guage For battery cable
What’s a good gauge for battery cable to bridge/parallel 2 coach batteries? There’s 2 guage and 4 guage at pep boys and Walmart Near me
Forum Discussion
DrewE wrote:putting a heavier guage is ok?Optimistic Paranoid wrote:thehippie wrote:
What’s a good gauge for battery cable to bridge/parallel 2 coach batteries?
It sort of depends on the loads you're going to put on the battery bank. If you're going to hook a largish inverter up to your battery bank, and use 2/0 gauge cable on it, then the cables between the batteries ALSO need to be 2/0 gauge.
In theory, the cables between the two batteries only carry half the current that the cables to the inverter would carry (assuming two batteries in parallel) and are short enough that added voltage drop is fairly insignificant. I would still size them to be able to safely carry the worst-case current, but not figure any voltage drop considerations for that current. (Under a fault condition, such as an open in one battery, they could carry the full current.) Using the same size wire is perfectly reasonable, though, and any savings from using smaller cables are likely to be insignificant since they are short.
