12k winch, trailer hitch mount, deep cycle battery, battery charger setup

admo · Monday at 9:56 PM

Hello, I found some helpful advice on this forum while figure out stuff for my truck. I felt it could be useful to share my competed setup if anyone wanted a setup that has been built and used. This is a setup using an aft winch so it is removable and has no body modifications.

Parts:

Harbor Freight Badlands Apex 12000.
Harbor Freight Badlands 12,000 lb. Winch Hitch Mount
500 cold cranking amps deep cycle battery (any car parts store)
Battery charger. This I cannot speak to, I bought it with the house from the previous owner. So I am unsure if you need one of this size or a more typical battery tender would suffice.

Issues:

My testing suggest the truck will slide on gravel at 2,000 pounds of pull. I use four wheel chocks but it still cannot anchor 12,000 pounds. I was unable to find any information on the truck frame's limits so I was not comfortable anchoring the truck to a tree with the front tow points.
The bed door sits against the top of the winch when it is open, I am unsure if stepping on the bed door in the down position would break the plastic light housing.
I had to buy that plug (absurdly expensive ~$50), cut, and swage it on so I could disconnect the battery from the winch. As the winch comes from Harbor Freight it hard wires to the battery which means you need to carry the winch, the winch mount, and the battery together. Very heavy and I don't need to hurt myself. I'm sure there are other solutions.

Hopeful this is useful for someone looking to set up their own removable winch solution.

Ford F-150 Lightning 12k winch, trailer hitch mount, deep cycle battery, battery charger setup aft_view

Ford F-150 Lightning 12k winch, trailer hitch mount, deep cycle battery, battery charger setup bed_view

potato · 2024-11-19T10:12:05-0800

I hope somebody starts making truck sized 240V winches. The biggest one I could find online was around 3500 lb. It would be nice to skip the whole battery/charger thing and just plug it in to the bed outlet directly.

admo · 2024-11-19T10:25:20-0800

potato said:
I hope somebody starts making truck sized 240V winches. The biggest one I could find online was around 3500 lb. It would be nice to skip the whole battery/charger thing and just plug it in to the bed outlet directly.

I think (not an electrical engineer) the largest problem here is AC versus DC, the 120v and 240v is AC while the big winches use 12v or 24v DC. I also have a Warn Pullzall 1,000 pound AC winch, but you're not getting the kind of power the DC winches can do. My naive guess as to why is there is no such thing as an AC battery, they only come in DC. The battery is allowing the huge cold cranking amps that these winches suck down.

The "best" solution here, if Ford were involved, would be to support switching the small 12v "car" battery behind the frunk with a full size one, then allowing the lithium ion battery to charge that battery. But given how many problems people have had with the 12v battery and software updates I decided not to even try this.

Alternatively Ford provides a permanent plug point to the lithium battery and we could get 48v winches, this would be the same thing the Sunrun truck-to-house inverters are doing except you wouldn't need to invert to AC.

So my options were to use the AC winch with two additional ropes and three snatch blocks to multiply it up to 8,000 pounds or do this setup and get 12,000 pounds with a much longer winch line.

potato · 2024-11-19T10:36:43-0800

admo said:
I think (not an electrical engineer) the largest problem here is AC versus DC, the 120v and 240v is AC while the big winches use 12v or 24v DC.

Watts are watts. 500 amps at 12 volts is 6 kW. The bed outlet can supply 7.2 kW. With an appropriate AC motor and reduction gear I'm quite sure you could make an AC winch the same size with the same power. (The smaller 240V AC winches I was looking at are similar size to DC winches with equivalent ratings.) But nobody has done it yet that I know of.

chl · 2024-11-19T11:22:28-0800

admo said:
I think (not an electrical engineer) the largest problem here is AC versus DC, the 120v and 240v is AC while the big winches use 12v or 24v DC. I also have a Warn Pullzall 1,000 pound AC winch, but you're not getting the kind of power the DC winches can do. My naive guess as to why is there is no such thing as an AC battery, they only come in DC. The battery is allowing the huge cold cranking amps that these winches suck down.

The "best" solution here, if Ford were involved, would be to support switching the small 12v "car" battery behind the frunk with a full size one, then allowing the lithium ion battery to charge that battery. But given how many problems people have had with the 12v battery and software updates I decided not to even try this.

Alternatively Ford provides a permanent plug point to the lithium battery and we could get 48v winches, this would be the same thing the Sunrun truck-to-house inverters are doing except you wouldn't need to invert to AC.

So my options were to use the AC winch with two additional ropes and three snatch blocks to multiply it up to 8,000 pounds or do this setup and get 12,000 pounds with a much longer winch line.

You have a point I guess about the power available from the Lightning AC outlets vs a 12vdc battery with a lot of cranking amps.

The bed 240V outlet will supply 30 amps - 7.2kW power.

The Frunk outlets, 120V supply 20 amps - 2.4kW power.

A 12v automobile battery may supply 200 to 800 cranking amps = 2.4kW to 9.6kW.

Now there are special 12v batteries that can supply up to 1,000 cranking amps!
that's a lot of power! 12kW of power.

There is even one that can supply 1540A!

But remember they can only provide cranking amps for maybe 10 seconds.

But I guess with a winch, that is enough to start whatever you are pulling moving at which point less amps may be needed to keep it moving?

admo · 2024-11-19T11:56:27-0800

chl said:
But I guess with a winch, that is enough to start whatever you are pulling moving at which point less amps may be needed to keep it moving?

Spinning the winch under no load (just hand tension so it winds the rope right) it takes nearly nothing. When it is under actual load they will tend to overheat if you actually need it to run hard for more than 30ish seconds. But typically either the tree or the truck gives way much earlier.

I don't worry about giving the winch idle time, this work is not a constant job for the winch. You spend so much time rigging things up, pull hard for 10ish seconds, then unrigging. I have found the AC battery charger has plenty of time to top up the battery. On one particular day I probably did 30 tree pulls over the whole day. If I had a team of people perhaps this could be an issue with draining the battery.

There may be something to these 240v AC winches but I suspect no one is making them in truck form factors. I made this post because trying to find expertise from local folks on these electric trucks was worthless. No one wants to even talk to me about debugging my GFCI issues powering the well pump with the truck, they don't understand and just want to sell you a fueled generator.

Farmford42 · 2024-11-19T13:26:21-0800

Does anyone know the 12v amp capacity for the trailer plug? I have run tiny fuel pumps off that but have always wondered if that would keep a battery charged under a load like that winch. I have a receiver winch for the farm and been thinking about this kind of setup.

21st Century Truck · 2024-11-19T15:38:51-0800

Two weeks ago driving through central Ohio I stopped in Newark at Wyeth-Scott and bought one of their 3 ton More Power Pullers, the one with the AmSteel blue synthetic rope. It comes with a snatch block so you can pull up to 12,000 pounds.

This More Power Puler is one impressive little come-along... it now lives in one of my Decked Drawers in the truck bed.

Sonny Boy and I, once I arrived at his place in Kentucky, test-wound the blue rope onto the drum by using his parked car as an anchor and winched my Lightning up his inclined driveway the length of the rope. It takes a bit of time but hot damn that little come-along can pull some serious weight without any problems! We didn't even bother to use the handle extension or the snatch block to pull the Lightning.

Because I stopped for the purchase in the Wyeth-Scott shop which is close off I-70, I avoided the steep shipping cost for that solid iron come-along puller

Besides, the small shop crew was pretty informative about the tool's capabilities and its maintenance. See URL WWW.Wyeth-Scott.com

Those who'll choose this More Power Puller rather than an electric winch, will save a lot of truck space.

12k winch, trailer hitch mount, deep cycle battery, battery charger setup

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