Battery charging/wiring

We have 4 golf-cart batteries on Bribon, which are wired in the usual combination of series and parallel, to wind up with 12 volts and ~400 amps for our house bank. I tried to attach a diagram but it would not send, so I will try to describe the setup. They are arranged in a row, with the system pos/neg taps coming off one series-pair. Would it be more effective to have the taps on the physically (and electrically?) far "ends" of the row? As in: neg of battery #1 and pos of battery#4, rather than pos #1 and neg #2. If I have this wired in an in-effective way, might this also explain why our alternator only puts out a max of ~40 amps into a bank which is showing down 120 amps on our Link 2000 monitor? This leads to the next Big Question...should cables from our wind generator and solar panels go to separate terminals in some way? I seem to remember reading this, perhaps in the wind generator manual. I have noted people having trouble with one regulator sensing the other high voltage and shutting down or reducing the output. If this is true, what connections should I try, other that just experiment? I'd love to have this solved in time for our next trip to Puerto Rico in June. Thanks, Peter Cal-39

As long as you are using regular large battery cable it really doesn't matter if you are picking off your power on the corners or on the side, if that description makes since. The important thing is that all the batteries are the same strength, ie replace them all at the same time. 0 gauge wire is 1/10,000 ohm per foot so if you are putting 40 amps through say 3 feet you would get 0.01 volts drop across the wire. That is nothing. As far as connecting chargers, it might make a difference how they are wired. I would connect the charger with their own wires to the battery and not share the house wiring. In addition, if the charger has sense leads, bring them to the battery bank with their own leads so that it is measuring the batter voltage and not the battery voltage plus the voltage drop across the charging wiring. I had a huge problem along these lines on my motor home. It has 3 marine batteries hooked up as both the house battery and the engine battery. The 4th battery ran just the generator. Very unusual setup. In any event, I would blow out the alternator every trip. After the 4th alternator, I re-wired with the alternator having its own wiring to the battery and a separate sens lead. The chassis on a car is a good ground so I didn't need to worry about the ground having its own leads but on a boat that would be different. My theory was that there was a voltage kick from the air compressor and that was blowing the alternator diodes. Whatever the cause, I have not blown out an alternator in 10 years. Papoose has two batteries and they are not wired together but have a big red switch. The battery charger is a two bank charger. You might consider that as with the setup you have, if one of your 4 batteries goes bad, the entire bank might go out depending on how the bad battery fails. On the other hand, you might have a separate engine battery and you are just talking about the equivalent of my one house battery. Hope this is useful, Allen On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 12:07 PM, C. Peter Audet <cp… [at] sympatico.ca>wrote: > > [Attachment(s) <#127e91e98c9140b2_TopText> from C. Peter Audet included > below] > > We have 4 golf-cart batteries on Bribon, which are wired in the usual > combination of series and parallel, to wind up with 12 volts and ~400 amps > for our house bank. I tried to attach a diagram but it would not send, so I > will try to describe the setup. > They are arranged in a row, with the system pos/neg taps coming off one > series-pair. Would it be more effective to have the taps on the physically > (and electrically?) far "ends" of the row? As in: neg of battery #1 and pos > of battery#4, rather than pos #1 and neg #2. > If I have this wired in an in-effective way, might this also explain why > our alternator only puts out a max of ~40 amps into a bank which is showing > down 120 amps on our Link 2000 monitor? > This leads to the next Big Question...should cables from our wind generator > and solar panels go to separate terminals in some way? I seem to remember > reading this, perhaps in the wind generator manual. I have noted people > having trouble with one regulator sensing the other high voltage and > shutting down or reducing the output. If this is true, what connections > should I try, other that just experiment? > I'd love to have this solved in time for our next trip to Puerto Rico in > June. > Thanks, > Peter > Cal-39 > > >

> As far as connecting chargers, it might make a difference how they are > wired. I would connect the charger with their own wires to the battery and > not share the house wiring. In addition, if the charger has sense leads, > bring them to the battery bank with their own leads so that it is measuring > the batter voltage and not the battery voltage plus the voltage drop across > the charging wiring. > > The only thing I would add is that ABYC code recommends these leads be fused as close to the battery as possible. Wish I had known that earlier, as it would have saved me the cost of a replacement battery charger vs the cost of a 15/30 amp fuse. /ch