Search the Community

Hello all. I developed a problem today and due to a passerby caught it before it became serious. I had purchased a toad charger apparatus several years ago as we traveled from coast to coast and often dry camped while doing so. The toad charging apparatus allowed us to maintain a charge from our 350HP Fleetwood Providence to our Ford Explorer for some time without problems and without running the Genny. Recently the apparatus failed to do the job and we would often have to use jumper cables to start the Explorer after a day's drive. I sanded connectors and terminals as much as feasible thinking that might be the problem. In any event, sporadically some days it seemed to work and some days not. If I thought about it in time I would run the Genny for a half hour before we stopped and the additional voltage almost insured the Explorer (Toad) would crank ok. Today, I stopped at a rest stop to make a phone call and a passerby beat on our door telling me he thought we had a fire. Sure enough, we did have a fire on our battery in toad that melted through the top of the battery. I was able to put out with a fire extinguisher and cut the charging wiring from the toad battery post and disconnected the motor home side of the charging cable. I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a new battery. Tonight all is well except I no longer have a toad charging system I still have #10 gauge wire from motor home to a toad connection that is also #10 wire and I am now thinking of just getting rid of the toad battery charging apparatus completely and just keeping the #10 wire and putting in 20amp fuses at each end of the positive circuit and leave it with a simple plug that can be unplugged each time we disconnect the toad from the motor home. The plug that we use is a trolling motor connect/disconnect that is really heavy duty. The apparatus previously installed included a diode(?) that purportedly kept the Toad from back feeding to the motor home if both were running. Not sure how important that is, but it was the selling point when I bought. I did go heavier in the wiring department when I installed initially by using #10 wire connecting to my house batteries which are in turn connected to the chassis batteries through a relay of some sort I think. Does anyone have thoughts as to safety of such a hookup if I install 20amp fuses on each positive wire (one for motor home end and one for toad end.) Thanks in advance for any advise you may have. Paul