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

[admo]

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.

 

[potato]

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]

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]

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.

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