High water electrical system preparation

Hi,
Are you guys doing anything special to manage water intrusion in your electrical system? There are connectors as low as the wheel sensors that get soaked when crossing even fairly shallow water. I'm not thinking about doing some kind of mad Q/Wet Nellie conversion here, mostly wondering what you guys do for the run of the mill kind of splashing around.

Thanks!

David

 

I don't worry about anything at the door sill level or lower. Everything on the outside is designed to be exposed to water. I mean they don't just stop working in the rain or the car wash, do they? The connectors and electronics outside are all sealed.

In reality where you start to worry is getting water high enough to infiltrate the cab, which isn't designed to have water inside normally so the ECU and stuff might get wet. But if the water is that high you also risk water ingestion into the intake, which would be the most immediate issue.

 

Yeah, I guess... Still, all the yack about moving the diff breather makes me wonder about the difference between barely tolerating something and being completely impervious to it.

 

Fording deep water in your truck is going to be mostly a mechanical issue. As you mention rear axle breather but also the exhaust (just keep it running), engine air intake are low. You need to put the radiator fan on a switch so it doesn't try to turn on in water. Then once you're up to the door sills the cab aren't impervious, the doors will leak water in. That's really the practical limit for water depth in my mind.

Back in the day, when trucks were more simple, we'd move our ECU from the kick panel up into the glove box. If that wasn't high enough the other way to gain higher water resistance was to put the ECU in a Tupperware box but leave the lid off normally so it didn't overheat. If we were crossing streams just snap the lid on. That wouldn't work now because there's computers and controllers all over the cab that would need to be sealed. But back then as long as your intake was raised and you kept it running the ECU was the limiter.

 

Cool, thanks.