Battery Charging Question

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by motion30

Yes.
I could get a battery monitor . I had one on my last boat and it was very helpful. The problem is on this boat there are 6 Pairs of 6 volt batteries . they are placed all over the bilge and it seems like each set has taps coming off of it. it's going to take a major rewire to be ever to use a single shunt. I would like to eventually do that but it will not happen right now.

Do all of your negatives go separately to the engine? It would seem to be possible to run ONE negative from the engine back to near the batteries, put in a Power Post or bus bar to collect them. Good luck.

[exMaggieDrum]

Originally Posted by Stu Jackson

Do all of your negatives go separately to the engine? It would seem to be possible to run ONE negative from the engine back to near the batteries, put in a Power Post or bus bar to collect them. Good luck.

One "quick and dirty" way to consolidate multiple negative leads is to do the post that Stu suggests and run one larger cable back to a term strip or post by each battery bank and then move the smaller wires to it. You can consolidate the bigger cables back by the "end" bank where you would put a shunt. I've done that before. Not ideal but it works.

[senormechanico]

If you really want to go into the weeds about lead acid battery charging, read this:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peukert's_law

That's why LiFePo4 cells are so much better. Their Peukert exponent is about 1.1
They changed my boat (and my home's backup system) for the better by a mile.