Second battery

[Guest]

I am currently sourcing all the parts for an onboard PC to have a touch screen in the 2 din dash slot.

I want to add a second battery to the car but not sure if the alternator can handle it, has anyone done this to their VR4 yet?

Any suggestion where to locate it?

only place i can think is in the wheel well.

 

[bradc]

I've got two small batteries in my spare wheel well and I haven't had any problems with the alternator. You can get little control boxes that only charge one battery and then the other.

 

[Guest]

great cheers thanks!

P.S what are you running big pc or big amp or both

 

[bradc]

neither. I'm running 2 very small batteries to keep the car light and have a low CG. In fact I've been running with only 1 for a year or so now. My Legnum is around 1600kg with me in it

 

[cyber_scriber]

Ben.

Consider whether you actually need 2 batteries.

A good deep cycle, gel type battery is often more than enough to run monster sound / computer systems and is a much quickier and easier thing to do than to wire up a second battery in the boot.

 

[Guest]

Hey Bruce, the reason i want to wire up a seccond battery is that i would like to keep the pc in sleep mode rather than shut down, it still drains a lot of power as the RAM has to be continuusly supplied with electricity, if i run twin i can completely protect the main battery even run the pc with the engine off for a fairly long time.

Maybe i have a crap battery now but my son turned the rear light on the other day and after 45 mins the car wouldnt start.

 

[bradc]

Why not use a laptop or even a tablet with a built in battery?

 

[Rasi]

You have a dud battery. Ours was the same, but after replacing the battery, the rear light can remain on for a few hours and the car starts.

Maybe i have a crap battery now but my son turned the rear light on the other day and after 45 mins the car wouldnt start.

 

[Riley]

You have a dud battery. Ours was the same, but after replacing the battery, the rear light can remain on for a few hours and the car starts.

hell i couldnt leave my drivers door open for longer than 5 minutes or else my old battery would go flat

 

[Guest]

"Why not use a laptop or even a tablet with a built in battery?"

Brad, I want to control the start/sleep modes via my ignition so my wife doesnt need to think about it, if she has to worry about how to control the unit it's pointless, needs to be completely intergrated.

 

[Guest]

I would be interested to see some pics of the final setup of the pc and batteries.

 

[minik1971]

I am curious as to why you would want to use standby rather than hibernate. I know the standy will boot up quicker than hibernate but it seems like a whole lot of bother for a small gain. I use hibernate and get music in around 30secs from key on, that includes 5 seconds for the pc to start from the PSU controller. I am running xp sp3 and haven't tweaked the OS yet to get a quicker start up time. Although I have 1gb of RAM so if I changed that to 256mb it would probably be faster too as it would have less data to transfer from HDD to ram on return from hibernate.