If I buy and wire in a DC DC smart battery charger then I probably won’t exceed anything on the alternator, right?
I would just run out of juice if I’m drawing more power from my secondary battery than it’s charging. Is that correct? From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 6:49 PM To: Animal Farm <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Road Trip Battery If you install the isolation diodes, then yes. But that only prevents a dead starter battery. If you have 3-4 devices all using 50 watts, and you have a 50 amp alternator, you only have 600 watts total. The air conditioner blower is going to take probably 200 watts, the onboard electronics perhaps 100 watts. So maybe 300 excess. I wouldn’t count on even that much. I have seen aux connectors fused at 15 amps so that is 180 watts. My dell has a 90 watt power supply. So two of those running non stop? From: Jaime Solorza Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 6:32 PM To: Animal Farm Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Road Trip Battery Not at all...Pep Boys and others sell a simple to install dual battery inverter and heavy duty fuse system. A good quality inverter would work well and no big thing to install. I use this for wiring up inverters for vans and buses to a solenoid to start inverter when vehicle is started. Prevents draining battery.. Jaime Solorza On Jul 11, 2017 6:14 PM, "Sterling Jacobson" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I've got a cross country family trip from Utah to New York coming up and I want to wire up a secondary battery to my Toyota Minivan. I know, maybe I'm crazy, but I want to be able to run all our electronics on the trip, including maybe a computer for serving up video (another topic). I want it on a secondary system so I get more power and don't kill the main car battery. From what I gather I would need a sealed battery to avoid fumes (mostly). I would need a some sort of control system so the battery can charge from the alternator, but not drain the main battery. I need high gage wire between the batteries/alternater along with fuse, and also between secondary battery and large inverter for AC power. Probably not possible to shove another battery under the hood of the mini-van, but I haven't checked. Is this a silly idea?
