Time to hook up the charging circuit from the truck.
I originally thought that I would be running cables from the alternator or something but of course they are already there . . . as far as the truck battery anyway.
So all I need to do is pick off the +ve and -ve from the battery bank on the chassis.
So the heavy duty cables are run up into the house through a couple of waterproof glands fitted to a plate covering the horrible hole left over from earlier temporary cables.
Which went something like - make the original hole bigger
screw the plate up from underneath with a couple of holes for the glands
The third hole is for reversing camera and body clearance light cables.
Seal it up with a little bit of paint
Poke the cables through the glands and push the big grey Anderson plug together. These are special plugs designed to carry heavy DC currents. This one is rated at 125 amps. The plug is there of course for when the body has to be taken off the chassis (which will have to happen once or twice more for final sealing and new springs).
The other pieces in the cable are an 125amp fuse and a voltage sensitive controller which disconnects the starting batteries from the house batteries until the starting batteries are fully charged and then the surplus goes to the house batteries. At the moment the truck alternator is only rated for 40 amps but the system has been designed so that it can be doubled in output to 80 amps. That is just enough to run the air conditioner so with the added 10 amps from the solar panels (in theory) it is enough to air condition the house while travelling without using the batteries at all! At the moment with every thing topped up it will deliver about 36 amps to the batteries. Interestingly enough the voltage isolator setting is slightly less than the house battery voltage when fully charged and the truck batteries are slightly older and less effective than the house batteries so when you stop the house batteries reverse charge the truck batteries until they reach the isolator setting when it all disconnects. In practice that prevents the house batteries from being able to rest fully charged unless I turn the truck batteries off manually (there is a switch to do that) but it does reinforce the theory that all batteries should be of the same age and use pattern in the one installation so they don't all get dragged down to the weakest battery.
It just occurred to me that as the truck is again going to the electrical installers tomorrow I had better restrain the fridge temporarily as it is now sitting on lovely smooth sliders and will try and destroy them as I am driving tomorrow.
The simplest way is to screw a couple of these weirdly named "breeching staples" into the back wall and run a strap through them
with a simple clip in the front and it actually works quite well . . .
it might be a while before it gets replaced with something more sophisticated . . .
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