Electrical and Light Systems Working
I know it’s been a while since my last update, but we’ve been doing a lot with the Deuce. When we first started working on the truck I thought that all of the electrical wiring in the box was going to have to be redone. John did some testing with the existing cables and figured out that everything should actually work ok. The stock umbilical cable did not seem to join with the breaker box properly, so we decided not to use it. Instead, we disconnected the generator start/stop control buttons and ran a standard household electrical cable from the inverter to where the buttons used to be and then into the breaker box. We are using an APC 900W UPS connected to six Everstart marine batteries from Walmart. Each battery is 115Ahr at 12 Volts, which gives a total of around 8.2KWhrs if I drain the batteries down to the shutoff voltage. Granted, I have no intentions of taking the batteries down to the 10.5V cutoff, so an 80% depth of discharge leaves me with around 6.6KWhrs, which is still a good chunk of change. Running the inverter at the full 900W would give me about 7 Hours of run time.
A later modification I would like to make is running electrical umbilical cables from the house to the truck (for shore power) and a second line from the truck to the house for emergency power (running the house of the truck’s inverter during a power outage). Yet another project related to that is get a 200A alternator connected to the truck’s engine in order to use the main engine as a generator.
I’ve just finished testing various light bulbs in order to figure out which ones would work best in the back of the truck. When I’m on battery power every single watt counts, so regular incandecent bulbs would only be used as a last resort. Once I got it working I borrowed some compact florescent bulbs just to illuminate the area. Even though the CFLs work very well while I am connected to shore power, five of those 13W bulbs still amounts to 65W of power draw, which is more than I would like. Further still, I’ve read that CFLs don’t like vibration all that much, and in a truck like this there is going to be a LOT of vibration. For these reasons I have decided to go with Light Emitting Diodes. I did some testing with a couple of different lights (shown below) and have decided to go with the 3W bulb that I found on Amazon.com
All the bulbs lined up in a row.
1W LED Spotlight
3W LED Bulb
13W CFL Bulb
15W Conventional Bulb
25W Conventional Bulb
Unfortuently, the varying amount of light does not seem to show up well in the pictures, most likely because the camera was changing the length of exposure. The more light there was, the shorter the exposure, thus causing the pictures to look very similar. The LEDs have a colder temperature than the incandecent and CFL bulbs, but it almost looks like moonlight, so it works well. The additional benifits of being immune to vibration and drawing very little power makes them the clear winner for my particular needs. Your milage may very. I am able to run 5 of the 3W LEDs on only 15 watts of power, or only slightly more than a single CFL bulb. That gives me around 440 hours of light if that is the only load on my battery bank (that’s 18 DAYS of constant light). I’ll never run the lights by themselves for that long, but it is interesting to think about.
The inverter puts out modified sine waves, which is kind of a nuisance, but at least I got the inverter for free. It works fine for lighting and computers and things, but it can not be used for anything with a motor in it. This means that I can’t run my fridge or freezer on battery power if the power at my house goes off… yet. Eventually I may get a pure sine wave inverter, which outputs power that is as good or better than the electricity that comes from a utility provider.