SidecarFlip wrote:

I use stranded neoprene sheathed welding cable from the local LWS. It's sold by the foot and Tweco crimp on lugs too.

NRALIFR wrote:

Brad, if your goal is to get good refrigerator performance in DC mode and still keep the camper batteries fully charged, you might want to read this topic of mine in Tech Issues. I did this after being disappointed with the camper battery charging I was seeing after running 4 AWG welding cables from the truck batteries to the camper plug in the bed of the truck. My camper is also a Lance, so the wire size then changed to 8 AWG in the umbilical.

When I had a 1995 F350, I upgraded the truck-side wires to 6 AWG, connected them directly to the alternator, and got acceptable charging performance to the camper battery. On my 2010 F450, I went to 4 AWG wires still connected directly to the alternator, and was surprised to see that the charging performance was no better than the old truck. Possibly because the camper umbilical wires were still 8 AWG, but upgrading them was going to be a huge project as you can see in the linked Tech Issues topic.

When I upgraded the charge wires on my current truck, I found that the alternator/battery charging system on the truck had changed so radically that I was very apprehensive about connecting any auxiliary loads directly to the alternator. Plus, if you have a single alternator on your truck, it’s located way down low on the driver-side of the engine, and you’d have to remove a lot of stuff to get to it. I connected my new charge wires directly to both truck batteries, which improved the charging performance over the OEM wires, but it still wasn’t as good as what I was seeing out of the older trucks. It wasn’t keeping up with the drain on the camper battery from the fridge running in AC mode through an inverter, or running in DC mode.

Without going into a long-winded explanation, the fact is the charging systems on new vehicles is so tightly controlled by the ECM that it’s nearly impossible to get decent auxiliary battery charging out of a single alternator system. I’m fairly certain that on a new truck with a single alternator, you could run 0000 cables to the camper and still not get good performance. I have no idea if the dual alternator systems work any better since I don’t have dual alternators.

I finally bit the bullet and did what I describe in the linked topic, including upgrading the camper umbilical wires to 4 AWG as well. That required removing the water heater from the camper so I could get to the area the wires enter the camper. The results have been fantastic. The refrigerator DC mode now works so much better that I no longer run the fridge in AC mode through an inverter. I believe this is due to the camper voltage always being over 14 volts thanks to the Redarc DC-DC charger. Best of all, we always arrive at camp with a fully charged camper battery.

***Link Removed***

srschang wrote:

That NAPA plug looks exactly like the Pollak plug I used on my charging cable from my truck batteries to the DC-DC charger in the camper.

Pollak Outlet

Pollak Plug