John S got me thinking about the two cigarette sockets on the front dash. He indicated that one is from the house batteries and the other is from the cranking batteries. Without undoing connections, does anyone know which is which.
Dan,
On mine, the lower is engine, the upper is house.
One way to check is to turn the salesman switch off and see which one still has power (= engine).
Trent
Mine are side by side.
On my 2001U 320 they are also side by side, and the LH one is for the engine batteries and the RH for the coach ones.
The RH one is only powered when the "salesmans switch" is "ON".
Speedbird 1.
On mine the left is chassis and right house batteries. I purchased a digital volt/ USB charger that plugs into a cig lighter receptacle on Amazon for around $12.00 that makes for a quick read on battery status.
I just installed 2 of these USB / plug-in chargers a few weeks ago, put about 700 miles on the coach and they charged our Apple products wonderfully. One of them replaced the phone jack that we don't use, the other one was a new install by the LR table just below the 110 plug in. ( they are both 12 volt plugs using chassis batteries. May switch them to coach batteries later ). They both originate from the dash area and are separately fused on a new fuse block.
Amazon has them. The USB plugs were about $18.00 each and the fuse block was less than 20. The cool thing about the fuse block is ( for those of us with poor vision ) that they have led lights for each individual fuse IF they blow. You won't have to yank them out to find which one is the culprit.
I know the white one should have been black, but we have a chair stuffed in that spot and I didn't even know we had a 110 plug there for the first month we had the coach. And I didn't feel like returning it. Going into a hidden spot and all that.
Also, in the wiring pic did you notice the green wire that was wire-nutted to a red one. That's a little spooky. How do people expect a person to keep this wiring stuff straight doing things like that ?
Bob, I have found this thread. I am not sure if this is answered by this thread....but it is this: Can I use the cigarette lighter socket to run simple 12 v power cords such as those that plug into the GPS, etc. Or do I need to change out the cigarette lighter socket? I found online this reference that seems to say I could just plug in a USB plug into the cigarette lighter.
the online statement was.....
Could the Car Cigarette Lighter Be Replaced?
The issue is that even if people aren't using car cigarette lighters for the purpose that they were originally designed, far too many portable devices rely on the technology as a de facto power source to ditch it altogether. USB may prove an acceptable replacement, since so many portable devices use USB already, but it's already extremely simple to just plug a USB charger into a car cigarette lighter and call it a day.
Any ideas?
Mike, if you are talking about the FT dash 12V sockets, we use our 2 "cigarette" sockets (which are really 12V sockets) for our GPS and our dash cam power and the 12V socket near the passenger seat for our TPMS.
We did replace the duplex 120V outlet on our passenger side table/cabinet with a combo single 120V and dual USB charging outlet so we can plug 1 laptop and 2 phone/tablet charging cables in at one time.
Yes Michelle.....I thought the one for cigarette lighting was/is configured differently than the simply 12v socket? (there are two side by side on the dash, toward center of coach, right of driver)
I have been working hard to avoid plugging the GPS into that one I thought for cigarette lighter!
Unless there was an ashtray option, I'm pretty sure one 12V outlet is off chassis batteries and the other off house batteries and that's the only difference. I don't recall an actual cigarette lighter in a coach (but then, I sometimes can't recall why I walked into a room ;) )
Bob, the green/red splice probably goes to his Christmas lights.
Larry. Ijust hope this person had done very little wiring on the coach.
Oh, and by the way. The round receptacle on the new USB plugs I installed can not be used as "cigarette lighters". They prolly can't handel the amps or heat. Doesn't really matter unless we take up smoking in the coach. NOT. We have used them for plugging in as a power source and they work fine for that. I opted to leave the cig lighter recept in the instrument cluster as is, but is now fused with the others I installed.