POWER and TOPPERS

[DeadSetMonkey]

Hey out there. I am wrapping my head around adding a pop-up camper top (like Tune, GoFAst, Oru, etc) to my 2024 Trailhunter.
Wondering how to make best use of the inverter 120V power already in the bed?
Goal is to get heat (electric? or propane?), USD power, and induction cook top functions.
Wondering what people have done for those need and how they have utilized the Tacoma bed power.

Use Tacoma power to charge a Li battery bank?
Run accessories directly plugged into 120V plug?
Where to tap into 12V power?

Broad questions to be sure. Curious how people have approached powering up there campers.

Many thanks

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[timetoeatpotatoes]

I'm very early on in my planning but I don't want to have to get into a scenario where I have to idle my truck in generator mode for an extended period of time to run devices.

I'm planning on a separate battery bank plugged into the inverter and then plug my devices into that, itll do both 12 and 120.

This will keep my fridge and whatever other garbage I brought with me powered up for the night or weekend and I can recharge that as I drive.

I dont plan on a heater but if I did it would probably be diesel or propane. Electric heat just takes waaay too much capacity.

 

[gofastdan]

Sorry for the late response but here are my thoughts and what I've ended up doing with my Lone Peak camper.

I had high hopes for the AC inverter in the Tacoma but my hopes were dashed even before getting it when I found out that there are a couple of deal-killers in the mix. Keep in mind this is the 400 watt I'm talking about. IDK, maybe the 2,400 watt in the hybrid functions differently.

First, it's only 400 watts when in park. As soon as you put it in gear it switches to 100 watts, no more than you get out of your cigarette lighter....

Second, you have to push the button to turn it on every time you start the vehicle. I don't know about anyone else but I'm never going to remember to do that every single time.

The older generations functioned the same way but at least there are kits that you can wire in to trick the Tacoma into thinking it's always in park, even when driving, so at least you always have the full 400 watts available. I worked with Guild Outfitters and they sent me one of their kits at a discount but we could never get it to work. The function is the same as previous gens but the inverter itself is different with different wiring and different connectors. I'm sure that it will be a matter of time before someone figures it out but w/o a schematic I wasn't about to go randomly cutting wires and Guild was oddly ambivalent about trying to help. He basically ghosted me once I told him the kit wouldn't work.

All that to say, sadly, I don't use the AC inverter at all. I gave up on it. Toyota really screwed up the implementation imho.

My main battery for the camper is an Ecoflow Delta 2 coupled to a Delta Max battery. If I had it to do again I wouldn't use the Delta 2 but it's what I have and I didn't want to spend money buying something different. My main problem with the Delta 2 is that it only has a single DC charging input. I wanted both to charge from the alternator (when driving) and from solar (anytime the sun is out). There are plenty of solutions, solar into the DC input and a DC to AC inverter off the alternator that plugs into the AC input for example, but all the solutions I came up with were inelegant and inefficient.

After a long search I found the solution I was looking for from ETaker. Last summer I purchased the F1000. It comes with power cables to run from the truck battery and then also has an input from your solar panels. It combines the two into one DC output that runs to your solar generator of choice, up to 1,000 (500 from the alternator and 500 from solar) watts total. It works great but I wasn't thrilled that you couldn't monitor or adjust the cutoff voltage for the alternator input and when I took a long trip from Seattle to Phoenix and back it would consistently get uncomfortably hot.

I contacted ETaker about my concerns and they said, "We have an upgraded model coming out. Would you like to test it for us?" Yes Please! They sent me a F2000 to test and this thing is a beast. Yes, it has double the capacity, but realistically I'm never going to allow it to pull more than 400 or 500 watts from the alternator anyway. In my testing it's never even gotten warm enough to turn on the fan.

More importantly to me it's fully configurable with an app and I can set all the parameters to exactly what I want, say have the cutoff voltage set to 13.2 volts so anything less than that and it won't pull from the alternator, but will still allow passthrough charging from solar up to whatever limit I choose (the Delta 2 has a 500 watt max DC charging limit...).

To be fair, they sent me a pre-production unit and I eventually blew the wireless module out so they sent me another one. They've updated the app and the hardware firmware multiple times and I have no idea when they'll start shipping to customers. That said, it's the solution I was looking for from the start and I'm very happy with it. There's a lot more customization I won't go into here but in my mind it's a great solution if it meets your use case. At some point I'll make a Youtube video or something about it once I'm convinced they've got it production ready, which should be soon. And it completely takes Toyota's stupid AC inverter out of the picture....

 

[Sagebrush]

You'll not get much bang for heat from a battery system. I've got a teardrop camper with a Propex (propane) heater. It's flat-ass wonderful and uses very little electricity.

But they aren't cheap.

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