Charging Station for RVs - 2 USB Ports - Ivory

Video Transcript for Hands-On with the Charging Station for RVs

Today, we're going to be taking a look at Diamond's USB charging station for RVs. This 2.1 amp two port USB charging receptacle is going to make a great upgrade for your camper, RV, or toy haulers. It operates off of 12 volts, so it'll work with your existing lighting system that's in most RVs. And it's going to be great for charging your phones, your iPods, tablets, GPS systems. There's a lot of different devices now that charge off of this, even small RC cars and drones, so it's not only great for your phone devices that you bring with you every day but for the toys you might have there on the campsite.What I really like about this is that you can place a convenient USB charging port in your RV where everybody can access it back in your living area. Typically in your RV, the only place you have a 12 volt place to plug in to charge your phone is going to be in the outlets up in the cab area.

Now, you can put one in the back. If you we're in the back, you normally just have 110 outlets where you're going to have to plug in a charge adapter that goes into it. Well then you have to be at a campsite or have your generator running to get that 110 to power that charger. Since this just runs off of your batteries, it's always there in a convenient location for you to access it, and you don't have to worry about forgetting your charge adapters or where you left them last.It comes in three different colors: black, white or ivory, so you can best match your interior. Regardless of the color, it's going to have the same look, design, and two charging ports.

The removable face plate hides all of the installation components, so that way, you'll get a clean look after you've got it installed. What I really like about this too is that it extends out around it, so in case you made your hole a little too big, or it's not quite perfect, those mistakes you made are now hidden.So whether you're using it to charge game devices, cell phones, or tablets, you can ensure that wherever you go, you've got a place to charge your devices, so you can enjoy your time out and as well stay connected on social media, so you can show the rest of the world all the adventures you're going on.Now, we'll go ahead and show you how to install it. We've got an RV panel here that we'll use to simulate the inside of your RV. It's wired up on the inside just like your RV would be. We've got a light switch here, and this is usually a great point when determining where you're going to be adding things to your RV to access power and easily run your wires.The first thing you're going to want to do when mounting this is determine where you do want to have it mounted.

Most people mount it near their couches between a couple of chairs, so that way, it's easy to access, so they can charge their devices while they relax. Other customers reported they like to place it next to the nightstand, so they can charge their devices while they sleep. We're going to be placing ours down low. This way, it stays out of the way, but when you're sitting down, you can still easily reach it to charge all your devices.You want to keep in mind where your light switch is and where you're putting it, so you can route your wiring from that light switch over to here. And it doesn't need to be a light switch.

Anything that's got 12 volt power going to it where you can access it in your wall will work. A light switch is just usually an easy access point.Once you've determined your mounting location, we'll be using a one and three quarter inch hole saw to drill out right here in the center. You can kind of see that it sticks up flush past the outside, so three quarter inch will give us enough room to get it mounted sitting flush against our wall and have enough wiggle room to ensure that we get it level.A quick tip when using a hole saw on this thinner RV paneling, like we have here, on thinner paneling or plastics, if you run the saw backwards, so we'll start it forwards first to make our pilot hole, and then once the hole saw contacts the wall, switch your drill, run it backwards, and this will cause it to cut a smoother hole into this thinner paneling. If you run it in the normal direction, the teeth can tear into it and make it look kind of rough.We're going to go back to our light switch. We're going to remove it, so we can access our 12 volt wiring in the wall and run that down to our switch. So we'll start by taking our covering off. We'll then remove the switch from the wall. Now, before removing our switch, it is a good idea to turn off any power or disconnect your battery, so you don't accidentally cause any shorts when moving your hot wires around.And now we've got access to our switch. Our switch has its positive wires connected to it, and a lot of times, there is a ground there or nearby, so we've got both of those. You're going to want to determine which one is hot all the time because that's the one we're going to be using. So we're just going to grab our test light. We crimp this on to our ground. Sounds hot. This one is not. If we turn our switch on, it's now hot, so we want to use this one, so that way, our switch doesn't affect our outlet, and we'll just be adding a wire from this post and running it down. We'll do the same thing with our ground.Now, your switch is going to have its power going to it. It may not look like our switch here. More often than not, you're going to find wire nuts is what's connecting your switches and stuff inside your RV walls. We've got ring terminals go into screws. That's how we're going to do it for this switch. Just keep that in mind. You're probably going to see these, and we're going to be using the wire nuts just like you would find in most RVs down below to hook up our charge port.So we've gone ahead and connected our power and ground to the same wires that are power and ground on our switch here. We'll then need to route these down to our hole that we had cut. There's a couple of different ways that you can do this. You can use a fish wire to route from one hole to the other, but since our hole's pretty much straight down from our switch, we're just going to be attaching some weight on it and then dropping it down. You can use anything as a weight. We're probably just be using some washers or spacers, anything we've got laying around, and some tape.To ensure ours drop down, we tied a nut to it. That made it easy for us to just reach into the hole, fish it out. We can just take that nut off of it. Now, if you we're in a different spot where it wasn't straight down from the switch, you may need to use a fish wire. Coat hangers work very well for that because you can bend it and tweak it to the way you need to go around corners or to move over a little bit and come out a hole that may not be straight down.We'll now take both of our wires, and we're going to strip them back. You can cut them shorter to length but having a little excess is usually a good thing for future repairs or other things you may want to add so having that extra wire is kind of nice. If it's ridiculously long, it's acceptable to cut it. We're going to leave the little excess we have here. Our white wire is attached to the red wire up top, which is the battery positive, so you want to remember which colors you've attached to where in the event have more red wire. If you need some wire, you can pick some up here at etrailer.com.We've got those stripped back. The wires on our USB port come pre-stripped, so we're just going to simply take those. We're going to twist those together, and then we're going to take a wire nut, put it on, and twist them together. If you prefer to have a little more permanent connection, you can use butt connectors. Those are also available here at etrailer.com. We're going to do the same thing with our white and red wires since that's our positive wire.We can now begin to mount our switch. The front cover just pops off. There's a couple of square holes that the alignment tabs line in, so we're going to remove that to expose our screw holes. You will have to provide your own hardware to mount these. Small wood screws work very well.Now, you can choose which way you want to mount it. Whether you mount it vertically or horizontally, it really doesn't matter. We're going to go ahead and mount ours horizontally. So we'll hook our wires back up inside our wall. We'll get our mount lined up, so it's pretty level. We're going to use some self tapping wood screws to get it in. Now, our cover simply snaps back into place, and we're ready to use our outlets. There is some minor left and right adjustment on the back. There's a nut located on the back side, so if you do need to straighten it out, there's a little tweaking you can do, but it doesn't have much movement.Now, I've got my phone here. We'll plug it in, so we can test it out. Currently, you can see the battery's at 91%, and it's not charging. Plug in our USB charge cable, and the phone lights up. I've got my charge indicator there at the top. We'll put the phone display to sleep. Give one tap, and now, it indicates that about 21 minutes until it's fully charged. All that's left now now is to reinstall your light switch. And that completes our look at Diamond's USB charging station for RVs.