On Wed, 20 Jul 2016 20:55:28 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Wed, 20 Jul 2016 18:54:34 -0500, Califbill
wrote:



My boat has had low or dead batteries when coming out of storage the last
couple years. Had time after the Monday boating, and had to rewrite some
bilge pump stuff. Corrosion. The ACR draws 16.5 milliamperes when just
monitoring the batteries. So adding a switch to the ground line on the
relay.

===

Best bet is to remove one of the battery terminals or hook up a
battery maintainer. I've had good luck with this one:

http://www.westmarine.com/buy/west-marine--bc2wm-battery-charger-maintainer--14982037



I have the ACR so both batteries will charge when I am running.
Electronics on #2 and motor on #1. That way I do not have to worry about
setting the 1/2 switch to both when running. I do a lot of trolling on the
electric trolling motor, separate batteries, and do not want to run down
the starting battery when the sonar, GPS and radio are all on. Where I
store it, AC is not available. Was thinking of adding a solar maintainer,
but was never a problem with the older West Marine charging relay.
Probably smaller solenoid. Was a lot smaller than the ACR.

===

A small solar panel should do the job. Prices on panels are really
coming down rapidly.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=20+watt+s olar+panel&_sacat=0

I recently put 800 watts of flexible panels on top of our flybridge
enclosure. It cost more to mount them than the panels themselves.