Outback Mods

07/16/13

Modifications to Our Outback 21-RS

Battery Disconnect Switch:

I added a disconnect switch for the batteries to be able to switch off all 12 volt power to the trailer. This keeps the parasitic loads in the trailer from killing the batteries when it's being stored and gives me a little piece of mind as well. I've added this disconnect switch to every trailer I've owned and think it should be standard equipment.

6 volt batteries:

I added a pair of 6 volt deep cycle golf cart batteries to the trailer.

The 6 volt batteries greatly extend dry camping time and they hold up better to being deeply discharged and recharged. These are a good investment for anybody planning to dry camp longer than a weekend. When I used a single 12 volt battery, I could never get through a weekend of running the furnace. Now we can do 4 day trips with heavy furnace usage and still have plenty of juice to spare.

Outside storage box:

My Wife's Uncle Bill made us a diamond plate box to store our slide support rails in.

I mounted it on the back bumper. The rails were originally meant to be stored under the front bunk, which I found pretty inconvenient. This seems to work much better.

Flag pole/Sign post Mod:

Talking with some friends about hanging signs on the front of the trailer and such, I got to thinking about it. I have a pirate flag that I want to be able to fly and needed a way to do so.
What I came up with was a couple of 1-1/2" conduit hangers and a couple of 3/4" conduit hangers.
use a short 1/4-20 screw and mount the hangers back to back and then stick them on your tongue jack.
I used wing nuts on the 3/4" ones so that I can put the pole up and down without tools. A stick of 3/4" conduit and your in business. I'll prolly just fly my flag on this for now, but a 90 degree bend in the conduit and you could hang a sign or a plant or whatever.

Power Tongue Jack:

The power tongue jack can be seen in the pics above for the flag pole Mod. This is also something that should be standard equipment for any trailer big enough to need a weight distributing hitch. It makes hitching and unhitching much easier. The model I used was an Ultra Fab 3002 from ultra-fab.com. I had some issues with water getting into the motor area and with the powder coating on the various pieces of the housing preventing proper grounding. I replaced most of the screws on the unit with stainless steel screws using star washers and started hanging a bucket over the unit to keep rain out and it gave me no trouble after that.

Fluorescent Light fixtures:

I swapped out a few of the factory incandescent light fixtures for fluorescent ones. I tried some LED bulbs first and just wasn't happy with the light we got from them. The goal here was to conserve battery power and these fixtures use exactly half the power of the original ones and provide about twice the light. I even measured the power use with a meter before I installed them to verify the claims on the box. The fixtures were a little pricey, but I'm happy with the results.

This site was last updated 11/02/12