This solved all my issues with aux battery and ESS.
WaX
It was the main feed over to a switchpro, was the longest cable I had at the time of the picture. I made another and have attached to the power bus since then.
That's a good sign. The intelligent alternator isn't like the old days when more voltage was a good sign. If you're over 14V all the time, it's either really cold, you drive only short distances or your batteries are fading. Im mostly doing long drives and watch the voltage regularly. I like when it settles down to around 13V, that tells me the batteries are topped off nicely.
Yep, we've had the JL 8 months now, and it shite itself twice where I needed the little lithium jump-pack to fire it up to get home. ESS is shite.
How do you "pull the plug" on the eTorque, w/ one battery only? What wires to disconnect to kill the ESS?
This is on my to do list, great post.Both jumping N2-to-N1 and N3-to-N1 do the same thing because once the auxiliary battery is taken out of the the system, either physically, or electrically, all the power is coming from the main battery/alternator anyway.
It’s just that in the stock setup, N3 is what feeds the auxiliary battery which in turn, connects to and feeds N1. Jumping from N3 directly to N1 is basically whats happening in the stock setup, but stock it has a relay and the aux battery between them and this way is truly bypassing them.
Fusing the jumper is not necessary because you’re bypassing all of the wiring that went to the relay and auxiliary battery. N3 comes right off it’s own dedicated 150A fuse that was there to protect that wiring which is now not connected to anything, or in my case physically removed. Jumping N3 to N1 is still retaining the 150A fuse. Putting a fused Jumper would be redundant by putting another (probably lower capacity) fuse in line with the existing 150A fuse. The 150A fuse that is there is probably not even necessary now because N1 is feeding accessories that have there own fused circuits.
The only difference between jumping N2-to-N1 and N3-to-N1 is that the latter is powering N1 through the original 150A fuse that it was going through stock.
Jumping N2 to N1 is feeding N1 directly from the main battery and it wasn’t that way from the factory, but doing it this was will work perfectly fine and is almost exactly the same. Some are suggesting taking the Aux battery + cable and connecting it to the main battery + and this works too. It’s the same as Jumping N2 to N1, but the power is going through more cabling and more cabling has more chance of getting damaged and shorted, but no more than it was stock because all of that cabling was there stock to begin with. So this way is fine too as long as the cable is rerouted safely. It’s basically rerouting what’s already there instead of making a jumper. Affectively using the original aux + cable as a big unfused jumper. If anything, this setup is less protected than how I have mine setup.
There are many different ways to accomplish the same thing. Hooking this to that, or jumping this to that is doing the same thing, it’s just pulling the power from a different point in the same system.
I did it the way I did because my goal was to clean it up as much as possible. I removed a LOT of cabling and clutter. I unwrapped the harnesses and removed everything I could including the cabling that goes down to the relay and all of the cables for the aux battery and then re-wrapped what was left. It looks super clean, not that you even see it. The Jeep doesn’t even know it’s not there. I left the relay itself in place and it’s still hooked up to the control wires, there just aren’t any battery cables hooked to it.
Hope this helps and I hope my explanation wasn’t too confusing. I learned all of this from the post started by @Jebiruph and I can’t thank him enough for the work that he did in that thread and everyone else for that matter. Getting rid of that aux battery mess really helped with the suspension project I’m working on. I did a ton of research on this before I implemented it and I think it was the best way and it worked great.
This diagram by @Jebiruph shows how the stock setup is, so maybe you can see what I confusingly tried to describe. Haha
-Jeff
And here's a picture of the mess that I removed:
You have bypassed it, taking it out of the system. It's just sitting there. Why charge it? Well, one reason is that if it sits long enough and goes flat, it could freeze and break (hmmm, do AGM batteries do that?)
my solution is simple but ad hoc. Every 2-4 weeks I attach the charger's negative clamp to the Aux's taped off and disconnected negative cable. That charges the Aux up just fine. I have the charger installed onboard the Jeep so this is easy to do anytime I have the hood up for some other reason.
