Airing Up (15 Viewers)

[Rednexus]

There's already a fusible link with an extra terminal for you. Mount the Anderson Connector on the access door or any of the plastic trim. This is a temporary connection. When you use your compressor with battery clamps, are you adding a fuse right at the clamp?

The connection is temporary, but the cables leading to the Anderson connector are permanent. They are always behind the plastic, always hot due to being connected to the battery, and always rubbing on things. With a portable compressor with clamps on an underhood battery, the entire connection is exposed and can be disconnected immediately by pulling off a clamp (albeit you might burn your hand on a hot cable caused by the under-sized wiring on a Chineseium compressor). With the proposed LC250 setup, if you had a short between the battery and the connector, it would require removing the plastic and using a wrench to disconnect the cable. Seconds mean everything in an electrical fire/short, so it's not ideal.

Glad there is a fusible link - which could be used if it has the proper amp rating based on the compressor draw (it could be over-or under-sized - if it's more than 10 amps above the compressor draw, I'd still install and flush mount a circuit breaker on the plastic). Additionally, I'd still sheath the cable to prevent the risk of a short due to rubbing, which would at the minimum trip the breaker and/or blow the fusible link. After all, the OEM Toyota hot cable in the picture is clearly well-covered and sheathed.

Or....instead of dealing with sketchy connections and Chinese compressors, just hard mount an ARB twin with real wiring and be done with it . Not a LC250....but the setup on my rig. It's safe, fast, and reliable. I still have a burn scar on my forearm from my old Smittybilt.

 

[hoser]

Take a look at your alternator charge cable. It is always hot, longer length, smaller diameter cable, 20 years old, vibration, oil, high heat cycled, more resistance. Probably 10x more likely to fail than the 12" pigtail on the rear battery. When are you going to address that?

 

[Rednexus]

Take a look at your alternator charge cable. It is always hot, longer length, smaller diameter cable, 20 years old, vibration, oil, high heat cycled, more resistance. Probably 10x more likely to fail than the 12" pigtail on the rear battery. When are you going to address that?

Did that last month. I have double-sheathed 1/0 cables going from my alternator to the battery, battery to the fender ground, and battery to the engine block. I also inspected the entire OEM alternator cable when I did that (it was fine), but I put new terminals on the battery ends of it. 1/0 cable is excessive and in hindsight I probably would have used 2 ga. But now my rig has a great electrical system. Oh, and I a added new HO alternator too .

After that I was unhappy with crappy aftermarket military terminals, so I dropped a bit of coin on some billet SDHQ terminals .

 

[hoser]

Nice... few people upgrade the charge cable and corresponding ground. I've done the same.

 

[Rednexus]

Nice... few people upgrade the charge cable and corresponding ground. I've done the same.

I honestly didn't realize how pathetic the OEM charge cables is on these rigs until I did the upgrade. It's maybe 10 gauge or 8 gauge at max. Can't image how hot that must have been getting running the rig electronics and the ARB twin, and it's probably downright dangerous if someone is trying to run a winch off the rig while it is idling.

 

[Jetboy]

There's already a fusible link with an extra terminal for you. Mount the Anderson Connector on the access door or any of the plastic trim. This is a temporary connection. When you use your compressor with battery clamps, are you adding a fuse right at the clamp?

I do normally sheath all my wiring because I have so much of it in both braided and split loom but this is literally a battery on the other side of a plastic panel.

View attachment 3954480

Thanks for that picture - I haven't seen how the battery is inside the panel. Seems like you could even just pull the panel off and use the alligator clips if you wanted to. In Australia do they call them crocodile clips?

It might be a good place to use one of these little inline auto-reset circuit breakers. The ones I've used are usually around $5 and it's nice to reset instead of go searching for a fuse. Just have some protection for everything you plug in as well. And if you somehow had a short across the poles in the receptacle. The ones like this that come with winches look like two 100amp ones on buss bars, but they're easy to fit directly on the terminal post without a lot of extra effort and then you don't need to find an extra place to mount them.