Accessories/Battery help

[thebassn8tr]

I have two batteries on my bass boat. One battery is a marine starter battery and the other is a deep cycle battery.

On the starter battery the outboard and the trim is attached. On the deep cycle I currently have my trolling motor, guages, fish finders, bilge, live well airator, and now CD player/speakers. My guages, fish finders, bilge, live well airator, and CD player/speakers, are hooked up to the same circuit with one + and one - going to the same battery that the trolling motor is hooked up to.

Today was my first time trying out my new CD player. But with my trolling motor running, fish finders running, and CD player on all day. My battery drained after 5 hours. It is too much for the battery?

After getting home I hooked up the + and - from the circuit to the starter battery. I thought that this would be best because the starter battery only gets fired up about 6 times in the day and the trolling motor can have it's own battery since it is on constantly all day. When I did this none of the accessories that were attached to the circuit worked except for the lights on the guages (which strangely don't work when conected to the deep cycle, not sure why??).

Any thoughts why?? Should I just get a third battery just for the accessories? Why did the guage lights come on with one battery and not another?

[thebassn8tr]

After reading a little I found out that accessories should not be hooked up to the starter battery. Any thoughts on why the guage lights turn on when I hooked the accessories to the starter battery but the guage lights don't turn on when I hook the accessories up to the deep cycle?

[Ike]

Yes you need another battery. What you are talking about here is load. Load is determine by the total power the items you have on the circuit add up to. Adding all that stuff to the deep cycle and then running the trolling motor too is just overloading the battery.
Frankly what I would do is have one battery just for the trolling motor and run the electronics off of a separate battery.

They don't work because even though you are powering from another battery you don't have a complete circuit.

[thebassn8tr]

I figured that I should get another battery just for the accessories. What is a complete cicuit? How can I make it a complete circuit?

[marshmat]

Electricity has to be able to flow from the negative terminal of the battery, through the device, and back to the positive terminal of the same battery. Any break in this loop and the current will stop.
That's an awful lot of gadgets to be running off of one deep-cycle battery. I agree you need a third one. The starting battery is best used for starting only, it has very porous plates (to generate the high current the starter needs) and repeatedly draining it fully will destroy the plates. Whether you add a second battery in parallel with your current deep-cycle (the two should be identical) or run the gadgets and the troller off of different batteries, is up to you- but I like Ike's idea of putting the starter, troller and gadgets each on their own battery.

[thebassn8tr]

So the + needs to be hooked up to the same battery that the - is? This might be why my guage lights turn on when hooked up to one battery and not the other?

[ted655]

Parallel and series are 2 different ways to combine batterys.. Plus hooked to plus/neg to neg is parallel and gives the same voltage as 1 battery but twice the time it takes to drain it. Plus to neg, THEN hooking a cable to the empty plus on the 1 battery and hooking a cable to the empty neg post of the other battery will give you 24 volts (if the 2 batts were 12V.). Mixing "types" is not reccomened (for long).
Were it me, I would work towards replacing BOTH batterys with AGM type. Optima "yellow top" for the motor and Optima "blue top" for the trolling motor. They are GREAT. Just 1 caution... they do not like to be overcharged. Read up on AGM batterys. Otherwise limp on with WalMart specials. Good luck.
http://www.1st-optima-batteries.com/...op_battery.asp
http://www.1st-optima-batteries.com/...plications.asp

[Ike]

You need to get a wiring diagram for this . If you can't get one from the manufacturer then try tracing out all the wires and making a diagram. Pay attention to the color of the wires. Those colors mean something. if you look at this link you will see what the colors mean. http://newboatbuilders.com/pages/elect5.html


As some one said above. The plus or positive wire goes to the piece of equipment, then there will be a wire from the equipment to the instrument. There will also be a negative or ground wire. this will be yellow or black. If you find green wires this is a third groundng or bonding wire that acts as ground only when you have a short between positive and negative. This is not very common on older boats with 12 volt systems but is becoming very common on new boats.

I am kind of amazed that some of your equipment runs off the trolling motor battery. This is not a common practice. Usually the only thing connected to that battery is the trolling motor and it's controls.