Charging question for jayco swan

Hi all,

I'm installing a carge cable to the battery in my jayco swan onto the drawbar. My question is do i need to install a fuse inline with this?

Definitely a good idea- it would prevent the chances of worst case sanarios I.e burning out your cables, damaging your battery,causing a fire and the list goes on ( your mad if you don't) Do yourself a flavour and buy a few spare fuses and a cheap digital multimeter, if your not a full bottle on electrickery then do a crash course on you tube and you ll be fine

yes on the car on the camper!!

Absolutely yes every time. If you're considering running an electrical cable somewhere on a vehicle, it MUST have a fuse as close as is reasonably possible to the source of that power.

Don't forget that light cables lose voltage quite a bit - we had 6mm cable (supposedly rated for 60A) running our fridge about 5.5m from the battery and the voltage drop was somewhere over a whole volt. Changed to 8Ga cable and the drop is down to 0.3V.

Your car is 6m long and there'll be at least another 2m of cable from the back of the car to the battery in the van, so you're in a considerably worse situation - and will have to compensate for that somehow. There are three ways primarily used.

1) Voltage Booster. This is how they did it in my caravan before I discovered it and tore it out.

2) DC-DC Charger like C-Tek D250S or the RedArc equivalent (get one with a solar input). Both are good, neither produce lethal voltages.

3) Invert the incoming power and use a mains charger on the battery. Perfect charging every time, use the inverter to drive power for the fridge/whatever at the same time and the battery will unload, making the charging process even cleaner. The caveat - lethal voltages. Stuff it up, have an accident, use a non-electrically-isolated inverter - any of these things will stand a chance of killing someone. Inverter output is as nasty as household power but without the RCD to protect you.

Normally with a Hot wire setup you run a self reset circuit breaker on the car end. This will protect it from a short if it gets damaged etc. Unless you put a switch in line with the Hot wire they are usually live all the time hence the reason for a circuit breaker. Once disconnected from the car that wire on the trailer usually has no voltage on it. Jayco use pin 2 on the trailer plug for this buy in my opinion it's not able to hold a big enough wire so I changed my plugs to 12 pin and I used one of the heavier 5 bottom pins. Works fine on mine anyway. The good thing with a 12 pin to is a standard 7 pin male from the trailer can still plug into the 12 pin on the car. I also run a wireless temp gauge to my fridge in the trailer so I can monitor the temp just incase I loose power for some reason I don't also loose all my food in the fridge.

Cheers.