Briohny here from Accelerate Auto Electrics and Air Conditioning. You’ve come across this video as you’re on our portable battery box custom build a page on our online shop. We realised the gap in the market. So customers wanted to custom design a portable battery box to suit their vehicle and needs for camping.
These boxes are great for you to take out in the car and pop it next to campsite to run your fridge, lights and power, all the devices you want. Or you can leave them running in your car full time. So let’s start off by talking about the actual battery box.
We use the Thunder battery box as it’s a super tough box that is made from industrial grade, polypropylene. So some of the features that we love it has internal strap mounts to keep the battery secure. It also comes with a separate mounting tray with four external mounting points. It’s got M5 five bolts to lock the lid in place. So the two buttons on top, the red one is to turn the voltmeter on and off and the white one’s a resettable circuit breaker for the sockets. So how it comes standard from Thunder is it’s got the two grey Anderson plugs on the rear, so they’re registered as an output. On the front, it’s then got two cigarette sockets, a dual USB and a voltmeter.
The Thunder brand has been created by Ashdown-Ingram. They’re the largest auto electrical supplier in Australia. So it’s a brand that is relatively new to market but it’s backed by a company with a long-term history. We used to have the option for customers to literally add in whatever sockets or Anderson plugs they needed. But we realised that 90 percent of the people made the following customizations. So we’ve decided to make this as the standard box.
When you buy a battery box with a DC to DC charger in it. So, the two great Anderson plugs we’ve replaced one of them with a red one, and that has now become a solar input via the DC to DC charger. The second grey one has still grey but it’s also now an input, which will allow you to charge from your alternator while you’re driving using one of our custom wiring kits. We then also added in two grey Anderson plugs that are your output plugs and you can run any devices or accessories that you want like fridges or air pumps or whatever you’ve converted over to an Anderson plug. If you want, you can also add in an option at the end to change any of these plugs here to any other socket. So you might want to change a cigarette socket to a merit socket or an Engel socket or whatever you want. You just need to put a note in the seller special notes at the checkout option.
Let’s have a chat about battery options that we offer.
First of all, no battery. Which is great if you’ve already got a battery that you want to use just select the no battery option below. Next, we’ve got an AGM. We’ll ship it direct to you. It’s the Zeal 125Ah 12 volt AGM deep cycle battery. Which comes with a one-year warranty. The Zeal AGM range is maintenance and spill free provides strong reliability with a low self-discharge.
Next up, we offer lithium batteries. We love going to a lithium battery as it’s light weight which makes a portable battery box, easy to move around. We can fit 100Ah lithium battery in here which weighs just 12 kilos. The 120Ah AGM we have is 30 kilos. So that’s a massive weight and back saving. We also love lithium because you can get an increased capacity. 100Ah lithium in real-world is approximately equal to 160Ah AGM battery. That 60% more usable power than its equivalent lead acid cousin. Lithium batteries will also recharge at a faster rate than AGMs. If you have 100Ah lithium and a 40Ah charger, you can recharge your battery in about two and a half hours while driving. The AGM battery will generally only charge at about 10 percent of its capacity. So 120Ah AGM is only gonna put in about 12 Amps of charge. So it’s gonna be about 10 hours of charging. I totally understand that’s not realistic and that the batteries would never be coming from zero percent.
We offer three lithium batteries as options. we use and we recommend these ones. The Zeal 100Ah has a three-year warranty. The Enerdrive 100Ah is an eLITE and it comes with a five-year warranty. And then Invictor do the 100Ah which is a seven-year warranty and a great feature of this is it’s Bluetooth compatibility.
So that means on your phone, you can get an app and you can see the status of the battery, the input and also the output of the battery which is a really cool feature. There’s a battery here to suit every budget.
Now let’s have a look at the DC to DC chargers that we offer in these battery boxes. First of all, they all mount inside the lid of the battery box. Which is a really great feature. It keeps your box nice and secure and it’s a standalone sort of thing that you can put into your car. So first up we’ve got the Projecta IDC 25.
It’s suitable for AGM batteries only. It’s a 25 Amp DC to DC charger with solar input and is budget friendly DC to DC charger. We then go to the BMPRO MINIBOOSTPRO. It’s suitable for AGM and lithium batteries. It’s a 30 Amp DC to DC charger with solar input and a two-year warranty.
The next is the REDARC range. We’ll start with the 1225D, it’s a 25 Amp charger, solar input. It is Australian made with a two-year warranty. You then jump up to the 1240. So both of these are AGM and lithium compatible. It’s a 40 Amp charger with solar inputs and Australian made two-year warranty as well. So with the lithium batteries we really do recommend the REDARC 1240. It will charge your lithium battery from zero percent to full in about two and a half hours. The DC to DC charger, this is the one you want for lithium.
Next option you’re gonna get to choose from, is a wiring kit. So first of all, you can choose no wiring kit. Which means you’ll have your own wiring kit or you’ll just use it as a standalone battery box. And you can charge it from an AC charger. We then offer two different actual wiring kits. Both wiring kits use 8 B&S cable have terminals to connect the back to your start battery and an Anderson plug to connect it to your battery box via that grey input plug. Basic wiring kit is a direct battery feed. It’s suitable for earlier model vehicles that do not have a smart alternator or temperature compensating alternator. This option is not recommended for late model vehicles from about 2010 onwards. It’s kind of like, or exactly like this one here. The wiring kit that we offer for the late model or smart alternator ignition switched is suitable for late model vehicles that have a smart alternator or temperature compensating alternator. Examples of this are the Ford Ranger, Isuzu D-Max, Mazda BT50, Toyota Hilux or the Landcruiser. It’s pretty much the same as this one here. It’s just got an isolator mounted in here.
So that’s a quick rundown of all the options that we offer in our portable battery boxes.If you do have any questions or you would like to customise anything within the box or the wiring kit or batteries you can send us an email to info@amae.net.au or call 1300 227 353