I'm a scientist and part of my work involves flying a large kite to collect data. It's controlled by an electric winch, which is powered off a car battery. This is a hideous web page but it will give you an idea: http://www.dborc.co.uk/goodwinch/ In the past I've had no trouble doing this with a regular car battery -- I just leave the car running when I'm running the winch and it does not drain the battery. This year I might have to use my Prius as a field vehicle and am not sure how to do this let alone figure out if it will damage the battery system. Any ideas?
I suggest that you connect the winch directly to the 12V battery terminals and leave the Prius READY.
The page you described wasn't very descriptive of the winch that you'll actually be using on the car. Yes....if you leave the car in READY mode, the aux (12v) battery will be charged/recharged by the car. How are you planning to connect the winch to the battery??? Switching/Fusing??? Shouldn't be a problem for a very small winch, but I'd be careful. The Prius has a rather puny 12V battery. Good Luck!!
A Prius in Ready mode can supply up to 100 amps (1200 watts, about 1.6 HP), pull more than that and you blow a fuse that is a pain to replace. These winches easily exceed that capacity under load so take care. JeffD
Thanks for the feedback. I don't have the exact model of Goldfish winch here at home, but from the website they look to be in the 4-6 hp range. Probably not a good idea. I actually haven't even looked under the hood in the Prius, but on the Subaru I just attached the clamper cables directly to the nodes on the battery, just as if I were going to give someone a jump. I'll also have a u-haul truck there, which will hopefully have a decent battery I can use, or I'll try to talk my field assistant into letting me use her car's battery. The Prius is otherwise a fine field vehicle, but I don't think I'll use it to power the winch.
I would just take a 12v battery with you and wire up a very low amp charger to the cigarette lighter for emergencys. Then the car has to be in ready mode for it to work so no worries on draining. I have used 12v optimas a bunch of times on a charge with a winch on a trailer pulling a 4,000 pound car up. They will last longer then you think.
That's not a bad idea. I actually have a set of deep-cycle marine batteries and trickle chargers that I use for black light traps. Maybe I could repurpose one of them for this.
