Quote:
Originally Posted by ontherocks83
As long as you have the correct size properly fused cable it shouldn't be a problem. I personally like only having 2 banks. A house bank and an emergency starting bank. Essentially everything runs off the house bank including starting. The back up bank gets charged by an echo charger and is only used should the house get drained too far down (which should never happen) or if there is a short in the house and or some other problem. This keeps it very simple to charge, maintain, and trouble shoot. . . .
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That looks like a good system. Even simpler would be a completely separate start bank with its own
alternator and charger. Then your emergency starting is from the house bank, rather than vice versa, but an
engine start batt which is separately charged and never used for anything else is very unlikely to ever need any backup.
My
boat is somewhat more complex because house is 24v and
engine and
generator start 12v.
Generator and engine each have their own completely separate start banks and
charging systems. The start batts are in the same box and back up each other.
In seven years with this boat, I've only needed backup starting once. For some reason which I have never figured out, every battery on the boat ran down while I was off the boat for about a month. I arrived on my
mooring (no shore power) one very cold evening and couldn't get either main or generator to start, and the house batts were dead (otherwise I could have pulled one of those out). I was fairly desperate. Finally I took the last good battery -- out of the
dinghy. A tiny start battery for the 25hp
outboard, but it was just enough. Added it to the run down main engine battery, and that started. After that, I was able to bring everything back to life. and the incident never repeated. Weird.