Arctic Fox Wiring/Ammeter
After hours of tracing wires, calling northwood and google'ing I finally was able to resolve an issue I was having with my 2013 Arctic Fox 990 not charging the house batteries via the truck. What a fr...
Forum Discussion
Golden_HVAC wrote:
I have a 'E-Meter' in my motorhome that I installed myself. .... It is sold as the "Trimetric" now.
The E-meter, which was also sold as a Link 10, was never related to Bogart Engineering, which makes the Tri-Metric meter.
They (Bogart and Cruising Equipment, maker of the E-Meter) are two totally separate meters and companies. Bogart never took on the E-meter.
Here's the "correct" evolution of the product (The E-Meter and Link 10):
The E-Meter was designed and manufactured by a company in Seattle called Cruising Equipment Co. (aka, CECO)
Cruising Equipment and Heart Interface teamed up, and were later owned by the same parent company. They developed products together, one such product was the Link 2000, which was a 2 bank amp hour monitor and a remote panel for an inverter.
CECO rebranded the E-Meter as a Link 10 for Heart Interface.
In the early 2000s, Xantrex (now also known as Schneider Electric) bought Heart Interface, CECO, Statpower and Trace Engineering. All 4 companies were in the Pac NW, with Statpower being in Canada, the other 3 in Washington.
The E-Meter / Link 10 evolved to the LinkLite and the LinkPro.
Xantrex LinkLite
Why do I know all of this? Because I used to work for Heart Interface. I also own a Link 10.
Back in the day, when I worked at Heart, The Tri-Metric meter was the only product that competed with the various amp-hour monitors that CECO manufactured.
In regards to the OP's questions:
Install the shunt as close to the battery as possible. I personally would install it in the battery compartment. That's where my shunt is.
Installing 3 ammeters is overkill. All you need is one. One will tell you everything that's going in to or out of the battery, regardless of the source of power, or the load.
Me personally, I'd go with a LinkLite. Since it's an "amp hour" monitor, it will read your battery like a fuel gauge.
I have not upgraded the charging wire between my truck and camper, and I can tell you the charging current while the truck is running is pretty minimal. My last trip, even with batteries that were below 11 volts, the small wire and resulting voltage drop across that wire only resulted in a charging current of about 5-7 amps according to my Link 10.
