Converting an Offroad Camper from AGM to LiFePO4....and this is the manufacturers wiring job.

[MarcoWasRight]

So I bought two 12V 100Ah batteries to replace the AGM's that just never lasted long enough. Always needed to be recharged by the generator.

Unfortunately the camper was stored somewhere I couldn't easily access it. Then my dad bought a storage unit for RV's and cars and shit so I have a nice air conditioned space to work on it.

I e-mailed the company and asked "exactly what model charger do you use in this model camper?" and they told me Progressive Dynamics. So I got the Progressive Dynamics lithium charger hoping for a direct swap. Nope, they used NOCO chargers for a period of time and this camper is one of them. So I can work around that but what to do with this wiring mess? I really don't feel comfortable just putting all this on the lithium batteries...I'd probably have to get longer M8 bolts anyways because I'm actually going to be using real compression lugs and real 2 AWG Windy Nation cable (would have gone for something a little thinner but the 2 AWG is leftover from the other camper that's had 6 AWG and could potentially pull 120A if someone tried to use the air conditioning on the lithium batteries in there....so that needed an upgrade.)

Do I buy a 12V fuse block and properly run everything through a fuse block? Should I run the two batteries to some simple bus bars and then run a single positive and negative to the Progressive Dynamics charger? I'm not too wild about daisy chaining the batteries in parallel. If I go the bus bar route should I just run all the loads off the bus bar? Some of them already have built in fusing.

Bus bar route seems the best way to go. And yes I'm aware the Amazon ones can be junk. Loads on this are pretty small. The charger is a 45A model and I think thats the largest amount of current any one single device will be sending through the bus bars.

 

[rodrick]

Go with buss bars that mess is just asking for connection issues

 

[50ShadesOfDirt]

I think I'd rewire the whole mess, as I imagine all older rv's, campers, & such had about 5 minutes of time on the assembly line to get the wiring task done. I'd bet that many a fire can be traced back to this spaghetti wiring ...

Identify all the loads, trace the wiring as best you can, and design a more modern, (plus 1 to the) bus-bar arrangement, given the layout of your camper.

A bit of time on research, and you could probably find many fine examples of clean wiring, modern elements (bus-bars, fuse blocks, etc.), and so on. Look at BlueSea (I got my busbars from them, when expanding my battery bank), as many boating items can transfer right over to camper use ...

Could be a bunch of "rewiring my camper" articles & youtube vids already out there ... possibly a source of what you could do.

Finally, leave room in the design for other solar energy elements (inverter, etc.), if you think you might expand in that direction ...

Hope this helps ...

 

[Vigo]

I would also rewire the things that are directly hooked to the battery terminals to either a fuse block or bus bar setup. I don't like having an excessive amount of crap hooking directly to battery terminals, especially if it makes it visually cluttered enough that its constantly slowing me down by some small amount every time i work on it because i have to mentally reverse engineer or just recall what i had figured out last time. Labeling things would help but still a half-measure in my opinion, rewiring would be preferable.