would typically just run those together on the same fuse but arm stays actually run two separate wires off the back here with two separate fuses he's labeled both so he knows exactly which ones which when he's installing and the reason is now say your fridge is running off the cig socket you charge your maybe your mobile phone off the USB USB trips for some reason you're not going to lose your fridge power so keeping everything separately fused is the way to go and I reckon that's a neat little trick mate and just a little cable tie at the back here as well just further Bush proofs that that is going nowhere [Music] and just like that we're done how good is that setup but I know you're sitting at home thinking what's that gonna set me back well let's run the numbers if you've got an old Ford drive you're looking at about $600 with an isolator with a new Ford drive it'll be more around that thousand to twelve hundred dollar mark for everything you need from start to finish yes you can do it cheaper and can get cheaper components but what we are showing you here is what it'll cost to do right and insure your 12-volt system lasts as long as you have your four wheel drive we're big believers in buying quality when it comes to 12-volt gear how did it cost effective and reliable 12-volt setup is a must-have in just about every vehicle if you're serious about getting off the beaten track now we've got the radar system wired up properly in here so we know it's going to last an absolute lifetime some of the 12-volt skills we went through and demonstrated during this vehicle would be able to use to do your very own DIY projects at home save yourself a bunch of money plus you'll also be able to use some of those skills to diagnose and repair your vehicle out in the bush the whole topic a 12-volt automotive wiring can be very complex now if we've haven't covered something properly or you've got a couple of questions make sure you put them in the comments below we'll try to get to each and every one of you guys also if you're interested in the red eye products that we used in this build you can find out more information and purchase those at red our comm that I you and just remember you can purchase some worldwide they have some of the best twelve Aki you can put in a four-wheel drive and when it goes with anything automotive an 12-volt iOS a buy the best that your money can afford and it'll never let you down so thanks again for watching this show and make sure you like this video and also subscribe to the best for driving channel on YouTube for drive 24/7

Channel: 4WD 24-7

Views: 1,011,229

Rating: 4.9108529 out of 5

Keywords: 4wd, 4x4, offroad, toyota, nissan, hilux, patrol, landcruiser, adventure, camping, fishing, diesel, petrol, shaun whale, graham cahill, dirty 30, shorty, gq, gu, 80 series, 40 series, 60 series, 79 series, troopy, 4wd action, 4wd 247, 4wd 24/7, dual battery setup, dual battery install, 12v setup 4wd, 12v canopy setup, 12v control box, 12v wiring basics, 12v camping setup, 12v, dual battery system, 12v fridge, ranger, 12v setup, dual battery wiring, redarc, projecta

Id: pRmadnYU-mE

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020