Second battery wiring check

Hey all, I've been looking to add a second battery to my Tacoma to use as a house battery and was wondering if I could get my wiring plans double checked.

Been a bit nervous about starting it cause I don't want to set my truck on fire ha.

 

@caribe makaira is the guy I would trust.

 

I don’t see anything immediately fire worthy -

but I do have a couple questions

Does renogy suggest fusing the output of the mppt?

do you want a fuse or perhaps a fusible link between the pos bus bar and the fuse box? Would prevent an issue if that fuse box were over drawn


Other than that I would suggest connecting it up one leg at a time with fuses out and then checking with a meter to ensure you have your connections made to where you want them and nowhere else

 

It's busy!

The Solar Panel On/Off switch can be deleted. Keep MIC4 connectors on the solar panel; those are your disconnects.

From the starter battery, I do have an On/Off near the DCDC MPPT converter as a disconnect.

Keep the 100A breaker to the 1000W inverter, but you can delete the second 80A ANL fuse.

From the 100Ah batter, both circuit breaker and fuse should be 120 Amp items so starting loads from the 1000W invertor don't trip them.

You're missing a Ground connection for the Car Battery to the Renology Battery. I ran both cables back to an Anderson Connector. I usually don't keep the Li battery riding around the truck unless camping. I do temporarily use my fridge for Costco runs so I have a jumper from the Anderson to my fuse panel.

Minor thing: USB socket ground should be on the ground side of the fuse block.

Looks good; price everything out. Then compare it to the EcoFlow solution. I've built my own (used aDC1240D Redarc) but since have gone with
the EcoFlow.

https://www.ecoflow.com/us/delta-2-portable-power-station $999.

I have the Home Brew like yours, which has a huge advantage as power connections never time out. Ecoflow makes you push a button to keep the outlet turned on. Not ideal for a fridge!

My EcoFlow is older, so car charging was limited to 5Amp (@12V) 60W; or 10Amp (@24V) Solar; so I have a Vectric 12/24 DC/DC converter so I can use car power to power up solar input and have 240W charging when driving.

The new one allows 8A max DC charge on either 12V (Car) or 24V (solar), so the DC/DC would also allow faster charge, but at 2x.






Inside the RSI Cap:

Note the yellow Anderson connector. My battery isn't there, but the 12V sub can be powered up by the vehicle when Frige is in the back seat for
Costco runs.

 

All the diagrams I've seen for the MPPT only had the 3 fuses listed (1 for starter battery one for house battery and one for the solar panels). A breaker for the fuse box might be a good failsafe though.

Thanks for the in depth reply! I've changed out the breaker/fuses for 120A on the inverter and got rid of the on/off switch for the solar and moved it over to the starter battery.

I was under the impression that grounding to any part of the frame would make a common ground? If not I can totally run the negative from the starter battery parallel to the positive routing.

The anderson plugs to run a fridge without the battery in is a great idea. Think I'm gonna try and incorporate that as well.

 

Chassis is common ground, but we have so much electronics in the vehicle I like to have known "feed" and "return" cables. Both are heavy 4AWG. You can see the grommets in the bed where my battery cables feed. The feed uses Blue Sea Safety Hub 150. Note the master power switch (from the car battery to Safety Hub; there is a USB charge port for my phone/tablet; BlueSea Volt meter)

Those two wires sticking out are for future use as they have "ignition on" or "accessory on" power.

On the right side is another fuse block (supplies fridge, LED lighting, PepLink Modem). The white thing is my LTE antenna for remote work.

The battery box can be used stand-alone (there is a fuse panel/circuit breaker, fridge, and CPAP connections on it).

There is a Red/Black cable hanging down. Those are from my roof-mounted solar panels (Plugs into my battery boxes Redarc 1240D solar input). We've lost power for days during Texas Ice Storms, but my CPAP was up and running as I could bring the battery into the house at night.

The newest EcoFlo has options not to turn off 12V power, so little more consumer friendly. So I recommend them for cost savings, but my old 12V Battle Born solution has many options when I am off the grid for a week.