Poor man pays twice

It’s a saying I live by, but it even caught me out today. I went to super crap auto to buy some 6 gauge wire. I needed probably two meters, but was going to buy four. They only had black, which although not a deal breaker, was annoying. Well, at $11/Meter for single core wire, it couldn’t help but feel a bit ripped off, seen as I bought 6 meters of TWIN core 6 gauge for $60 delivered. I thought, stuff that, I know they sell jumper leads are cheaper than that!

So, I found a set of 100 amp, basic cheap ass $14 set of jumper leads, with the full intent of cutting the ends off and using the 5 meters of wire. They sold bigger sets, but they had anti-surge rubbish, I just wanted the copper wire, so i bought these beauties:

I figured, they are rated for 100 amp, I only need 80 (the fuse is 80), so this would work out nicely.

Well, here is the rubbish. This wouldn’t be good for 20 amps continuous load. gawd dammit! How they can call that 100amp jumper leads I don’t know. It seriously couldn’t jump start a fly.

So, I returned to a different SCA and bought some 400 amp ones (figuring that if we divide by 5, I’ll get my 80 amps). Well, finally after cutting the ends off, and removing the anti-surge thing, I now have 6 meters of 6 gauge wire for $24. Well, $38 if you count the loss from the other wasted purchase.

Here is the Anderson connector, mounted to allow a nice secure connection at the back of the car. It would look nicer low to the floor, but you can’t reach it to unplug it down there.

As with the Anderson connector above, I also needed a way of plugging/unplugging the 4 individual wires without having to unscrew them off the fuse block every time  I wanted to remove the kitchen unit.
The white/brown wires are +12v from the car battery which was conveniently taken from the door light circuit. The purpose of having the 12v from the car battery is so I can measure it’s voltage – that’s all. Everything else in the back runs off the auxiliary battery.
The red/green wires are for the big LED light on the roof.

Annoyingly, when I did a bit of a test wire up, i seem to no longer be getting voltage on the +12v, no idea why but it’s far to dark now to figure it out. As I’m leaving at 10AM tomorrow, I'm going to be pressed for time to figure out what’s wrong in addition to the list of other things I need to get done.

As expected, there is a lot of lateral movement now that the fridge is bolted onto the unit. Because I doubt I have time to secure it properly, I’ll secure it with tie-down straps for this trip.
Tomorrows post will just be done from the Spot, but I should have more to report on when I return Sunday.