Hard Wiring Wet Okole Seat Heaters

This is technically my first write-up, so hang with me here. Basically, I wanted to hardwire my new seat heaters I got from the Wet Okole group buy so I could still use my cigarette lighter for charging my devices. After doing some research on hard wiring these seat heaters, I found some really good information.

Full write-up on installing WO seat covers with Toyota factory switches. This write-up was really good, but a little more coin and time than I'm willing to spend right now. So I decided to document how I'll be doing this since I haven't seen a similar one. Unless you're making your own controller or plan on using a stock Toyota controller, hard wiring these is simple.

First thing I decided to do was get an auxiliary fuse box to accommodate the heaters and any extra accessories I might want. I went with a ST Blade Fuse Block from Blue Sea and mounted it to the top of my fuse box. I might be running some accessories that I don't want keyed, so I just ran it right to the battery. I know a lot of people will have issues with this, but it works for me. I should probably add a 125a fuse going to the block, but I didn't…



Here's a look at the big WO switch. It's actually mounted to a small PCB board that acts as the controller for the whole setup. It has the LED's, 10k resistors for the LED's, 2 thermo-resistors and 2 resistors controlling the HI and LOW current flows. I'm no EE, but it looks like the only difference between the High and Low positions are how fast it heats up to the range of the therm-resistor (both positions use the same therm-resistor so therefore they should both shut-off at the same temperature right?). To wire these into my new fuse block, I cut the cigarette adaptor off and just ran a ground and power wire into the new block with a 5a fuse for each line.


The plan was to de-solder the switches from these boards and replace them with a 3-position rocker and some lead wire so I could mount the switch in the center console, but hide the rest of the controller board. After playing with my solder gun trying to de-solder these things, I decided that A.) my solder gun is garbage B.) I don't really care if I have the big switches as long as I can hide them somehow. For these reasons, I ran my wiring under the carpet in front of the seat and out the existing hole above the clutch pedal and placed my switch in between my center console and seat.


Here's the finished position. It actually hides pretty well since I can slide it back when I'm not using it, making it totally out of the way (if you didn't know I had them down that crack, you'd never notice them). Overall I'm pretty happy with it since I can use my cigarette lighter for my phone charger and have heated seats at the same time now (and the install is somewhat hidden).

 

I have started a full write up of a more complete integration of the wiring here:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/hard-wiring-wet-okole-seat-heaters-01-04-tacoma.565131/

Will take a few days to get everything posted.