Category Archives: tow vehicle

Euro 6 Engines, Smart Alternators and Your Leisure Battery…

27 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by in Caravan Electrics, Electrical, Technical, tow vehicle, Uncategorized

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About 12 months ago I wrote a blog post “Is A Euro 6 Engine Killing Your Leisure Battery?” and it got a few comments and generated a number of emails. However 12 months on I’m getting a lot more questions relating to problems around smart alternators and I’ve brought forward this blog post by quite a few months from my planned posting date following a couple of long email exchanges with two readers and a few others.

Right, I think the best way to explain this is to set the stage so to speak.

Bob stores his brand new caravan at home and it is regularly plugged in to the house to run the internal battery charger and a dehumidifier. It’s got a new 110Ah AGM leisure battery and a new motor-mover fitted. The caravan is plugged in at least 24 hours before any trip to get the fridge down to temp prior to stocking it up. Bob also has a brand new car, Euro 6 diesel with a smart alternator. The car is a few months younger than the caravan and he’s never towed a caravan with this car. The tow bar and tow electrics were all fitted by the dealer (or dealers agents) prior to it being purchased. He did tow this caravan on 4 trips with his previous car, same make but 6 years older.

The caravan suitably prepped, fridge down to temperature and stocked. An early morning departure and six hour journey with a couple of stops to catch the Euro Shuttle over to France followed by a couple of hours driving in France to their first destination. On arriving, Bob sited the caravan on to the pitch not using the motor-mover and went about setting up. Mrs Bob knowing a request for a cup of tea was imminent went inside to put the kettle on where she discovered everything in the freezer had defrosted. Bob checked the fridge, it was still set for travelling. For what ever reason he also checked the leisure battery on the caravan’s system… 12.1 volts.

Over the next few days there was a couple of phone calls to their caravan dealer along with a number of emails. For the next three weeks and 2 other camp sites the fridge worked perfectly. On the return trip a similar distance and travelling time to the outward journey ended up when Bob returned home he only managed to get the caravan part way up the drive using the motor mover. He had to plug the caravan into his house overnight to charge the leisure battery enough to allow him to use the motor mover to finally put the caravan into its ‘home’ at the rear of the house.

Within a couple of weeks the caravan was returned to the dealer for extensive checking and the dealer could not find any issues with it or the fridge. They put forward the idea it must be an issue with the car. Bob tended to agree with this as he had taken this caravan on four trips towing with is old car and never had any issues. Three relatively short trips, the other a longer two week trip from the North East down to Cornwall, a similar 8 or 9 hour journey and everything seemed fine.

After a conversation with the main dealer who agreed to have the vehicle towing electrics checked over the next couple of days. The verdict from the main dealer was they could find nothing wrong with the vehicle, everything was working as expected.

Now, this is where I got involved. The above is actually an amalgamation of two very similar emails asking for thoughts and advice. The people involved had vehicles from different manufacturers and the caravans were also from different manufacturers. The only common element was the vehicles were new and had Euro 6 engines with smart alternators. I am not going to mention the vehicle or caravan manufacturers for a couple of reasons…. one, I don’t want to end up on the wrong end of a legal letter and two, I don’t actually think the manufacturer of either is relevant.

What’s Going On?

Luckily for me Bob is recently retired but knows his way round an AVO 8 being an apprentice TV repair man for Redifusion back in the day when valves were king. (Just as an aside, I bought my first AVO 8 back in 1976 and paid £8 for it. It was Ex REME in a leather case. I purchased it from MAZEL RADIO on London Rd in Manchester. Anyone from Manchester of a certain age will know Mazel Radio).

To cut a long story short over a period of a couple of weeks we proved that when hitched up, as soon as the smart alternator went into eco mode, there was a current flow up to about 4.5 to 5 amps FROM the leisure battery TO the car. This only stopped and reversed when the electrical load in the car caused the vehicles ECU to turn on the alternator’s output. Furthermore we determined that with the caravan hitched up, the period the alternator was in eco mode was also longer than when unhitched. Although we could not prove this with definitive evidence, this would also support the reverse current flow from the caravan to the vehicle that we were seeing as the caravan leisure battery was now supporting the vehicle battery.

Now there were a few questions that were buzzing round my brain….

  • Why didn’t the caravan habitation relay drop out when the smart alternator went into eco mode to stop this reverse flow?
  • Why didn’t the dedicated tow electrics strop this reverse flow?
  • Why didn’t the vehicle ECU knowing a trailer was hitched stop the alternator going into ECO mode?
  • If the ECU put the alternator into eco mode why didn’t it drop the fridge supply and by default release the habitation relay?
  • Why did the fridge defrost/not work even though in theory there was a voltage supplied to it?
  • Was this the reason I had seen an increase in emails relating to motor mover issues and batteries not holding their charge?

What Next?

I don’t really know. I don’t know how wide spread an issue it is or its going to become. I also don’t know the details of how specific manufacturers implement eco modes in the ECU programming or how the tow bar electrical interface manufacturers could work round the potential issues while still being able to get their products certified by vehicle manufacturers.

I think it might be down to the caravan manufacturers to come up with a solution. I know that there are a couple of after-market products available that provide a solution – We have one I installed in our caravan and in the short term I think this will be the quickest route. Caravan manufacturers may have a reluctance to respond and they can legitimately say “Well it is designed to work correctly to the relevant standards.” I think that maybe it will require the two main caravan clubs to look further into this and if what I have outlined above is proven by them to be the case, bring pressure to bear on all the parties concerned to come up with a way forward to resolve the issue.

For my part, I have contacted a few manufacturers asking for information and clarification or even acknowledgement of an issue. Unfortunately no one seems to want to talk about it. I do know individuals have emails details of their own problem to manufacturers and have received less than helpful responses.

Let me know in the comments below if you have had anything that might be related to this. I’d like to find out more.

EDIT:…

The thought just crossed my mind…. what affect, if any, will this have on AL-KO ATC (if fitted) when the vehicle is in eco mode and the alternator shut down? Does is mean that there is a possibility that the AK-KO ATC may not work correctly in all circumstances?

How’ve We Been Getting On With Our Catch Can?

09 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Amarok, General, Maintenance, Modifications, tow vehicle, VW Amarok

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Back in June 2018 I fitted a Man Hummel ProVent oil catch can to our Amarok. Since then I’ve had a few people asking me how we have been getting on with it and has it actually ‘caught’ anything.

If you haven’t a clue what I’m on about here’s a link to the original two posts…. Catch Me If You Can… and Catch Me If You Can Pt 2

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I fitted the ProVent to our VW Amarok when it had done about 8000 miles (12,800Km) and we have now done just over 13,000 miles (21,000Km) a great deal of it towing. I opted initially to drain the ProVent every 600 Miles (1000Km) and the first three each time I got about half a cup of slightly oily water. It was clear like water but when rubbed between your fingers it felt ‘slippy’ a bit like baby oil. I did notice that one    draining that covered two long tows up to the Lake District what came out was slightly darker, still about the same quantity though. However I did notice on the last draining I had more of a dark oil content as a separate layer in the lighter clear ‘oily water’. Watching the video below I did find out that this is normal. The filter that is in the ProVent takes a few hundred Km to start working properly, first catching the condensate and then once the filter is saturated does it start to catch and drain the heavy oil.

I did recently remove the hoses on the intercooler (inlet and outlet) just out of curiosity and the interior from what I could see was still clean, with only a light covering deposited from the first 8000 miles (13,000Km) of running without a catch can fitted.

So how much have I got out?

Well in the first 5000 miles (8000Km) I have now filled an old 500ml  2 stroke oil container and just started on my second. I’ll continue to drain at the 600 mile mark. Although I must admit I now drain it before a long towing trip and again when I return home. It only takes about a minute and doesn’t require any tools so really is one of those tasks that is easily accomplished with the minimal of effort. Hopefully this will keep our engine in tip-top condition and not start to suffer from the oily carbon build up that saps power and is prevalent in all diesel engines.

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Here’s an excellent video from the guy’s at 4WD Action with probably the best explanation I’ve seen so far on the net… (Video (c) 4WDAction.AU)

TPMS Revisited…

01 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Accessories, Amarok, tow vehicle, Towing, TPMS, VW Amarok

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Its been quite a while since I did my first review of a TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring System) back in September 2015 in fact, on a Tyre Pal system sent to me for review. I did like it but it did give me a few things to think about. Later on I got to test out the Fit2Go TPMS and I ran with that for about 12 months. However I still wasn’t convinced this was the one for me.

With the Tyre Pal I did like the information, but on a screen that size I would have liked to be able to see all the pressures and temps altogether rather than scrolling through each wheel. Although it did cross my mind at the time “do I really need all this info” and that’s why I liked the Fit2Go unit. It sat there quietly monitoring the wheels and just occasionally flashed at me to say everything was OK…. or beeped if there was something wrong. I did eventually miss not being able to see the pressure and temp of each wheel and started to think my earlier statement was flawed.

I had an issue with the Fit2Go unit at around nine months of using it. The batteries in one of the wheel sensors failed… and a couple of weeks later a second battery went down. This was a bit of an issue as the sensors on this unit were sealed and the batteries weren’t replaceable (a plus point for the TyrePal here!) Credit to guys at Fit2Go… now re-branded as Michelin – they sent me out a complete new unit and four sensors. I installed the replacement unit and sensors and ran with that for a while.

Going into work at around 04:45 in the morning, I pulled off our drive the unit started beeping, indicating a low pressure tyre. I pulled over and checked the small LED on each sensor… no flashing red indication.  Tyres looked good, checked the pressure with the  Fit2Go hand-held unit and all as they should be. I  carried on. The beeping stopped. A few days later as I had just got onto the motorway it went off again, pulled onto the hard shoulder, checked each sensor and wheel… no flashing LED and all wheels looked OK. I also took the time to check the pressures again, all OK. On the fourth or fifth time this happened I gave up checking. It only seemed to happen with an early morning start and I started to doubt the info I was getting from the unit.

I started looking around for alternatives… mainly in the US for RV TPMS systems as they seemed to have a greater number of options. It wasn’t long after this that I got the e-Trailer unit to test. Which as well as checking the leisure battery voltage, monitoring the fridge temp and a host of other things had TPMS monitoring for your caravan wheels and sent alerts directly to your phone. With this fitted I had at least covered off the important wheels when towing. I just needed something for the truck. Looking around at  what was available on Amazon.Com in the USA made me realise how much we are actually paying in the UK for this stuff. There were units branded for the American market that were identical to those in the UK for a lot less even with the poor exchange rate.

This set me thinking… could a cheap TPMS available in the UK be as good… were we paying too much? I found a unit on Amazon.co.uk for £50 and ordered one. https://amzn.to/2wv49TS

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The unit had a couple of options for mounting. The sensors had replaceable batteries and were pre-coded to the unit. Each was marked with the correct location… FL, FR, RL and RR.

After much procrastination about where to put the display (it’s a man thing) I could not make my mind up so for the time being it sits on top of the steering column….

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In the few weeks since I installed it.. which was really easy,  it’s worked well. I can set the upper and lower limits for pressure and temp for each wheel and it is fairly accurate on pressure. To test it I used my digital tyre gauge fitted to my compressor in the work shop and checked with a standalone digital check gauge I used to use for aircraft tyres. It always matched the same PSI as both my digital gauges showed and as it didn’t decimal point readings on the PSI setting (you can change it to BAR, as well as from C to F for temp) it seemed to round-up from about .6 which seems acceptable to me. (32.4 PSI would be displayed as 32 and 32.6PSI  would be shown as 33)

It comes complete with a small spanner for the lock nuts, a do-hicky for replacing the battery in the sensors and for £50 it seems like reasonable quality. It does what it states on the box, it’s small enough to put almost anywhere (and that’s my problem… where!) and if you have amazing eyesight… it even has a vehicle battery voltage display right in the centre! And if that didn’t clinch the deal… it even alarms when the batteries are low in the sensors.

So was my £50 well spent? Well at the moment I think so. (I reserve the right to change my mind in the future) You know me by now and if I thought it was a jockey wheel with out a handle…. I’d tell you!

So if you don’t yet have TPMS and don’t want to spend a fortune on one this might be a suitable option.  If you want one… go on you know you do, here’s my affiliate* link on Amazon UK – https://amzn.to/2PX6a3a

*It won’t cost you any more but you will get that warm fuzzy feeling knowing Amazon are going to give Caravan Chronicles some of their profit.

Is A Euro 6 Engine Killing Your Leisure Battery?…

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in Accessories, Amarok, Caravan Electrical Fault Finding, Caravan Electrics, Electrical, Maintenance, Modifications, Off Grid, Technical, tow vehicle, VW Amarok

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OK… so that title was a bit dramatic! However here’s the thing… I don’t think everything is peachy with Euro 6 engines and charging leisure batteries.

If you are a regular reader, you know I have recently installed one of Sterling Power’s Wildside units (and so far I’m super happy with it!) but I did get an email from someone who had read all my postings about it and asked me if it might cure his problem. Here’s the gist of his email….

Note: I have edited this down a bit…. and withheld the name of the person and vehicle.

“I have recently changed my car to a new 2017 xxxxxxxxxxxx and after several trips with it, on arriving home there is never enough charge in the motor mover to manoeuvre our caravan up our drive (which is on an incline) and park the caravan round the back of the garage. I have to plug the caravan in overnight before I can use the mover.

This only seems to have started happening since we changed to the xxxxxxxxxx. I had the caravan’s battery tested at two garages and they said it is OK and it is only 2 years old. The local caravan service man said he could not find anything wrong with the motor mover.

As we are on mains at the caravan sites we visit for a few days the caravan battery should be fully charged.

Can you help?”

This did have me stumped for a bit. Battery tested OK, no issues with the mover, so what was going on?

While doing some of the prep work for writing about my installation of the Wildside unit, I had spent a few days prodding about our VW Amarok with a multimeter and making a few notes about voltages etc. One thing that I did cotton on to was the cyclic way the vehicles ECU seemed to turn off the alternator…. well I should really say put the alternator into “idle” mode. Now with the caravan attached (pre Wildside unit install) I did notice that  at the start it seemed to take longer for the vehicle’s alternator to go into idle mode but also it seemed to stay in idle for a lot longer and I was in the process of trying to work out why as initially I’d have thought it would have been less as it was running the fridge and charging the leisure battery.

A picture is worth… you know the rest. Here’s one of my excellent drawings!

Euro 6 Problem 01

Right, here we go… The drawing shows a caravan plugged into a tow vehicle that has the engine-turned off. Pin 9 is live as it should be, and the habitation relay in the caravan is effectively off allowing the caravan’s leisure battery to connect and power the caravan’s internal 12 volt systems. As the vehicle engine is off, there is no power on Pin 10 the fridge circuit, as this is controlled by the vehicle’s ECU.

Really this could be any vehicle with any engine. Now let’s have a look at what happens with the engine running…

Euro 6 Problem 02

Pin 10 is live, turned on by the vehicles ECU and this powers the caravans fridge. It also operates the caravan’s habitation relay which now disconnects the leisure battery from the caravan’s 12 volt systems and connects it to Pin 9 so that the vehicle can start to charge it.

Again, this could be any vehicle with any engine. This is how our Land Rover Freelander works with our caravan. All straight forward.

Now lets look at what happens when the Euro 6 engine puts the alternator into “idle” (or Eco mode etc.)

Euro 6 Problem 03

This is where it starts to get interesting. I have taken a few liberties here and made a few assumptions. I have shown the vehicle’s alternator disconnected. In practice the ECU doesn’t disconnect the alternator, it will reduce the field voltage and hence the output, not really disconnecting it but reducing the output to a negligible amount.

The ECU will also monitor the vehicle’s battery voltage and continue to allow the vehicles general electrical system to drain the battery to somewhere around 75% charge (this may be a bit of an arbitrary figure) The ECU will then turn on (or up) the alternators output to recharge the vehicle’s battery to about 80%. Why 80% well it needs the remaining 20% ‘free capacity’ so that when you brake, the excess energy of engine braking (regen) can be dissipated into the vehicle battery. Remember that on a Euro 6 engine the alternator is capable of generating round about 2Kw.

Now at this point it dawned on me that something could be happening here, but the idea was a bit ridiculous…. guys with far more agile grey cells than mine must have worked this out and I dismissed the idea. I must have missed a trick somewhere.

I did a bit more checking. I was using two 17Ah sealed lead acid batteries as my “leisure” battery simply because it was quicker to charge or discharge them than a 120Ah battery. For a fridge load I was using 3 x 50 watt light bulbs and it was all jury rigged to a 13 pin plug so I could just plug it in to either the Freelander or the Amarok to make comparisons. I was using a trusty old AVO 8 meter, a couple of digital multimeters and a clamp meter to measure current so really the whole set up was super sketchy for anything that I could write about. I thought that I must have been missing something somewhere and I actually kind of put it to the back of my mind. I just got on with installing the Wildside unit and writing it up.

“DING” You have mail……

I received an email from Charles Sterling with some very interesting information. During testing he had come across exactly the same issue I was pondering over but had put off further testing. I guess by now you have worked it out. Quite simply you can get current flow in the opposite direction… from caravan leisure battery to vehicle battery. In testing Charles had measured a current of around 6 Amps.

It dawned on me that maybe during my initial testing with my jury rigged set up I hadn’t missed something and the readings I had seen were correct. Both Charles and I quite separately had (in my case ‘stumbled’) on a potential issue with Euro 6 engines and caravans.

Back to the original email earlier. It now made sense. The sender of the email was setting off from their campsite to travel home with a fully charged battery (being on EHU while they were on site) and during the course of the drive home, the vehicles ECU was actually reducing the fully charged leisure battery down to 80% charge as it actually thought that the ‘vehicle’ battery was at 100% charge. Hence when he arrived home, the caravan’s leisure battery didn’t have enough charge to run the motor mover long enough to put the caravan away.

So what does this mean in practice?

Well effectively (give or take a bit of loss due to cabling) the caravan’s leisure battery will only get charged to about 80%. You can now think of the vehicle battery and caravan leisure battery as being one battery bank because that is how the vehicle sees it. If the leisure battery is fully charged its voltage will be higher than the vehicle battery so the vehicle will turn off (or down) the alternator so that the vehicles electrical system can drain it to about 75% ready for accepting the excess energy from regen braking. The caravan’s fridge helps the vehicle by draining the battery bank that bit quicker.

This also answers another question. While I was testing, sometimes I’d plug-in my jury rigged setup and if my two little 17Ah batteries were fully charged I’d get a low current drain indicated on my clamp meter. I’d dismissed this to a certain extent, but now I realise that as my two 17Ah batteries were fully charged and the vehicle battery would be at about 80% charge, there would be enough of a voltage difference for a short while, that the two 17Ah batteries would try to equalise with the vehicle battery by recharging it slightly..

Whats the answer?

Well thankfully I solved my problem when I installed the Wildside unit a few weeks ago.

Finally…

If you have had any electrical issues with a Euro 6 engine and towing please drop a comment below. I’ll try to help.

As an aside, I am trying to arrange attending a tow bar installers electrical course with a couple of the OEM electrical equipment manufacturers and one of the approved bodies so I can hopefully increase my knowledge base and widen the number of vehicles I can cover. It’s a bit up-in-the-air at the moment as it would appear its going to cost a small fortune! (Sponsorship deals gratefully received!)

A Step In The Right Direction…

03 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in Accessories, Amarok, General, Modifications, tow vehicle, VW Amarok

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OK, so if you read about the bike rack install I guess you might have seen the video of me getting onto the tailgate of the VW Amarok…. akin to a whale wearing a tutu and trying to get on points. I needed something better… well my knees were telling me I better do something about it at least. In the USA, the land of the pickup or Australia the home of the Ute there were plenty of options. The downside was the Amarok has not been released in the USA and shipping charges from Australia are insane. I had to find something closer to home. Doing the usual google searches always ended up with products on sale in different continents so I ended up searching for images that contained the word ‘tailgate’, ‘step’ and ‘Amarok’ and after clicking on various pictures discovered Pegasus 4 x 4 in Bristol. (Note to all the companies out there… spending time correctly tagging and key wording all the photos on your websites pays off!) Continue reading →

Getting All Charged Up – Part 1…

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Boondocking, Caravan Electrics, Caravan Servicing, Electrical, Gadgets, General, Maintenance, Modifications, Off Grid, Product Review, Reviews, Technical, tow vehicle, Uncategorized, VW Amarok

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If you are a regular reader you may remember a couple of posts I wrote about leisure battery charging in caravans and motorhomes (Smart Alternators: how they affect Caravans and Motorhomes…. and NEC Show Roundup – it’s all technical…) and I linked to a few videos that Charles Sterling from Sterling Power has produced covering charging topics and Euro6 engines. At the recent NEC show Sterling Power were featuring a new product that would soon be available that would solve all the issues for caravan owners that were experiancing towing with vehicles that had “smart alternators” which were are standard on Euro5 and Euro6 engines and the issues around regenerative braking on Euro6 engines. Charles promised to send me one of the first pre-production “Wildside” Battery to Battery chargers specifically designed for caravans.

IMG_1127A couple of days ago I was excited to receive   a package from Sterling Power containing one of the pre-production new “Wildside” units. The unit itself is robustly constructed and weighs in at about the same as a bag of sugar – 1Kg.

It comes with a comprehensive 11 page instruction/installation manual that goes through all the steps that you need to install the units and what all the various lights and connections are on the unit itself. For anyone that is familiar with my electrical drawings, Sterling have based their installation drawings on my format so are easy to understand (in my opinion!).

I’ll state now for the record, Sterling Power have sent me this free of charge to install and evaluate and that is what I’m going to do, but I will be honest and tell you if I think there are any issues with the installation or the unit in the way that it operates.

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Looking at the connections for the unit it all looks straight forward. The circuit board is labelled  exactly as the drawings in the installation manual which is reassuring and the manual goes into the various functions of each connection and the programming of the unit.

Why this unit?

Since we had changed from using our 2006 Land Rover Freelander HSE as our primary tow vehicle to our 2016 VW Amarok Atacama I had noticed that our leisure battery was not getting close to a full charge even after towing for a couple of hours. We don’t have a solar charging system installed and relied on the tow vehicle and EHU when on site to keep our leisure battery topped up. I knew about the limitations of smart alternators and have written about them before and answered lots of emails about problems readers were now experiancing. Up to this point I really didn’t have an answer to most of the problems and I was considering going down the same route as our Australian cousins and installing some hefty cables between the tow vehicle and caravan, connected together with Anderson connectors. Works fine down under and would do here, especially coupled with one of Sterling Power’s B2B units which I had been looking at.

Now this would be ideal for us, but anyone who tows using a company car, a lease vehicle or a vehicle on a LP scheme can’t just go ahead and install stuff willy nilly. Unless it is done right, it has the potential to be a bit of a ticking bomb as well and  if I was going to recommend it as a solution there are very few people with experience to do an installation of this type. I have seen some right botch jobs on heavy-duty cabling by so-called “professionals” when installing simple winches and dual battery systems on 4 x 4 off road vehicles. Using a lump hammer, cold chisel and block of metal is NOT the professional way to crimp battery cables!

I was looking round to see if there were other options and talking to the chaps on the Sterling Power stand at the show told me they had a product in development that might just be the solution…. and here we are!

How does it work?

I’m not going to give you chapter and verse on the internals (some of that would be guessing on my part and some is propriety information anyway) so I’ll simplify it as much as I can.

In current tow vehicles you have two connections that supply power to the caravan – one for the fridge which is only live when the engine runs and one for charging the leisure battery which is usually live all the time.  Now the problem is that as it’s quite a distance from the front of the vehicle where the battery and alternator are to where  the leisure battery and fridge are located in the caravan. The size of the cables providing the connections are key to how efficient it all works.

Nearly all good quality tow bar wiring uses 2.5 mm square (2.5mm²) cable for these circuits and they connect between the tow vehicle and caravan through a 13 pin plug and socket (or 12N & 12S in older vehicles). The problem with all this is down to good electrical ‘laws’. In essence the more current you draw through a length of cable the greater the voltage drop ( I go into a bit of techie detail about it here… Understanding Cable and Cable Sizes ) Some people go to the lengths of re-wiring the circuits in 4mm² or even 6mm² cable, which was OK up to a point… usually the point which is the connection between the vehicle and caravan. With the traditional installation what you end up with is two circuits that the voltage is usually too low to provide a good charging capability for the leisure battery and the fridge circuit that might or might not, depending on voltage drop, have some spare capacity but you can’t use it to charge the leisure battery.

Back to the Wildside unit…

What the Wildside unit does and this is really clever, is it takes over the two power circuits, aggregates them and manages the output. It draws the maximum current available through each of the two circuits and provides an output for the fridge always at the correct voltage to maximise the efficiency of your fridge and protect it from the voltage fluctuations inherent with Euro6 and Regen engines and any spare capacity on this circuit it added to the leisure battery charging circuit, steps up the voltage and provides a separate output via a four stage intelligent battery charger to maximise the charging capability to your leisure battery.

This is a very very simple one paragraph explanation, it does have a few other tricks up its sleeve though.

One feature is the “Remote Mode Select” switch option. This allows you to install a switch that will allow you to turn the unit to “Wildside”, “Boondocking” or “Off Grid” mode and run the fridge as though it was being powered from the vehicle. It is actually being powered from the leisure battery.

Take note though… Most caravans and motorhomes are fitted with absorption fridges which use a heated element that is constantly on to make the fridge work. However some motorhomes ( I don’t know of any caravans) are fitted with the more expensive and vastly more efficient compressor fridges which work exactly like your fridge at home but can’t run on gas. If you are camping off grid for a few days with an absorption fridge, then run it on gas. However if you are worried about your fridge not maintaining temperature on an hours ferry crossing or on a euro tunnel crossing then you can use the switch to keep the fridge running. The period you can power it will depend on the capacity of your battery(s)… I would not advise using it with and absorption fridge on a battery bank with anything less than 110Ah capacity.

If you do use this feature on the Wildside unit, it will protect your battery bank from discharging past the safe point by turning off the fridge when the voltage reduces and reaches a critical point that would damage your battries.

You also have the ability to specifically select the type of leisure battries you have installed – GEL I, GEL II, AGM I, AGM II, Sealed, Open, Calcium, LiFePO4 to get the correct tailored charging and maintenance program for your battery bank.

If you are fortunate to have lithium leisure batteries there are a couple of other connections you will need to check out too.

Installation Considerations…

We know what it does so how do we connect it. Well this is where it could get messy unless we have a plan.

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In essence, what do we need to do? Well we have to cut and divert the incoming pin 9 and pin 10 into the Wildside unit and connect one output to the leisure battery. We also need to disconnect the fridge from the caravan’s original control box and reconnect it to the Wildside unit. As the habitation relay is usually buried inside the original control box we need to be able to control this from the Wildside unit. There is a terminal for this (“CVan Dis Output”) but what do we connect to this to make the habitation relay operate correctly?

The original Pin 10 lead that we cut and diverted into the Wildside unit, the other end of this still goes into the installed control box and this will operate the habitation relay. Remember we disconnected the fridge power lead from the installed control box and reconnected it directly to the FRG+ output on the Wildside unit so all it does now is operate the habitation relay.

So summing up, we have to cut 3 cables and re-terminate 5 ends into the Wildside unit. This of course does not include the neutral connections which will be easy and straight forward.

Other Considerations…

The installation of the Wildside unit must be easily reversible so it can be moved to another caravan at some point in the future.

We must also use the correct size cables to connect to the leisure battery as we will now be charging at higher currents than was possible before, the original cable that was installed in the caravan to connect to the leisure battery may not be of a sufficient rating.

We must document the changes properly so that at some point in the future someone can follow what we have done incase they have to fault find.

We must make sure all the connections and general installation are done to a high standard to ensure the installation is safe.

Finally we must be able to do the install without invalidating any warranty on the original installed control unit (i.e. not opening it up) and retain functionality of all the elements of the caravans electrical system. It’s no use installing the Wildside unit if half the electrical features of you caravan don’t work afterwards!

IMG_1130In Part 2…

In the next part I’ll go through the manufacturers electrical schematics of the caravan and show how to find and trace  which cables we are going to look for when we do the install and how we produce a simple drawing showing the changes.

I’ll also come up with a quick check list for all the additional bits (cable, terminals etc) that we will need for the install.

Fitting A Bike Rack to the VW Amarok – Finale…

12 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in Accessories, Amarok, Bike Carrier, Bike Rack, General, Modifications, tow vehicle, VW Amarok

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It’s time to wrap up the bike rack install. I had to wait a few days for the final rack to arrive. Although I had ordered a twin pack of the Thule FreeRide 532 from Holdcrofts via Amazon and they had shipped out a twin pack, it would seem that their courier had ‘lost’ one and to Holdcrofts credit as soon as I emailed them they dispatched another… which the courier took four days to deliver.

IMG_1098 Continue reading →

NEC Show Roundup – it’s all technical…

28 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Caravan Electrics, Electrical, General, Maintenance, Modifications, Technical, tow vehicle, VW Amarok

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This is really a follow-up to my previous post – Smart Alternators: how they affect Caravans and Motorhomes….

While at the NEC show one of my big tasks was to get a number of technical questions answered by the industry players. One of my first stops was to Westfalia and to meet up with Rick Sykes and his colleague on the Westfalia stand. Rick is the national training manager for Westfalia and I was able to get answers to a number of questions that you have asked me and I’d not been able to answer fully. Continue reading →

A Few Questions Answered About the Amarok…

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Amarok, tow vehicle, Towing

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I’ve been known as a Land Rover supporter for quite a while now, in fact I started driving Land Rovers 38 years ago back in 1978 and passed my test in one. A lot of people were surprised when I decided to look at something for towing other than a green oval and I have received lots of questions (I mean lots!) about the Amarok.

So far we have done about 1100 miles in ours and I’m still learning about some of its capabilities. One thing that has really impressed me is the awesome eight speed gearbox. One thing that taking any vehicle off-road and sometimes towing on loose or slick surfaces requires is to hold a set RPM while the tyres find traction. With Auto gearboxes normally the gearbox doesn’t like this and shifts up a gear to reduce RPM taking you out of the power band. However, flick the gearbox into manual tiptronic mode and the gearbox will just simply sit in the gear selected until you change. The other thing I found out too was that on slick or icy surfaces, you can select second gear and pull away from stationary to reduce any chance of wheel spin. Do you really need a vehicle that can go off roading with the best… well lets just say you will never have any issues on that sloping grassy CL/CS site!

It would take me far too long to answer all the questions I have been asked and quite frankly it would be flipping boring… akin to reading pi to 20,000 decimal places, so I’ve put together a small collection of YouTube video’s that hope fully will answer a lot of the questions. The first four are courtesy of Miles Continental VW dealers in New Zealand and the first features well-known 4WD professional Pete Ritchie. The fifth video is the inimitable Andrew St.Pierre White of 4xOverland.com (and yes Andrew, they have sorted bluetooth connectivity out) and finally, if nothing else watch the last video… can a two litre engine and auto gearbox pull a road train?

 

 

 

 

And finally….. if there was any doubt about pulling power……