It's been a while since I made an update. With the holiday season that just passed, I was doing a lot of garage storage and organization work: mostly adding a garage attic with a pull down ladder, flooring, and LED lighting.
This was so I can finished my Oldsmobile project car, and have more organized work room in the garage for the Jeep and other projects. It also helped having everything in the garage during a recent, and rare hailstorm. Our winter in the Phoenix area has been certainly different.
We also had family in town from Chicago for Thanksgiving, and hosted at our home for Christmas.
One positive note from the holiday season is the plethora of items that going on sale on Amazon: including LED flood lights and wiring kits with relays.
I also had the opportunity to get annoyed enough of seeing the Dometic fridge slide tucked under the garage cabinets since late October to install it. Since we use the WJ close to 7 days a week (4 days a week for me going to work, and 3 days as a family vehicle in lieu of the GMC truck) I wanted to rear storage to be more practical.
As you can see from the install below, the slide makes it much easier to get to the fridge, especially for my wife. Even though I used cable ties to clean up the hold down straps' appearance, I enjoy knowing I can pull the fridge if needed. It is mounted using steel anchors, so I can pull the entire slide to get to the spare tire. I contemplated making a platform that covered the whole cargo area and used u-bolts on the factory mounts, but I didn't get that far. Behind the slide I have a basic tool bag (everything from the CD changer area went to this bag) and an umbrella, which I've needed a good amount this winter to my surprise. Also, to the left of the fridge is a sunshade which is a must here in the summer. Since the Jeep is garage stored, I'm not to worried about it on weekends.
For the longest time, on and off, the fridge was in the dead center of the rear cargo area: held down via ratchet straps to the factory supplied hold downs. It worked well, but was horrible when it came to space efficiency. For normal weekends, I need to fit the fridge, medium, sized stroller, and still have room for groceries, bags we take for the day, etc.
Also, powering the fridge was another problem. The factory, rear 12V plug is the cargo area is 20 amp (which shocked me) which is more than enough power, but made the plug extremely hot, and pulled a huge draw which wasn't good for the battery. Another issue was that I was using a constantly hot dash plug to keep the fridge on, while the other plug is key-powered and for the Sirius radio at the moment (I need to hard wire it); this meant my wife would unplug the fridge to charge her phone while she was using the Jeep, and the fridge may or may not get plugged in and the plug may or may not come loose from being manipulated. So, I hardwired it to a switch on the dash with LED indication. This also helps if we go out of town or let the Jeep sit at home as we can just flip a switch as to not drain the battery.
The fridge is the switch to the right, the left one if for the new LEDs I mentioned above. I'll cover those in an upcoming post very soon.
Overall the cargo area is much cleaner now.
