Attention Transit owners; Don't be stupid like…
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Attention Transit owners; Don't be stupid like Princess_Fluffypants. Connect your DC/DC charger to a chassis ground, NOT to the vehicle battery negative terminal.
**TL:DR - Using the battery negative terminal for your DC-DC charger messes up the van's battery monitoring system for ~2020 and newer vans, leaving you with a dead starter battery. Connect your DC-DC chargers to a chassis ground instead.**
I've been living in my 2021 Transit for ~4 years now, and more than once I've found myself with dead starter batteries at the most insane of times. Like when I had been driving for at least 4 hours of highway, and after pulling over to get gas . . . *click click click* when trying to restart the engine. How the hell did I have a dead battery after driving all day?!
And this happened to me *multiple* times, so many times that I ended up rigging a reverse charger from my house batteries to the engine batteries just so I could self-jump. But the fact that I had to do that at all seamed insane; I do have a 120amp DC-DC charger from the engine to the house batteries, but the van has dual 250 amp factory alternators. It should *easily* be able to handle running my house battery charger while also keeping the engine batteries full.
When installing said DC-DC charger, out of laziness I had connected the negative from the charger directly to the negative terminal on my vehicle batteries. It turns out that this messes up the van's ability to monitor the state of charge of the starter batteries; I can only assume there's a shunt somewhere between the engine battery and the chassis ground that the vehicle computers use to monitor how much power has gone in/out of the engine batteries. When you connect your equipment directly to the battery negative terminal, it bypasses this; so I was pulling ~100 amps out of the vehicle batteries but the engine's computers never knew it, so it never turned on the "smart" alternators.
I redid my electrical system to move the negative coming out of my DC-DC charger to a chassis ground, and I've never run into this problem again.
(Some of you might be saying "Well yeah you idiot, this is right there in Ford's Body Equipment Mounting Manual if you'd just read the damn thing". And to you I say "Ain't nobody got time fo dat").
#lifestyle
source
**TL:DR - Using the battery negative terminal for your DC-DC charger messes up the van's battery monitoring system for ~2020 and newer vans, leaving you with a dead starter battery. Connect your DC-DC chargers to a chassis ground instead.**
I've been living in my 2021 Transit for ~4 years now, and more than once I've found myself with dead starter batteries at the most insane of times. Like when I had been driving for at least 4 hours of highway, and after pulling over to get gas . . . *click click click* when trying to restart the engine. How the hell did I have a dead battery after driving all day?!
And this happened to me *multiple* times, so many times that I ended up rigging a reverse charger from my house batteries to the engine batteries just so I could self-jump. But the fact that I had to do that at all seamed insane; I do have a 120amp DC-DC charger from the engine to the house batteries, but the van has dual 250 amp factory alternators. It should *easily* be able to handle running my house battery charger while also keeping the engine batteries full.
When installing said DC-DC charger, out of laziness I had connected the negative from the charger directly to the negative terminal on my vehicle batteries. It turns out that this messes up the van's ability to monitor the state of charge of the starter batteries; I can only assume there's a shunt somewhere between the engine battery and the chassis ground that the vehicle computers use to monitor how much power has gone in/out of the engine batteries. When you connect your equipment directly to the battery negative terminal, it bypasses this; so I was pulling ~100 amps out of the vehicle batteries but the engine's computers never knew it, so it never turned on the "smart" alternators.
I redid my electrical system to move the negative coming out of my DC-DC charger to a chassis ground, and I've never run into this problem again.
(Some of you might be saying "Well yeah you idiot, this is right there in Ford's Body Equipment Mounting Manual if you'd just read the damn thing". And to you I say "Ain't nobody got time fo dat").
#lifestyle
source
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