One of the best things you can do to your Vanagon is install GoWesty’s Auxiliary Battery Kit. Once you have that done, you might consider this battery hack we first got from Ken at Van Again. He put 3 motor scooter batteries in parallel to get more amp hours out of the setup. We followed his lead and it works great. He used 3 UB12220 batteries to get a total of 66ah. We had to settle for 3 Power Sonic 21ah batteries to get a total of 63ah because nobody would ship the UB12220 batteries to Honolulu, but we are totally happy with the setup.

This project doesn’t look complicated, but the space is tight. We wasted 2 hours trying to string these batteries together in place before removing them and connecting them on a desk. Trust me, make all your connections outside the van and then put the batteries in place.

So far this hack is working well. We are considering adding two or three more of these batteries under the rear seat to get even more juice.

UPDATE: We made some improvements to this hack by adding an isolator and thicker 4 gauge wire. If you have an auxiliary battery, read this.

If you’d like to try this hack, Amazon has the UB12220 batteries that we wanted to use. They are 22 amp hour batteries which will give you more juice for the money. Buy them here and have them shipped to you and you won’t be sorry:

If you want a much simpler solution, we have also used this Odyssey battery and it was a real winner. This is the equivalent to the battery GoWesty recommends. It’s a very good battery. It only has 40ah but is still great for moderate use. Order it from Amazon and have it delivered right to you.

Tags: Auxiliary Battery