Battery Connections

 

You see all sorts of things when surveying boats and one of the most common has to be problems with the electrical system. Not only do things need to be both neat and tidy to make fault tracing easier but there is a safety concern too. This photograph shows how not to connect up your batteries and has at least 5 infringements of the ABYC guidelines but there may be more, not to mention that it looks just plain wrong. Firstly there should be no more than 4 connections to each battery terminal, frankly I think that is too many and if you need more than two or three at the outside then a bus bar should be installed and the loads wired back to that. As you can see this terminal has 7 cables attached to it, some of those are the wrong color,ie red when they should be black or more commonly yellow these days. There is at least one cable with no captive ring terminal and the wire end is simple squashed under the ring terminal above. One of the cables in addition to being the wrong color as already mentioned is suffering from heat damage causing a breakdown of the insulation possible caused by an undersized cable causing resistance in the wiring. Finally the terminal should be covered with a protective shroud to prevent short circuits

I am not sure what exactly all these connectors are for but the only things that should be run directly from the battery and are bilge pumps, monitors and other instrumentation that will loose it's memory if it is disengaged from an electrical source. The other thing that can be connected to a battery is a battery charger and as you can see above the yellow cable is the newest having been fitted by an 'electrician' the day before.

This is how he did it. Unbelievable as it seems the new charger is held in position on top of the holding tank by tucking the flange of the charger under the holding tank strap. The 120 volt mains power cable is trailing loosely across the top of the charger and the only place that it is clipped back is by a couple of plastic cable ties around the steering ram. Click on the image to make it larger and you can see it a little better. The whole installation is so messy and dangerous from a guy that touts himself as a marine electrician. Needless to say there were a few comments in my report.

Comments

[Leon Panjtar]

Learned a lot. Brief post but also rich on knowledge.

[DIY Boats]

Hi. I also have some similar content on my DIY Boats Blog and have just added a trackback to your post. I think it is well written. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.