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.

 

[chl]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[Ishkatan]

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.

There was another thread here that said it was fused for 30A. You could also call Ford and ask.

https://www.f150lightningforum.com/...in-trailer-charging-output.18527/?form=MG0AV3

 

[Maxx]

The truck already has a DC battery pack capable of giving enough power and two strong DC motors. Next gen F150 should have this as a built in function with only the cable assembly as an accessory.

 

[subseavet]

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.

Watts are watts. You are 100% correct, but AC and DC motors have very different torque curves and hugely different inrush current demands depending on the full load voltage/current requirements to achieve max instantaneous torque, which could easily overwhelm, stall, and overheat certain motors. Many very large AC motors have requirements that they be started at low or no load and have load slowly transferred to them or they stall and overheat the motor windings before they even get spinning (it's why soft start AC motors have been a thing for decades, they stall easily on startup under load). DC motors often are built to overcome this (to a point), but the voltage and current required to generate the full load instantaneous torque necessary to move a 12,000 lb load (for example), are crazy, and even with 7.2kW of AC power available the truck may not supply sufficient instantaneous power without damaging AC/DC power conversion equipment (or tripping the breaker) to meet the need. This is where your massive 12V XXX cold cranking amps battery comes in and provides that absolutely mind-numbing inrush current and voltage for the milliseconds it is needed before achieving a much more tolerable running current and voltage/amperage requirement. All of this to say, our Lightnings are well equipped to handle this problem because they do it every time you accelerate the truck from a stop, especially when towing or moving heavy loads in the bed. To do that, Ford spent years and $$$ getting the current battery and motor system tuned for exactly that use case. If we want a winch to operate with similar characteristics, the entire system would need to be built for it, and I think it is doable, but it may be such a niche market that no one will bother. Thus, the charger, battery, and winch setups people have come up with. If anyone comes across something better or more interesting, I want to learn more. This is not a simple problem. And I guess one final thought/reminder for winch owners/users. Your winch cable is rated to pull an object to the rated load. When you are trying to move something that weighs the full load value with your winch, when you start moving it, and are dragging it, the actual load exceeds the rated weight throughout that evolution because chances are not everything you want to winch has four nice round wheels on it. So be mindful that while your cable may have an engineering factor of safety on it that should make sure it won't break when you do what I just described, know that each time you do it, that safety margin is getting smaller and smaller and eventually you will part/break your cable under heavy load which is incredibly dangerous and the cause of many amputations and deaths over the years. If your cable does not have any kind of tension, tell tales in it to show when you are stressing it to rated capacity or beyond; be mindful of this. Don't overload it often, and if you do, replace your cable more often than you think you need to because you don't want to be injured by your equipment failing. Sadly, cables that fail catastrophically can look perfectly fine to the naked eye right up to the moment they snap. So please don't rely on your eyes to tell you when you've overdone it one too many times. Know your equipment and its ratings; if you're unsure, find out or just replace the cable. Happy winching and motoring!

 

[admo]

Thank you for all the information subseavet. You're leaving me a little worried about the stresses I put that smaller AC winch under while trying to pull a tree, leaving it under heavy tension, hosing the dirt and giving a moment for the tree to break a little, winching a little more while under heavy load... it sounds like it was not great for the motor and I should have being doing more rigging instead.

I too worrying about the cables and it sounds like you have the experience to give the right warnings to us all here. I use the more expensive synthetic line purely for these reasons even though I'm sure using them around trees, mud, thorny plants, and rocks is going to use them up fast. The only metal I have in the line is the chain wrapped around the tree and I always use a snatch block to make a turn and put the winch out of line with the chain.

Lastly, your dog looks great.

Sponsored