Three boxes in a basket on a hitch

When planning to move across the country and your husband is a bit of a preper and a lot of a truck fanatic, you get some funky but useful homemade items to use along the way. This post is all about what we are storing in our front hitch basket, why that stuff is there, when it will be used, pretty much the works on our food and power.

For our road trip, we planned months ago to have extra storage in the form of a hitch basket on the front of our truck. The F-150 that we are using for the trip is Chris' pride and joy and often used for projects, towing vehicles or toys, and a myriad of other truck-needing tasks. Because of this (and not just our road trip) we decided to install a front hitch on the truck. It obviously cannot tow a trailer but it can hold any hanging hitch attachment. In this case, we are hooking up a basket to hold our food cooler, dry food goods, and most importantly, our battery power pack box (BPPB).

Each of these items were gathered specifically to fit into the space in the basket so that we could take advantage of all the space we have available. We are trying to get most of our food from grocery stores and we figured it would be that much easier to keep it cold if it was left outside in this wintry weather. Also, the bug gathering shouldn't be too much of a problem with the boxes we are using to house everything. The cooler is on the left in the photo above, it's just an average cooler we got from Lowe's. It will hold produce, meats, maybe some milk or condiments, whatever we deem to be good road trip food. The box on the right is our dry food storage container. It's just an old container we had from at least 10 years ago and very well may get recycled after this journey. It will hold beans, nuts, seeds, crackers, LOTS of NUT BUTTER (I'm kind of obsessed), collagen protein, coconut oil, and whatever else makes the cut. The hitch basket is also from Lowe's, we found it sitting on a shelf in the outdoor section totally unboxed, no hardware or anything accompanying it so we got it for a really good deal and just picked up Grade 8 Steel bolts to use with it.

Now for the Fun, Complex Creation Chris built! The BPPB.

(only ever referred to as BPPB in this blog post for ease of writing, we are not THAT corny.)

The photo above is inside the black box that sits in the center of our front hitch rack. Chris constructed it so that we would be able to use household appliances and tools on the road without just draining our truck's battery. It is made up of two regular car batteries, an inverter, and some inexpensive wiring and electrical supplies. (The 2x4s are just there to hold everything in place.)

How it works: The two batteries are wired in parallel and then connected to the inverter which is wired to the outlet shown in the photo below. He did it up all cool by just buying a 70 cent outlet and connecting it to the inverter with an extension cord piece (yellow cord above). This way we don't have to open the box really ever once it's set up on the truck. So you're thinking: "Yeah right, that charge is NOT going to last their whole trip." ...Well we solved that too! The whole point of this was to power stuff without killing the truck battery, otherwise we would've just used the inverter on its own, right? In order to achieve this, Chris is connecting the BPPB to the truck's battery (also in parallel) with a starter solenoid so that when the truck is running, all three batteries will be charging and when it is off, the two BPPB batteries will be a power bank to run anything with a normal 110V plug. Then, once we were ready to keep the box with the truck, he wired the truck's battery to the starter solenoid, and then added a ground line, and a relay switch line. Also, if the starter solenoid is case grounded, like ours, it needs another ground to complete its own circuit

After a few checks with a test light and voltage meter, we got it all figured out and ran a fully operable outlet to the bed of the truck.

We are very excited about this set up because it lets us charge and power any of our normal stuff all within the truck. If we were planning a longer term life in the truck, we probably would have gotten solar panels on the roof with a (possibly bigger) battery bank. It didn't seem necessary for our situation though, mostly because it is a lot more expensive since we already had a lot of the supplies for the BPPB. We are bringing an extra alternator that can be replaced with a ratchet wrench and 10 minutes at a rest stop, but we do not anticipate the extra batteries putting too much of a load on the current alternator that it would be a big problem. The outlet on the BPPB can also be extended with any household extension cord to bring the power back to the bed of the truck where we will be sleeping (or in the cab if that seems useful for some reason). We plan to use the power supply for food prep, charging electronics, lighting, and running tools or our electric blanket if necessary. Check out my salt lamp and crock-pot being powered by the BPPB below! I'll add some more of it setup once we have it on the truck too.