One of the first tasks for me was to get the auxiliary battery setup sorted, as well as clean up some of the existing wiring work that had been done. I'm no fan of the Scotchloks ARB provides with their bars, and the spotties that came with the car had been installed pretty... quickly. There was loose, unprotected wiring all over the place, stuff cable tied to the radiator – it just looked pretty agricultural.
For the bullbar, I replaced all of the Scotchloks with soldered and heat-shrunk joins. All the cabling got a bit of protection with split-tube corrugated conduit and cable tied securely in place.
I already owned a Redarc BCDC1225D and was very happy to continue with that approach for the auxiliary power system. The goal was somewhere in the vicinity of 100Ah of storage on board. I had a Century 105Ah AGM battery from the previous vehicle, but I couldn't find anywhere in the engine bay to hold that unit. As many others here have done, I elected to go with Optima Yellow Top D34s. I decided on two of those mounted under the bonnet.
I did a whole bunch of research on battery trays and mounting options and settled on a custom-made stainless steel tray from Tim at Autospark at Osborne Park in WA. It's a beautifully made product and Tim was incredibly helpful on the weekend I installed it. It has provision for the BCDC1225D to mount on the tray nicely too.
Installation was a wee bit fiddly, but mostly because of the mess of other accessory wiring that was already in place. Installing the tray requires you remove the two bolts that hold the coolant reservoir in place and slide the foot of the battery tray under it. The power steering fluid reservoir attaches to a bracket welded onto the tray.
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It's all a pretty tight fit in there! I wound up taking a stanley knife to one of the plastic ribs on the case of the battery so the coolant reservoir didn't rub. This is my problem rather than a design flaw in the tray – I've got a protruding stereo fuse that causes the battery to be further over to the left of the picture than is ideal:
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After a bit of shimmying and jiggling, the tray was installed. The next task for me was to create a bit of a wiring loom from the back of the BCDC. I like to wrap my conduit in cloth tape – it makes the finished product look nice and factory. It does it for me, anyway!
The BCDC1225 is then mounted and the wiring loom fed through. I secured the two batteries in their respective locations and hooked it up. Huzzah! We have battery charging. I love this setup – the Redarc charger does a great job of keeping the batteries topped off, and it comes ready to go for solar. I reckon there's enough juice there to run my 40l Engel for about 3 full days before I need to turn the engine on. That's plenty for my purposes, and particularly with the ability to drop in some extra charge via a rooftop panel, I've basically got unlimited 12v power.
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At this stage of the game, I haven't got a roof rack up there, much less a solar panel and associated wiring, so I've left the solar input lead in the drivers-side battery box, ready to connect up when the time is right.
While I was waiting for the factory battery bracket to arrive from an online purchase, I made up my own hold down bracket from some 6mm threaded rod and galv angle – two pieces of galv on each of the top edges of the battery, and one across the top that is held down to the factory nutserts. That worked incredibly well and provided a rock-solid mount for the battery on the driver's side. When the factory bracket and bolts arrived, I chucked my home-made job out, but regretted it soon after. The factory bracket doesn't quite fit the Optima battery quite right, and it's secure... but just not quite as secure as before. I'll probably shoot down to Bunnings and re-make my home-made bracket one of these days.
The next step was to run auxiliary power into the cabin. I bought a fuse block online and mounted it in the third row storage area where (I believe) the optional rear AC gear would otherwise go:
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6B&S twin core cable was run from the auxiliary batteries to the fuse block in the rear and 4mm twin core feeds were run to various accessory locations. I pulled apart the dash and re-wired the passenger-side cigarette lighter socket to the auxiliary power. All joins get soldered and heatshrinked. An Engel socket was installed in the third row too.
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That's a wrap... for now. There's further 12v work to do yet. I'll replace the standard ARB indicator/parker assembly with an LED equivalent, as well as put some Deutsch connectors on the cables that hook into the system. The passenger-side indicator on the bullbar is dicky and it's due to a crap connection from the low-quality, non-weatherproof connectors ARB use. Lighting still needs to be addressed, and I'll run my campsite lights from the auxiliary batteries. Solar will need to be sorted to. I've got my eye on a Switch-Pros switch panel, but bloody hell, they're expensive. I'll slowly work out all of that too.
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