Henry's Blog

[Rok_Dr]

Nothing to do with Henry, but I thought I’d share a pic of his garage companion, Lady Penelope all ribboned up for my son’s wedding last week.

Cheers
Steve

 

[MrMike]

Nothing to do with Henry, but I thought I’d share a pic of his garage companion, Lady Penelope all ribboned up for my son’s wedding last week.

View attachment 7886782

Cheers
Steve

I had that exact model in white with the 3.6lt in it

 

[Rok_Dr]

Battery Box Controller
The next step in my auxiliary battery box solution is a DCDC charger controller box.

I’m a fan of the quality brands, Victron and Redarc and have had a good experiences with both including the Redarc RedVision vehicle management system fitted to my camper trailer. For my use case and to keep things compact I wanted a combined DCDC/solar charger which ruled out Victron. Looking at the Redarc options I rather liked their recently released BCDC Alpha which comes in 25 and 50 amp capacities. Compared to their other DCDC chargers it had some nice features including:

• Bluetooth configuration and monitoring.
• Reverse charging ability. You can charge a flat starter battery from the auxiliary and charge the starter from a solar panel once the aux battery is fully charged

Like all Redarc gear they’re not cheap, but the Christmas sales came to the rescue again and I found one at a good price online. Though I didn’t need the extra capacity I went for the 50 amp model as there wasn’t a lot of difference in price and it will give me a bit of future proofing and growth potential if needed.

Ultimately, I decided to make a separate controller box rather than mounting it to the vehicle or the battery box I bought (more to come on this). Taking inspiration from @DennisM’s box (https://www.theineosforum.com/threads/adding-a-third-battery.12417621/post-1333318547) I made a simpler/smaller one as pictured below.

Rather than putting fuses on/in the box I kept things simple and followed Redarc’s recommendation placing the input fuse close to the start battery on the Anderson pigtail I previously installed. On the other side the Auxiliary battery box already has a fuse. One small downside of the Redarc alpha is that they don’t fit a protective cover over the terminals. I used a small strip of scrap neoprene rubber held down with a few dabs of contact cement, which hopefully will stop any accidental short circuits.

Moving on to the ignition sensor wire, I used a mini fuse piggyback tap with a 3amp fuse. The tap had square ended fuse blades so I had to gently file them back to a taper so it could be easily inserted the fuse box.

The next small challenge was finding a fuse in the interior electrical centre that was ignition switched. Ultimately, I tapped into the Power Mirror 5 amp fuse (FI38) position as it is not a critical circuit, only live when the engine was running and critically had enough clearance around it to allow the tap to seat properly.

First test using my 20year old battery box and AGM battery I had given my son worked all to plan. Once I get my lithium battery (its still on back order!) I'll update this thread with the new battery box and my impressions.

Cheers
Steve

 

[Rok_Dr]

Auxiliary Battery Box and Battery

The last ingredients for my 3rd Aux battery set-up.

Firstly the battery box. As you all know there are plenty of options out there ranging from the cheap and basic to expensive with lots of bells and whistles. One that caught my eye was made by National Luna, It looked well made, had a good selection of outlets and provision for a further 4. The only downside was cost. Thankfully the Christmas sales came to the rescue and with a combination of supplier and eBay discounts I was able to get one at almost 40% off. https://www.nationalluna.com/product/12v-auxiliary-battery-box-blue/

Overall I’m very pleased with the box. It’s well-made and has an additional Anderson outlet compared to the pictures the eBay seller posted. Other things that grabbed me included:

• A decent master switch/circuit breaker and socket outlets are protected with blade fuses.
• Thick battery cables.
• A good instruction booklet with details on how to fit up to 4 additional outlets.
• Outlets are angled to make plugging things in easier.
• National Luna also thoughtfully included a wire pigtail so you can make an adaptor to plug a 240v charger into their propriety NL5 input socket on the box. I’ve spliced this to a Victron pigtail for my 240v Victron charger.

The only rough edge I noted was that they used a 5 mm rod for the U bracket to secure the battery but threaded it for 6mm wing nuts. As a result, there’s not a lot of thread for the nuts to grip on. I think I’ve fixed this with some thread tape but if that doesn’t hold, I’ll source a 6mm threaded rod and bend to suit.

Moving onto the battery it is no surprise I chose lithium given the lighter weight and better usable capacity compared to lead acid. Working out what to buy was a bit of a nightmare though as there a lot of snake oil advertising and FUD statements out there by many suppliers. At the end of the day most suppliers use Chinese components in standard size battery cases and slap their brand on the case. Prices are also all over the place but generally are dropping over time. I went with a local supplier ATG batteries who appear to be part of a larger group I’ve historically used. In January they had a new compact size 150amp-hr Bluetooth battery on back order at a very reasonable price so I took a punt and placed the order. Finally received the battery last week and all appears to be working as advertised. https://atgbatteryshop.com.au/products/atg-batteries-150ah-12v-lifepo4-battery-pre-order-now.

Like most generic batteries it uses a Jiabaida BMS and their generic XiaoXiangElectric monitoring app. The app is nothing fancy, but has enough monitoring functionality (ie SOC, power charge/discharge and history graphs) that I don’t need to add a shunt to the box.

Everything worked as expected in my first test using my Victron 240v charger in supply mode @13v output.

Cheers
Steve