National Luna DC-40 Charging System

Video Transcript

Intro

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about the National Luna NLDC40 DC to DC charger isolator and solar controller.

Package Contents

This is the unit right here, and let's chat a little bit about what you get in the package. You get the unit itself that manages and controls all the activities. Of course, the instructions. You have a full set of mounting brackets here that you can use if it would make sense; if not, you can mount the unit directly. We also have all of the lugs, fuses, inline fuses, a ferrite ring, and a temperature sense, and we'll talk about those here in just a second.

How it Works

Let's talk about this unit right here. It measures about seven inches by six inches. It's a little bit heavier than the NLDC25. It's a 40 amp version versus the 25 amp version, and it has a lot of functionality to it that we should chat about. First of all, how do we run this? There are four wires necessary to make this happen. We need a positive and negative lead from your main battery; those connect here. Positive and negative lead from your auxiliary battery; they connect here. That is all that's necessary to make this system run. It will run based off of that.

There are some other wires that are possible to add to it. First of all, solar. Let's talk about solar for a second. The solar capability of this is a 600 watt MPPT solar controller, so you can add up to 600 watts of solar to this unit, and it will manage it just fine. Positive and negative leads right from the panels to this unit.

There is a wire called the Temperature Sense, and that is this wire right here. What that does is you mount it to this unit, and you run this to your auxiliary battery and connect it to that battery. What it does is it monitors the temperature of that battery so that it can adjust the charge current from the unit to the battery to optimize the current going to that battery for charging. Very interesting piece of equipment.

An alternative connection is what they call an ignition sense. Now, that wire is a wire that you would hook up to a vehicle that is a smart vehicle, smart truck with the smart technology with the variable output alternators as well as the start-stop capability. This can manage that. You connect a wire to this unit and run it to an ignition hot circuit in your vehicle, and it will adjust that based on whether the vehicle ignition is on or not. A very good unit to have in that.

Alternate DC Input

Now, there's also another capability that this one has that the NLDC25 does not. It has an alternate DC input. Now, what that means is that you can hook up to this unit something that is of a DC current generation, whether it's a generator at 12 volts or wind generation or whatever DC current that you have available that is not the alternator and battery system of your vehicle. You can hook this up to 42 volts, and it will charge from that alternate DC capability.

Monitoring System

Okay, so from this unit, once we have those wires connected up to here, what a really nice option is to hook up the NLDC M2. Now, what this is makes it a little bit unique for this vehicle is a monitoring system in the cab of the vehicle for the system. The unit here measures about three inches by three inches, three-quarters of an inch thick, has a mounting plate to put in your vehicle if you'd like, and you run a cable from this unit to the MLDC40 and plug it in. Now, this unit here has three different display modes to show you everything that is going on with your auxiliary battery, your main battery, solar connection, alternate connections, whatever it is. This can show you what's going on and how your batteries are doing in that. It's kind of unique to the National Luna system to have that remote monitoring capable right off of the unit itself.

We're very excited about having this product to join the National Luna line of products. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to us at equiptone.com. Again, I'm Paul. Thanks for watching.