Why not treat power distribution as a product, not a task?

Today’s subject is a two-edged sword.

It’s about workshops. But it’s not a criticism of them. Far from it. Because the truth is, workshops have been asked to take on an engineering burden that they were never meant to carry. And we say, why not treat power distribution as a product, not a task?

Walk into any workshop today and you’ll see rows of high-end chargers, batteries, inverters, solar controllers, monitors, lights, switching solutions — all engineered beautifully, all proven in the field.

And yet… Despite using premium components, installations still fail. In fact, in our experience, and in the experience of hundreds of workshops we talk to, around 90% of system failures come down not to a charger, or battery, or inverter. It’s the wiring and connections between them. It’s a poor crimp, a wire shaken lose, a cheap fuse folder, Andersen plugs becoming corroded, and most common of all, voltage drop caused by poorly designed wiring. These problems have the potential of ending a trip of a lifetime. We’ve all seen these horror stories on social media.

This is the quiet truth of the 12V, 24V and 48V industry — a truth that even many workshops haven’t fully recognised. And this is the truth that led to the creation of EGON.

Most common failures

The most common failures of installations include customer complaints that their system “keeps cutting out”, “won’t charge properly”, or “kills batteries”. These failures almost always live in a hand-built system. 

Is this an industry blind spot?

Ask a workshop what they installed today and they’ll respond with, “A DC-DC charger, a lithium battery, a fuse box and an inverter. And maybe a solar panel and controller too”.

But behind the scenes — whether they realise it or not — they’ve also built entire power distribution systems, designed from scratch and each one is different for every customer. While the best workshops do a great job, there is no installation standardisation in existence- until now.

Which means that every time a build is commissioned, the result is dependent on:

• Which technician did the job? Skilled tradie, sparkie, newbie, hack, hack’s brother in law?
• Does the workshop train using good tools and habits? There are $15 crimping tools from Super Cheap and crimping tools at a few hundred from Tool Mart. One will do a great job in the right hands, and the other cannot possibly do a good job, even in the right hands.
• When was the work done? How many shortcuts were taken to, “Get it out the door,” the week before the Christmas break?
• And the, “Yeah . . . it’ll be alright” syndrome.

 

No matter which way one looks at this, building an electrical distribution system is an engineering task often handed to people who do not have engineering training. So, our question has been, “Can this be handed over to engineers every time, in every workshop, everywhere?” We think it can.

So, we set out to create an engineered product that could almost eliminate these design and fitting shortcomings. It’s the DC-Hub. How well did we do?

• Loose screw terminals. Solved
• Undersized cable. It helps a lot
• Corroded lugs. Solved
• Incorrect fuse ratings. No
• Messy ground paths. Solved
• Inconsistent colour coding. It helps
• Poor crimp integrity. Solved
• Shared circuits that shouldn’t be shared. Solved
• Voltage drops hidden inside convoluted wiring runs. In a big way.

 

That’s a good start. But what the DC-Hub also does is standardise decisions, so even if the hack’s brother in law is the last one to work on it, it’s still done properly. Because all these demanding tasks are taken care of.

• Running, routing, grouping and securing wiring
• Crimping, soldering, heat-shrinking
• Building fuse arrays from Mega, ANL, MIDI, Maxi, and Mini blade fuses
• Creating grounding paths
• Splitting circuits
• Designing redundancy
• Managing thermal behaviour
• Ensuring serviceability
• Ensuring fault-finding will make sense years later

 

Our gig is to bring engineering to the entire system. Not just the accessories wired to it. 

The idea is simple:

To standardize and speed up the installation process, technicians should connect products — not design power distribution systems. Engineering should happen once, in the product, not every day, in every vehicle, by every technician.

We are hoping that engineered power distribution will become the new default.

Because as it stands, installations are a collection of fuses, crimps, lugs, fuse holders, heat shrink that is almost always a hard task for the end user to figure out should a problem arise. So when touring, knowing the system — and being able to troubleshoot it — can be the difference between a minor hiccup and a ruined trip.

For workshops, the choices include, how much value do you put to repeatable excellent wiring installations that can be trouble-shot by the user without the need of your intervention?

We think this is the simplicity the industry has been sorely missing, and is the backbone that ties all the great products together. It’s the missing piece that finally makes 12V and 48V systems truly dependable.