Cigarette lighter receptacle power source?

2019 R27 OB questions:

#1. I want to rig a non-permanent starlink mini set up and want to use the 12v car charger port in the cockpit to power the dish—is the 12V cigarette lighter plug in the cockpit run off the starter or thruster batteries or the house bank?

#2 I have a small 113 Watt hour battery slab to power the laptop but the HP laptop doesn’t like it. Instead I will charge phones and I am thinking about getting a Solix C300 power bank to possibly run the star link mini and the laptop and anything else that won’t charge on the standard 11-14 watt usb ports.

And while underway run the inverter to charge the really high demand items like the laptop and the power bank

Any suggestions, experiences or other help would be greatly appreciated—thank you!

The 12v outlets should all be run to the house through a switched fuse block. I don’t believe the Thruster battery runs anything at all other than the thrusters on any of the Ranger Tugs.

The portable battery packs are great, especially on a NiCad battery boat. If you have the lithium packs you only would need them if you’re on the hook for several days though. I have one of those but rarely use it on the boat because ours is lithium.

You can power Starlink over 12v though. Theoretically you can with a laptop too but the outlet has to be fused high enough and you need the right cable. The 12v outlets with USB-C ports are fused to only 5 amps, which isn’t enough. The ones that have a standard 12v plug are fused to 20 though, which is enough if you can find a USB-C converter that provides enough power and your laptop accepts USB-C.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Jesperjo. I have been away from my boat and trying to prep and strategize energy consumption/conservation for a 10 day sortie to Princess Louisa inlet so the First Mate can work from the boat. I don’t have lithium but I replaced all the AGM batteries and all seems to work well. But this will be the first trip longer than three nights in a relatively remote area and your information is very helpful—thanks again!

if you’re not into serious fishing you might consider converting one or both of the two pre-wired downrigger power outlets to a 20 amp rated female cigarette plug. We did that on both of ours to power a portable freezer in the cockpit. On my C-28 the down rigger power outlets are 40 amp but I replaced the fuses with 20 amp. We occasionally use the down rigger cigarette plugs to recharge our Anker C2000 when underway. The conversion of both outlets was super easy as they are both located under access panels covers on our boat.

Glad to hear it helped. @scross suggestion is good as long as those downrigger outlets are in a convenient place and you don’t mind not using them for downriggers.

If you just want a backup though, check out some of the battery pack updates. Jackery, for example, has a Memorial Day sale right now that includes the relatively portable Jackery Explorer 1000 (https://www.jackery.com/products/jackery-explorer-1000-v2?variant=41738382278743). The Starlink mini shouldn’t draw much more than 25 watts, and that pack has 1000 watts, so you should get up to 40 hours out of it if you only use the pack for Starlink. You can also get it with separate folding solar panels so you can top it up. There are other options as well, like Bluetti.

I’d suggest running the Starlink off either a USB C outlet or the cigarette lighter jack on an external battery pack, or even plugged into the boat. That way you don’t lose power in the inversion to AC and then rectifying it to DC again in the dish. The dish operates on DC and that’s what is stored in the pack, so you wouldn’t have any meaningful conversion if you plug the dish into a DC source on the pack.

We got a male scotty plug and new starlink cord from amazon and wired the plug to the cord and insert it into the scotty outlet. It runs our starlink very well. It has an on off switch so unplugging is not needed. Set up takes 30 seconds. When under way we keep it on the cockpit floor and when at anchor we have it on a short post in a rod holder. We have had great service with this in BC and AK.