2015 Subaru Outback - Expedition Retrofit

[midlifecrisis]

Got the last bits of electrical sorted and installed this afternoon, completed battery box/electronics suite here.


I have a few small items left to complete....second window screen, some window covers, straps....that kinda stuff, but for all intents and purposes I'm pretty much finished with this round.
I'll probably put a solenoid/hot lead and I have a rack extension coming, but until I get a chance to use it and find out what works and what doesn't, this is it.

Taking a short overnighter tomorrow as a shake down run, and then next Friday I leave on an 8 day trip so I should have some good info/data to share.
I'll be interested to see how my batteries fare with the double 6's, the solar panel dumping some limited juice back in and running the refer off of an inverter while underway.

 

[DETN8R]

Looking good. Been following this thread for a while.

 

[CurtStyler]

Looks great. Thanks for the info about the sleeping platform. I just placed a deposit on a 2016 2.5i Premium for delivery in mid-October, then it will be build time.

I'll be interested how your test run goes down. I may end up stealing some ideas from your build when my Outback comes in.

My original plan was to try to keep the rear seats in position and build a removable platform over them for sleeping. I'm going to be moving around the country for a while but staying a few months in various cities so I wanted to keep seating so it was still practical. Since I'm in Florida, I'm going to head down the Key West and start a trip with the goal of hitting Prudhoe Bay next Summer. The more I look at some of the other camper builds, I'm thinking I'm going to end up removing half of the rear seat and keep the small seat in place "jump seat style". It looks like the measurements put it just under 27 inches so I may end up going with a similar sleeping arrangement.

Between your build and Grants, I've got some great ideas of what this car can do. I'm going to try threading the needle right between your builds, half a sleeping platform and a mild lift might be a good balance for me. I can't wait to join the modified Outback club, y'all need t-shirts.

 

[midlifecrisis]

Looks great. Thanks for the info about the sleeping platform. I just placed a deposit on a 2016 2.5i Premium for delivery in mid-October, then it will be build time.

I'll be interested how your test run goes down. I may end up stealing some ideas from your build when my Outback comes in.

My original plan was to try to keep the rear seats in position and build a removable platform over them for sleeping. I'm going to be moving around the country for a while but staying a few months in various cities so I wanted to keep seating so it was still practical. Since I'm in Florida, I'm going to head down the Key West and start a trip with the goal of hitting Prudhoe Bay next Summer. The more I look at some of the other camper builds, I'm thinking I'm going to end up removing half of the rear seat and keep the small seat in place "jump seat style". It looks like the measurements put it just under 27 inches so I may end up going with a similar sleeping arrangement.

Between your build and Grants, I've got some great ideas of what this car can do. I'm going to try threading the needle right between your builds, half a sleeping platform and a mild lift might be a good balance for me. I can't wait to join the modified Outback club, y'all need t-shirts.

Ya, if you need rear seats that definitely makes it more interesting, especially if you are working towards a refer. It's a space hog.
For your purposes, I kinda like the split rear idea, leaving in the little seat and pulling out the wide half. The bracket between the two seats would allow that, you'd just have the "other" half flopping around but no worries there.

I would try to engineer it with a super flat section of the platform that was "attached" to the back of the small seat somehow so in the 80% (?) of the time you need space more than you need a back seat slot you could flop the little seat forward and have something usable. It's a matter of taste for sure, but I just don't like trying to use the back seats for storage. It's OK for soft-floppy stuff, but I'm always afraid I'm going to tear a seat cover and I am anal about stuff being "just so", which makes stuff tossed in the backseat offensive to my DNA.

 

[midlifecrisis]

So, short shake down run complete and here are some things I learned:

1. I still need to find that one last squeak!

2. The twin 6V AGM batteries are rock stars. When I pulled out of the driveway they were showing 13.0V on the solar controller readout (haven't received my special AGM charger/minder yet, so I went with the as-shipped level of charge). They are under no load during travel because I have a small inverter hooked into one of the stock switched outlets making the refer 110V during transit. Car shut off at ~9:30 AM and the batteries took over with the refer and water pump duty. I used the pump for dish washing, I took a shower after a long hike and I ran it fairly continuously for 5 minutes or so recycling water back into the tank trying to sort out the hot water heater (after a cold shower). I kept tabs on the meter and it never showed less than 12.8V. Drove home with the inverter working again and all load off the batteries and when I pulled into the driveway they were at 13.0V again! So after 18 hours or so, no input voltage and a rest period they basically rebounded to their previous charge state.

3. I was in the trees and there was a big brush fire off to the East with thick smoke in our area, so there was no opportunity to try out the solar panel. There was one little scrap of sort-of-sun so I mounted the panel just to see if I could get a look at the controller with juice coming in, but apparently there wasn't enough electricity bullets coming through to fire off the panel. At least I got the chance to mount it, plug it in and make sure everything was Hoyle with all of that.

4. I need to spend some time rearranging my stored items in the under-floor hatches as opposed to "sweet, this fits there" type of thinking. I spend WAY to much time sliding things here and there to access stuff under the floor so getting things I will use all of the time/part of the time/only in a crisis categorized and arranged better will be time well spent.

5. Sleeping setup works great, no issues there. I do need the second window screen to let air circulate through and some loose window coverings are in order, but I knew that.

6. Hot water heater was DOA, so that's boxed up and headed back to the Amazon. I'm going to take a breath and think about that one.

7. Water pump is a good, strong model. I ended up swapping the little push button on/off hose end dealio from the end of the hard pipe coming from the basement to the end of my 5 foot whip. It works a lot better for one-handing rinsing off dishes and whatnot, basically like a fancy garden nozzle which makes me think I could have juts used a fancy garden nozzle, but I like the push button functionality. And you can use it without a full depress of the button to dribble if you like, so that's cool for filling dog dish, etc.

8. The dog is a pain in the butt on the way up but a sleeping lump on the way back. Just like kids...walk the crap out of them and they are much more pliable.

9. Refrigerator seems to work really nicely. It will be nice when I get comfortable with it and can stop obsessing over the temperature readout. I set it for 38 and had it plugged into shore power overnight Friday before leaving Saturday morning. It was on inverter during the drive up and back and on battery the rest of the time. The readout seems to bounce around a few degrees up/down so I'm not sure if that's a function of the electronics, usage or what, but it never showed below 34 and never above 40 so I guess a window bracketed around your set temp is the game. From an analog-style analysis standpoint, everything stayed nice and cold.

10. No blown fuses, no car fires, no broken suspension pieces so that's all good. Fully loaded, by rear space between the fender and tire was -1" from my front, so a little squat as discussed previously, but not enough that it's even obvious and I didn't feel like I was driving a boat that won't plane out or anything like that. Felt normal on the pavement and didn't bottom out on any of the 22 miles of crappy waterboarded forest road with dozens of diagonal water channels across it.

11. Wind drag! I can FEEL the wind on the crap up in the cargo basket and it was very obvious that was killing my gas mileage. I had the spare, the propane tank, the shower tent, a folding chair and a storage box up there (the box being the biggest offender). I pulled it all down (except the spare tire) and threw it in the back for the two hour drive home and it was like night and day. Mileage crept up the whole way and was showing 24.5 for the whole trip when I got back, that was over a distance of 210 miles with ~25 on 15 mph dirt. I don't trust the computer completely because I know it's working on trends, but the trend it was showing on the way up was sub-20 and from where the gauge is sitting I think 24+ is about right. I spent the ride up designing an expanded front fairing that will cover all the way up to the top of my chosen cargo load out. It will be a pretty inexpensive experiment, so we shall see how that goes, but I don't want everything inside the car and I don't want 19 MPG, so I will look into it.

12. Courtesy lights! I have all of the interior lights set to "OFF" so I can be in and out of the car and leave the rear hatch open without affecting the car battery, but at some point I noticed that those damn little courtesy lights in the mirrors were staying on. Apparently they stay on indefinitely if a door is open, although I think the car has some sort of "battery drain" feature that will kill stuff like that at some point, but I don't want to find out where that kicks in! I went to move the car at one point and it was just the slightest bit wonky on the starter, and I was like "WHAT?!". That's when I noticed the CL's. So I will need to dig into how to disable those (not using a rock) because having the rear closed is NOT a good option. If anyone knows....

Think that's about it for now.

 

[freshlikesushi]

glad it worked out well!!!

the water heater took some playing iwth at first for me to get it to work. felt like the vertical switch wasnt working right

 

[midlifecrisis]

So tonight's project is a real pain in the backside.
Using 1/8" SS cable and crimps, I am creating a "security net", for lack of a better term, for over my cargo rack. I want to be able to park at a trail-head or go inside somewhere for dinner and not have to worry about all of the stuff up top, or have to transfer it all down inside the car.

I remember years back seeing a small version of this that is for locking your backpack to a pole or your motorcycle or whatever. I searched around and couldn't find a full size version of that, so I decided to build it.
The materials were surprisingly cheap, I think I have $76 in it with shipping. It's going to take some patience and an evening or two, but I'm 5 strands out of 22 so it's coming along...slowly. Word of advice, measure twice, crimp once because those little suckers are a pain to get back off of there is you make a mistake (proven).

22 strands, all equal length.
Tip #1: once you cut them (I used some end cutters and a small sledge...that stuff is tough) coat the ends in super glue to keep them from fraying once you start threading the crimps. It makes ALL the difference.


I designed my "diamonds" to be 5" x 6", so I needed a reference mark every 4" along all of the cables. As is always the case, it starts with a sketch and a good computer model.


First two strands linked up, with the aforementioned printout of the design laying there.


I've gotten one more strand past here so far, but you can see the idea. When you stretch it across the gear it opens up into the diamonds I mentioned. It will have loops on all of the terminal ends so I can run a perimeter cable all the way around and lock it all down.


It's not completely theft proof by any means, but neither are the windows in the car so you can only do what you can do.
It is VERY cut resistant I can tell you, at least to standard wire cutters. No way I was getting through with those.

Oh, by the way it's 1/8" grade 304 stainless steel in 7x19 with aluminum crimps. I got it all off of a site called www.e-rigging.com

 

[DETN8R]

I've been seeing "kits" for security nets at REI recently. That's a great idea!

 

[midlifecrisis]

And that is the general idea.
Not a fun project by any stretch.

 

[michael_l]

Looks awesome dude! Keep it up!

 

[real3175]

Great build, thanks for the referral!!

 

[midlifecrisis]

A few pics from last week on a camping and hiking trip I took, first real trip for the Outback in its current configuration.





The tarp situation is on the drawing board for a better solution. I am thinking about a batwing setup because when it pours I want one side and the back under cover, like I did in the pic but with less ghetto.
Sleeping situation was good, I was able to fully spread out and the 4" memory foam mattress was plenty cushy. Dog stayed on her side of the bed too.

The method for dealing with the water is going to be re-thought as well. Having the short hose on the back is nice for bottle filling, pans, etc. but I don't like that if I want to wash off a pot or whatever I am putting water on the ground right by my back end. I'm mulling.

We did about 15 miles of fairly rough 4WD roads on Tuesday up to a high country lake and the Outback just purrs along and is really very capable right out of the box. There were a couple of locations with questionable clearance but I never scraped anything.

The frig has some eccentricities to it that I don't fully understand yet. It runs on an inverter while traveling and then switches over to 12V once we park. I noticed that the temp was creeping up the next morning and I wasn't hearing the fan or compressor, although the temp indicator light was on and all that jazz. For some reason I decided to turn the motor over, which threw the refer back onto 110V from the inverter for a few seconds, and when I shut it back off it kicked on (fan and compressor) and cooled right back down and was rock solid on 12V for the next two days. Not too sure what's going on there, but it's sure nice to have good cold food with no ice or water BS to deal with.

All in all, a pretty good first time out. I need to do some organizing and small things but I'm pretty happy with it for the time being.

 

[freshlikesushi]

So question,
IS the 12v plugged into an existing factory plug?
I noticed that if I have the fridge into something with direct, thicker gauge wiring to the battery (I.E. the new wiring I did) vs OEM wiring, it is more efficient. It seems from my experience and others on this board, that the fridge acts like the voltage isn't there on some OEM wiring systems and basically just sits there, or doesn't turn on as it should etc etc. Its a hit and miss thing on my car. Some weekends it would work on OEM plugs, some weekends it wasn't that great.

As for the hose, im in the same boat. not sure how I want to extend my stuff out either

 

[michael_l]

I was thinking about this water issue as well when looking at everyone else's set up. I was thinking for myself that a simple collection bucket might be a temporary solution. Maybe one of those collapsable one? Collect the drainage and dump it 20 feet away when complete. KISS method you know.

 

[PetitFrereArmada]

Awesome build...