Cut your cigarette plugs off (they suck)

Every time I see a new 12V appliance that comes with the male cigarette lighter point, I cringe. I absolutely despise them, and you should too. They are the single most useless plug ever to grace this earth, and can cause you a lot of heart ache. If you have any accessories that you depend on, do yourself a favour and swap them out!

They don’t stay in

My biggest gripe with cigarette lighter plugs is the fact that you only have to hit a tiny bump in the road and they will stop contacting, which in turn means what ever you were running, is no longer being powered. Of course, when the plugs are new they work OK, but over time they lose their spring and become totally useless.

I lost count of the number of times in my 80 series land cruiser where I pulled into camp to find the fridge had turned off because of the cigarette plug. They wobble loose, and often loose their spring tension over time.

Now, I will point out that some are much better than others, and the Iridium 9555 satellite phone cigarette lighter plug is pretty good, but most of them are just cheap garbage.

If you are looking at Anderson Plug vs Cigarette Plug, you have chalk and cheese. Anderson plugs are far superior in every single way; they’re waterproof, solid, durable, auto cleaning and pass current very well. Good luck trying to get an Anderson plug to wobble apart – you have to physically give it a pretty serious yank for anything to happen.

I have since replaced both of the cigarette plugs for my fridge and freezer to Anderson plugs, and haven’t had a single issue since.

Power flow issues

Cigarette plugs are also terrible for good electrical flow. I constantly had issues with my 150W inverter not getting enough power and faulting out, and also the same for the newer Evakool Fridge.

It would show low voltage, when in reality there was plenty of voltage and it just wasn’t getting through the plug properly.

If you are running anything more than about 2 amp hours, get rid of your cigarette plugs – they are a right pain in the behind. Technically, they are good for 10 amps maximum, but you are really pushing your luck trying to run that sort of current through them.

Do yourself a favour and do an Anderson plug conversion; you’ll never look back! This is easy enough to do, as long as you have a decent crimper, or you can solder.

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