Electrical Anderson Plug Questions

[Rockyrambo84]

Hi Guys,

Got a couple of questions which have been puzzling me. I recently bought a secondhand 2010 Expanda 17.56.2 and it has been fitted with a 7 Pin Plug and Anderson Plug. It seems that the Anderson plug has been fitted straight to the fridge as I checked the connection and in the mess of wires under the van the Anderson plug wires connect straight to the fridge cables. I confirmed this with my multimeter. The questions I have are:

1) with my car idling I was reading just under 14v at the Anderson plug on the back of the ute but I was reading just under 13v at the connection from the Anderson plug where the fridge connection was made at the junction of all the cables underneath the van as the cables come out of the chassis. This seems like a fairly big voltage drop over the lender of 2-3m? Do you think i should re-wire the wiring from the fridge junction to the anderson plug? Also would the Anderson plug cables be run seperate to the trailer cablling otherwise it will be a pain in the ass to re-run the cabling through the chassis am I best of running it externally in cable covering?

2) can I splice this connection at the back of the Anderson plug where it connects to the fridge wiring at the back of the chassis so that I can take a new connection to the 100amphr battery in the van and charge the van as I drive? Or do I need to run a secondary set of wires and splice them at the Anderson plug itself? I want a new connection from the Anderson plug to the battery as I want to get a set of external solar panels which I can plug in to the van via the Anderson plug to keep the battery charged when free camping.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Nick

 

[achjimmy]

Hi nick and welcome.

If it was like our 2011 model they ran my requested Anderson plug wire to the batteries in 6mm auto which is barely 4.5mm sq. I replaced both battery and fridge run with 13mmsq and the fridge would freeze down off the tug. If you are loosing it down to 13v that's probably not to bad but if you wanna up the cable size it can't hurt. I ran the 13mm from an Anderson until near the fridge and terminated it on to a self resetting breaker then run the 4.5mm through a fuse to the fridge say 250mm run.

If I understand your second question you wanna also charge the batteries? I ran separate circuits from different batteries in the tug. It was explained to me that the draw of the fridge on 12v would stop you ever getting decent charge through to the batteries sharing the same cable as the fridge? Others can comment and I know some run a DC to DC charger, good luck