Electrickery

We have been slacking a little on our updates, so there are a few to come over the next few days.  The first of which is electrics...

This car is going to be wired... literally.  We are a team comprised of techno geeks so going anywhere without at least 3 electronic devices each is unheard of.  As a result this van will be toting around phones, gps, CB radio, powered cool box, cameras, plus anything else we want to fling in to the mix.

Quite a bit of tech, so we need a way to wire it in.  The current cigarette lighter is only rated to 10 or 15 amps. Daisy chaining everything out of the dash like that would look terrible, likely be a fire hazard, and also be prone to breakage.  We needed to do it properly,  so the first step is to run a decent wire into the cabin from the battery. We still had some of the heavy duty 30amp cable we used in the GTO, so out comes the drill...


To get a feed from the battery requires getting through the firewall.  Finding a location that doesn't have stuff on both sides is always tricky without stripping things right back, but in this case we managed to score an easy win.  Due to the design of the Previa, the internal re-circulation for the heater goes up through the dashboard, out through a hole in the firewall, then back in via a gate that selects between recirculate and external air.  This means that there's a direct line to the foot-well via that hole.  All we needed to do was get a cable into the air-box and run the cable into the cabin that way.  Simples.

With the cable run, I hooked up a 30 amp fuse at the battery end as a safety backup, and then moved to the cabin for the rest of the work.

Next we have the problem that if its wired directly from the battery, that means its always-on.  Not ideal, as that could end up running our battery down, so we needed a way to switch it on/off.  We could do this manually but why bother when tech can solve the problem.  A company call smartcom produce an automatic leisure battery charger which basically switches on once the car alternator is producing at least 14v, and cuts the power as soon as that voltage drops below that mark.  This means we don't need to remember to turn it off after a long day of driving.

I mounted the unit under the dash so that it was accessible if required, but out of the way most of the time.  The unit takes the feed direct from the battery fuse, then has two feeds out the otherside, one goes up to the dashboard 4-way socket, and the other goes back to another fusebox which distributes power to the rest of the car.

As this isnt intended to be a long term solution, the effort involved in routing cables is limited, but I have tried to keep it mostly neat where you can see it, and tuck it away under plastics and carpet where possible.  The fuse box is mounted to the wood (installed in an earlier blog) and its a bit heath-robinson, but it works, and shouldn't catch fire... we hope.

As we wont be sitting on the middle east, I have routed a 4-way through the seat-back to allow charging of phones, cameras, and tablets.  In front, the 4-way mentioned earlier is mounted using double-sided tape to the dash.  This will power the GPS, and some cameras to help us document the run.

Lastly, we had a couple 12v LED flood lights lying around, so to aid the camping (should it be dark when we arrive) I mounted two to the wooden rack in the back.   One on the side, and one to illuminate the rear.  They are powered through a switch just above the server case.

There are a few other things that will get wired in, including the coolbox and the CB. That will get documented in a future blog.