Camping Interior Wiring radio to leisure battery

Wiring guide for radio to leisure battery

If like us you like listening to music whilst camping then this is for you. We wanted a way of being able to listen to our MP3 headunit whilst camping for short peroids on sites without mains hookup. As we only use our leisure battery for interior lights and a water pump we decided to wire the headunit to both the starter battery and leisure battery through a dash mounted toggle switch.

The diagram below is a diagram of how we achieved this:-

http://www.club80-90.co.uk/wiki/images/c/c4/Radio_2_LB.jpg

The switch is a £1.69 on-off-on switch from maplin - part number FH05F.

I chose this switch because it is small and only requires a 6.3mm hole drilling in the front of the dash. It does however require the wires to be soldered to the terminals. Larger switches are available but generally require 12mm holes to be drilled.

I drilled a hole 6.3mm in the dash next to the radio mounting hole. Then I soldered 3 lenghts of wire to the terminals. With these wires I then wired up the radio as in the above diagram and mounted the switch on the dashboard

The next trick is to mark up with labels which position is for which battery. Remember the toggle switch position is opposite to the wiring. i.e leisure battery wired to top switch terminal means the switch is pushed to the up position.

Written by Cruz
FUNPLACE2B CAMP