Strange Question

We have our fridge and other things we need to get to regularly at camp, but the fridge is most important, in the backseat. This means that we open and close the back doors repeatedly over the course of a day.

Every time we open a door with the truck turned off a wide variety of things happen from dash lights coming on to annoying warning alarms. We camp, usually by ourselves, in very remote places and we are old so ensuring that the battery doesn't run down is a HUGE concern for us.

We have managed to turn off the warning beep through the infotainment system, but there's still too much crap going on when we open the doors.

So here's the question:
Does anyone know of a way to open the doors without the truck doing things that use the battery?

Can you just tape the little buttons by the doors up or would that cause other problems? Can you Disengage it somehow?

Absolutely any ideas would be great!

 

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I doubt realistically you can turn off those things.
Either way you should have a jump pack, the modern ones are small, affordable, hold a charge a lllooong time, and are plenty powerful. So much so, there’s really no reason not to keep one around town too.

 

Not that I'm aware of. Best thing you could do is bring a portable jump starter and a portable power station like a Jackery or Bluetti etc.

 

Do you have dual batteries or portable battery for accessories?! Accessory battery for fridge and other things + crank for non-dead vehicle.... Your crank battery wont die opening and closing the doors with the lights and the dings, but if it will die if the fridge drains it and isn't hooked up to a secondary power source. I utilize a jackery 1000 to power my fridge for typically 3 days on a full, then I got solar or a dc connector to recharge the jackery.

Really wouldn't worry so much about the opening and closing of the door.

 

Mine makes no noises when the door is opened. I set the bed light and the doors lights off when doors open, so nothing happens at all. Not sure what "stuff" comes on your dash!

 

We have a jump pack, an absolute must!
We aren't running a dual-battery system for the truck itself but nothing runs off the truck battery except the truck itself, of course.

We do have a Bluetti with a 200W solar panel and a little RockPals, but both are too small to run the fridge so they're for all of our other general charging needs.
We also have 350W of roof-top solar and a house battery that we're getting ready to install (mostly for the fridge) once we decide how we want to mount the panels to our GFC roof.

It's not really about the fridge, but all the nonsense that comes on when we open a door to get into the fridge, grab a dog leash, get into a camera bin, etc. We would just really love to find a way to open the doors without it affecting the battery. We open the doors A LOT while at camp, sometimes up to 20 times a day.

 

The dashboard lights come on an we get the little message that a door is open.

 

Battery shut off switch at the battery is probably the only way to ensure you’re not using any battery,,, especially w modern vehicles that run systems checks and whatever the sam-hill they want, when they want to.

 

Could you roll the window down, reach through the opening, and keep the door closed?

 

Now that's a really good idea and one we never actually thought about, but now that you mention it I can see a few other benefits.

 

I mean if you get a proper one (like the HD type we used on boat batts) I can’t see the harm, worst that happens is, you don’t use it, or you do and you have to reassign phones and radio presets. But if you’re not draining your battery low low, I could only see it extending its life.