I recently restored the images on a couple of old topics of mine that are related to this one that you may find useful.
I use the battery in my camper while we are driving to run the fridge in AC mode from an inverter. It’s an intermittent load of about 28 amps when the cooling unit is operating. I’d done this for several years successfully with my two previous trucks. Our traveling and camping style make it necessary for me to always be ready to dry-camp for at least 2-3 nights, so having a fully charged battery (or at least close) at all times is a must.
The first was a topic I started when I bought my current truck. It has a lot of unrelated info in it, but towards the end, I show what I did to beef-up the charging circuit with bigger wires on the truck so that it would charge the camper battery better.
Keep in mind that at that point, I was working with the “knowledge” that doing what I had done on the two previous trucks would work just as well. Maybe even better than before because I was going to up-size the wire gauge to 4 AWG. Short story is; of the three trucks (‘95 F350, 2010 F450, 2016 F450) guess which one I got the poorest performance from? My current truck, the 2016.
Buying a New TC HaulerThe second topic was started after finally accepting that the truck ECM was not going to allow me to get adequate charging, regardless of how big I made the wires going to the camper. Part of the problem was my reluctance to make a direct connection to the truck alternator as I had done on the two previous trucks. I could see that there were considerable differences in the charging systems between the 2010 and 2016 F450’s. But in the long run, connecting my charging wires to the truck batteries was exactly what was needed to install a DC-DC charger. This second topic shows the charger install, and upgrading the charging wires in the camper”s umbilical, and to the camper battery. The OEM wires in the camper were 8 AWG, and I went to 4 AWG.
Redarc DC-DC Battery Charger:):)
