Now, most of us who own RVs also own devices, of one kind or another, that are either charged by or powered by a USB port. The RV industry understands that and they put USB ports standard in most RVs these days. Our Palomino comes with one port in the radio. And one is just fine if all you’ve got is one device, but we have two phones and heaven knows however many other video production related devices we need to charge. So we needed to add another device or another port to the Palomino. Thankfully, we were able to reach out to our friends at RecPro and we came up with a really great solution. This is the RecPro Dual USB Charger, part number RP-41680, and there’s two USB ports on the front. It’s only about 2 1/2 inches diameter or a little bit smaller, not very deep, it’ll fit in an awful lot of little corners in a cabinet someplace, and it only has two wires to connect it, 12 volt positive, 12 volt negative. That makes it one of the easier aftermarket accessory installs that you’ll do on your RV. We decided to use one of these guys, and we’ll show you how it works going into our Palomino.

Jeff: We used a 1 3/8 inch Forstner Bit to drill a smooth hole in the cabinet. We located a spot with no backside wire or plumbing interference and drilled the hole for the charge unit. Every wire joint was soldered and protected with heat shrink tubing. The 12 volt supply line is protected by a blade-type fuse holder. Always add a fuse to the new accessory power line. Three small woodscrews made fast work of mounting the charger. With the USB charger powered up, we connected our kindle and it indicated it was receiving current: Success.

Jeff: Well, that was a pretty easy install and it’s a very useful item. Now, we have three USB ports in the Palomino, which ought to be enough to cover most of what we need to do. As my dear wife Pam would say, we have juice. So check out the RecPro catalog and their dual USB charger and you might find it a pretty handy accessory for your RV too.