Auxiliary retro add-ons

Landyfox said:

Bit of an odd post but bare with me! Due to recent surgery, I am significantly hindered by pain and discomfort in my back and legs. As a result, I'm looking to add a few retro fitted aids and I would welcome any advice on how best to do this.

Firstly,I recently purchased some cheap car heated seat pads from Alidi which plug directly into the cigarette lighter for £9 each. They have two heat settings which are fantastic and the warmth significantly aids my bad back. As I have pretty thick durable seat covers and these pads are so effective, I thought I would chop the cigarette lighter connection off and wire them directly and then use a dedicated double setting rocker switch for each one. This way it frees up my cigarette lighter. Would I need a relay for the wiring, maybe 2, one for each circuit. If anyone has done this, I would appreciate any advice on wire amp rating etc and how they went about doing it.

Secondly, at present I'm finding twisting somewhat difficult and rather painful. Therefore, I have decided to fit a reverse camera up at the rear of my Defender just above the door. It cost £18 of eBay including a small TFT monitor. The camera was simply installed, by drawing power from the rear reverse lamp and grounding on the body of the vehicle. As a temporary measure, I've piggybacked a live switch at the fuse box to power the monitor. The clarity is fantastic and It's made such difference when reversing.

Thirdly, I'm going to attempt to fit central locking using a full kit of eBay which cost £39.

Finally, In the future, I'm looking at fitting some basic LED running lights which I received as a get well present of my ittleoness. Unfortunately they don't come with a wiring loom. Again, any guidance on how to install these would be very helpful, such as Wiring needed (amp rating) Relays and how you wire in to the vehicles electrics.

Given all these retro-fittings, would it be advisable to create an auxiliary fuse box. Ideally I would like to make the fuse box 'switched live'. Any advice or pics on how to do this would be very much welcomed. I intend to fit any new switches into the cubby box. Due to lack of room and limited funds, ideally I'm not looking to run two batteries on split charge at this time.

Defender is 90 300TDI - cheers guys

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discomania said:

For your heated seats I would say yes and no given that they can run from a cigarette lighter. No because it cannot be that big a current if it runs on the cigarette lighter circuit so a decent switch and Fused supply would be just fine but yes as you would need some form of ignition control so you cannot accidentally leave them on.

If it was me I would take a feed from the battery box via a fuse holder or a small fuse box you could mount in there, run that fused feed via a relay up to your pad circuit. If it has two settings you may need to look at two relays. I would then take the relay switching circuit from an ignition on live so it can only be on with ignition.

Or I would wire them to a 10-20min relay and ignore the gin feed and just set it so you can only have them on for a maximum time at a time so even if accidentally switched on with the engine off it would not stay on indefinitely.

The second part sounds fine really.

Your DRL would need an ignition switched feed, there are quite a few behind the centre panel on the dash where the cigarette lighter is, one is a green with another colour trace if my mind serves me correctly.

I would take one of these and extend it out to your bulkhead, use this to switch a relay, deck the relays coil to the mounting screw and that's you got your ignition switch for the DRL. Then run a new fused supply up to the relay, then out to your DRL. Again deck them locally to the headlight and lighting earths for example.

Central locking just needs a good permenant live, it uses current for such a small amount of time you don't need to be too fussy. I think I tied mine into a purple feed I found behind the centre console which ran the clock and cigarette lighter.

A new fuse box would be nice but it then means a lot of new home runs to a new fuse box, nothing your adding is particularly power hungry, invest the money you would spend on the box on some good quality crimps and wire and heat shrink.

If you need more help or wiring diagrams on how to do any of this let me know.

No need for split charge for any of this, what you are trying to do is all very sensible and everything with exception of the central locking is only really even going to be on when the engine is running so 2 batteries wouldn't help you here as it's the alt taking the load.

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discomania said:

For your heated seats I would say yes and no given that they can run from a cigarette lighter. No because it cannot be that big a current if it runs on the cigarette lighter circuit so a decent switch and Fused supply would be just fine but yes as you would need some form of ignition control so you cannot accidentally leave them on.

If it was me I would take a feed from the battery box via a fuse holder or a small fuse box you could mount in there, run that fused feed via a relay up to your pad circuit. If it has two settings you may need to look at two relays. I would then take the relay switching circuit from an ignition on live so it can only be on with ignition.

Or I would wire them to a 10-20min relay and ignore the gin feed and just set it so you can only have them on for a maximum time at a time so even if accidentally switched on with the engine off it would not stay on indefinitely.

The second part sounds fine really.

Your DRL would need an ignition switched feed, there are quite a few behind the centre panel on the dash where the cigarette lighter is, one is a green with another colour trace if my mind serves me correctly.

I would take one of these and extend it out to your bulkhead, use this to switch a relay, deck the relays coil to the mounting screw and that's you got your ignition switch for the DRL. Then run a new fused supply up to the relay, then out to your DRL. Again deck them locally to the headlight and lighting earths for example.

Central locking just needs a good permenant live, it uses current for such a small amount of time you don't need to be too fussy. I think I tied mine into a purple feed I found behind the centre console which ran the clock and cigarette lighter.

A new fuse box would be nice but it then means a lot of new home runs to a new fuse box, nothing your adding is particularly power hungry, invest the money you would spend on the box on some good quality crimps and wire and heat shrink.

If you need more help or wiring diagrams on how to do any of this let me know.

No need for split charge for any of this, what you are trying to do is all very sensible and everything with exception of the central locking is only really ever going to be on when the engine is running so 2 batteries wouldn't help you here as it's the alt taking the load.

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discomania said:

For your heated seats I would say yes and no given that they can run from a cigarette lighter. No because it cannot be that big a current if it runs on the cigarette lighter circuit so a decent switch and Fused supply would be just fine but yes as you would need some form of ignition control so you cannot accidentally leave them on.

If it was me I would take a feed from the battery box via a fuse holder or a small fuse box you could mount in there, run that fused feed via a relay up to your pad circuit. If it has two settings you may need to look at two relays. I would then take the relay switching circuit from an ignition on live so it can only be on with ignition.

Or I would wire them to a 10-20min relay and ignore the gin feed and just set it so you can only have them on for a maximum time at a time so even if accidentally switched on with the engine off it would not stay on indefinitely.

The second part sounds fine really.

Your DRL would need an ignition switched feed, there are quite a few behind the centre panel on the dash where the cigarette lighter is, one is a green with another colour trace if my mind serves me correctly.

I would take one of these and extend it out to your bulkhead, use this to switch a relay, deck the relays coil to the mounting screw and that's you got your ignition switch for the DRL. Then run a new fused supply up to the relay, then out to your DRL. Again deck them locally to the headlight and lighting earths for example.

Central locking just needs a good permenant live, it uses current for such a small amount of time you don't need to be too fussy. I think I tied mine into a purple feed I found behind the centre console which ran the clock and cigarette lighter.

A new fuse box would be nice but it then means a lot of new home runs to a new fuse box, nothing your adding is particularly power hungry, invest the money you would spend on the box on some good quality crimps and wire and heat shrink.

If you need more help or wiring diagrams on how to do any of this let me know.

No need for split charge for any of this, what you are trying to do is all very sensible and everything with exception of the central locking is only really ever going to be on when the engine is running so 2 batteries wouldn't help you here as it's the alt taking the load.

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Landyfox said:

That all sounds fantastic and exactly what I want. If I'm honest, I got lost when you tried to describe the DRL. I would very much welcome any help/advice with wiring diagrams

For the seats.... for Christmas along with the cheap eBay DRL, my little ones got me a bit of a kit: a new 10 blade fuse box with spade connections and two heated seat rocker switches, I'm not sure of their amp rating but it as an image of a seat with two settings and a green led. My little kit also included 5m of 8amp, 17amp and 27amp wire. No relays tho. I do have a spare pair of jump leads, I assume I could use this for the battery feed. Could I make the whole auxiliary fuse box 'switch live'?!

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Landyfox said:

The switches I have look like this....

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Landyfox said:

Discomania... first can I just say massive thank you for this.

Unfortunately I don't have the packaging for this describing the features and specifications. Similar ones seam to state the wattage at High 45W and Low 36W. Does that help.?!

Just for reference I don't go wading so locating in the battery box shouldn't be an issue and it should look nice and clean.

The picture below shows what they look like

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discomania said:

No worries.

45W at a nominal 12V is 3.75A so very very little. I would probably use a 5A fuse and wire rated at 8-10A. In reality it will draw less as the alternator will sit at around 14.4V so the current drops to nearer 3.2A.

I will draw you up some schematics on Tuesday for your various circuits.

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Landyfox said:

That's fantastic and very good of you Discomania

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DaveM-sport said:

I bought a heated seat kit for about £60 for two seats. comes with all the wiring and relays and two small rocker switches. Got a pair of TD5 Disco 2 heated seat switches then to use to match the Defenders dash. Whole lot was well under a 100 quid while Specific kits for the TD5 Defender were listed in lots of places for nearly £250 for the same thing!!!

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discomania said:

Here are some options and ideas for you. I think given the requirement for these circuits to be ignition switched then I think a ignition relay would be the way forward - something you can use to operate your add on's. You could technically use the ignition switch itself but you are then ramping up the loads and I don't really think the standard LR switch is up to much.

So create a dedicated ignition switched power supply - you can then add things to this up to the maximum load as you wish. I would start off with a decent sized rely for this one - for your needs I think you would get away with about 20A but I would go for 40A at least so you can add things to it in the future, also, you want it over-rated so the contacts are not stressed. This is what you should probably make up, it also means you can create a nice hardness with all your wiring in it to make it look pretty factory and smart.
Circuit:
View attachment 124698

Now going forward I have done these options with their own relay shown for clarity and to let you choose what you do - however, if you choose to do the single main one, then simply dismiss the relay part of my circuit and start from the switched output of the relay and replace that with the fused supply from your main ignition switched relay fuse board.

This is the most simple option for standard ignition on DRL's - you could also put a switch into the feed if you wanted to have the ability to disable the DRL's. I would work out the rating of your DRL's combined, add some contingency then round that up to the next available fuse size. All wiring from that point onward must be rated to at the very least the same rating as the fuse, but I always tend to go up a bit more. I would take the DRL's earth connection locally to the lights, probably using the main earthing connection on the wings where all the front lights are earthed anyway.
Circuit:
View attachment 124695

Now here is an option for the heaters. This option relies on a single relay (or your ignition switched relay fuse board) so that the heaters cannot be left on when the ign. is switched off - this is probably my favourite as it reduced the number or relays.
Circuit:
View attachment 124696

Now here is another version, probably the least economic/efficient version and does not include the use of a ignition switched relay but rather smaller independent relays.
Circuit:
View attachment 124697

The circuit diagrams are a little hard to see on the thumbnails - but they are up there!

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Landyfox said:

For the ignition relay, do I require the 4 or 5 pin.?! Thanks

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discomania said:

Either will work, only difference with a 5 pin is that you have "normally closed" and "normally open" contacts - so on application of power to the coil one pin becomes live and one goes dead.

A 4 pin will be just fine - 2 terminals for the coil, and 2 for the switching of the circuit - it would have normally open contacts - i.e. OFF until power is applied to the coil.

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discomania said:

Either will work, only difference with a 5 pin is that you have "normally closed" and "normally open" contacts - so on application of power to the coil one pin becomes live and one goes dead.

A 4 pin will be just fine - 2 terminals for the coil, and 2 for the switching of the circuit - it would have normally open contacts - i.e. OFF until power is applied to the coil.

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Landyfox said:

So I am easily with the limits using a 17 amp or 27 amp wire rating.?! I've also purchased the 4 pin 40amp coil. Damn I'm excited... I will keep you posted

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