The FJ hasn't gotten a lot of love lately. However, it'll roll up to 130,000 miles this week, and still drives like a new truck. I recently had some "excitement" with the FJ when I replaced the main battery a few weeks ago. We've been getting hammered by weekly storms, which made replacing the battery a challenge; trying to line up good weather and being in town. I finally got the chance to do the work. Shouldn't be that tough, right? Pull off the terminals, pull off the several auxiliary leads, yank out the Group 31 battery and drop in the new one. Replace terminals and leads and bolt the battery down. Right? It’s never that easy. After doing all of that, I jumped into the driver’s seat to start the truck. My National Luna dual battery controller started beeping. No lights appeared on the right column, indicating I didn’t have a second battery. Somewhat mystified, I shut the engine down and started troubleshooting. I’ll spare readers the details, but I spent the rest of the afternoon pulling BOTH batteries, checking continuity, voltages, etc. Something was amiss. Finally, cold and frustrated and running out of light, I pulled the controller (which was 4 years old) and put everything else back in place. I bought a new controller from Equipt1, and again had to wait for the perfect overlap of weather and physical proximity. Finally, I was able to plug in the new controller and have it work as advertised.
I had wondered if the new battery, which had sat in my basement since December, had lost charge and set off this chain of events. However, after installing the new battery, I plugged my onboard battery charger/conditioner and let it test and top off both batteries.
Some time ago, I realized that long bouts of not starting the truck weren’t doing my batteries a favor. So I installed a Norco Genius Charger/Conditioner. It’s a marine item, designed for wet conditions. It’s also made for a dual battery setup. The toughest part of the install was determining where to mount the cigar-box shaped charger. I finally screwed it directly to the top of my Cold Air Intake. There is about ½” clearance between the charger and the inside of the hood. I then ran the leads to the appropriate battery terminals. I protected the leads with loom, and zip-tied everything down to keep the cables from vibrating and chafing. I then drilled a 1” hole on one end of my ARB bumper and mounted a waterproof plug. Again, the cable connecting the plug to the charger was covered in loom and zip-tied out of the way. It’s now easy to plug into shore-power and keep the batteries topped off during super cold weather or a long period of inactivity. I’m hoping it will provide for longer battery life for the two Group 31 batteries I have jammed in the engine bay.
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