On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:23:24 +0700, Bruce
wrote:

There are several methods of separating battery banks for use and
connect them for charging. You can use diodes, which take some special
wiring of the regulator to fully charge the batteries, or an automatic
relay system that doesn't.

I had the automatic relay system for a while but for reasons that were
never clear it had a bad habit of sticking in the closed position.
That left the starting battery in parallel with the house bank when it
shouldn't have been. Rather than chase Mr. Kirchhoff around his
endless loops in a complex system, I decided it would be more reliable
to replace the automatic relay with a manual parallell switch, and get
really conscientious about remembering to open it up after shutdown.
So far, so good. Of course I also have to remember to close the
switch after getting underway but a low house bank has a way of
attracting your attention fairly quickly if I forget.

On 11/15/10 7:40 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:23:24 +0700,
wrote:

There are several methods of separating battery banks for use and
connect them for charging. You can use diodes, which take some special
wiring of the regulator to fully charge the batteries, or an automatic
relay system that doesn't.

I had the automatic relay system for a while but for reasons that were
never clear it had a bad habit of sticking in the closed position.
That left the starting battery in parallel with the house bank when it
shouldn't have been. Rather than chase Mr. Kirchhoff around his
endless loops in a complex system, I decided it would be more reliable
to replace the automatic relay with a manual parallell switch, and get
really conscientious about remembering to open it up after shutdown.
So far, so good. Of course I also have to remember to close the
switch after getting underway but a low house bank has a way of
attracting your attention fairly quickly if I forget.



You guys sure spend a lot of time, effort and money dealing with
'lectricity on your boats!

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:23:03 -0500, HarryK wrote:

You guys sure spend a lot of time, effort and money dealing with
'lectricity on your boats!

If you start doing any serious cruising, you will also. The old days
of using kerosene lanterns are just about over for most of us. If you
have ever experienced a power failure at your home that lasted more
than a few hours you will realize how closely dependant on electrical
power we have become.

On our boat, and many others, we can't even cook, run water or flush
the heads without electricity.

On 11/16/10 8:54 AM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:23:03 -0500, wrote:

You guys sure spend a lot of time, effort and money dealing with
'lectricity on your boats!

If you start doing any serious cruising, you will also. The old days
of using kerosene lanterns are just about over for most of us. If you
have ever experienced a power failure at your home that lasted more
than a few hours you will realize how closely dependant on electrical
power we have become.

On our boat, and many others, we can't even cook, run water or flush
the heads without electricity.


When the power goes off at the house, our standby LPG-fired generator
switches on. It's got the "juice" to run a heat pump, refrigerators,
lights, oven, but not everything else at the same time, of course. So
far, the worst we've had it was two days without outside electrical
power during the aftermath of a heavy snowstorm.

I don't see us doing the sort of "serious cruising" you and many others
here do. We're weekend and four-day weekend cruisers, at best, and if
the weather in our environs is really hot and we're going to be on the
boat overnight, I'll plug into shore power at a marina and turn the A/C
on full-blast, though our generator allegedly has the juice to run the
A/C. We also have a 3000-watt inverter which I have yet to use, other
than to try it out to see that it worked.