Battery re-wiring ???

On my last rv I bussed all of my positive cables on to a Blue Seas buss bar and ran size 0000 cable from the bar to the batteries.

All my nagatives either went to the frame or the top of a shunt which was also frame grounded and the same size, 0000 to the batteries.

Motivation was the same, to clean it up.

Sounds fine but do take pictures before removing any wires. Do not rely on your memory or color of wires.

Install bus bar in utility box and mount to frame. You will need one main fuse between the battery and the buss bar and individual fuses from the buss bar to the devices those wires power.

I used these AMG style fuses because they're cheap and a 1/4" bolt fits the hole. They are not the quickest acting but will do the job. ANL fuses are the quickest to interrupt.

Bus bar with fuses:

I just did this and out right copied westend's design. I ran my solar, inverter and trailer wires to the bus bar. Going to the battery I have a Pos and Neg off the bus bars as well as I left my genny starter cables attached to the battery. This made for a nice clean wire setup with everything protected by the trailer frame and nothing hanging below the frame.
I ended up cutting and replacing the cable lugs on every wire under the trailer as they were to long to begin with. I purchase 2ga wire to run from my bus to battery but in the end I would have had enough just off the extra cable coming from the genny to make the bus to battery run. Yep there was an extra 4 feet of genny cable zip tied and hanging under the trailer on both the pos and neg side.
I also found that the genny neg cables was grounded to the frame and then attached to the neg battery post. After thinking about it and talking with a RV tech I could come up with no reason the genny needed frame grounding and removed this extra chunk of wire, now the genny neg goes directly to the battery.

I will post a few pic this weekend of my handy work.

All branch circuits can be moved to a bus. Then a single cable to each battery.

Here are some before and after pics of my rewire job. I didn't take the cover off the boxes but they look the same as westend's on the inside. I still have a couple long wires that run to the battery disconnect switch which is not working right.My next project is to remove the leveling jack so I can get to the back of the switch and replace the disconnect switch with a better design. I have all the parts for this just haven't got around to the work yet.

Quote:
You will need one main fuse between the battery and the buss bar
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What for ? Just to add 2 more connections to where you were trying to make less ??

Make the battery to buss bar cable impregnable. Wrap with nylon spiral wrap and you can whack the cable with a claw hammer and not hurt it.

Individually fuse branch circuits leading from buss bar. Use toothed Shakeproof lock washers under every nut or screw.

Fuse as much as you want. I didn't have a fuse on the old wiring from the battery to disconnect but after the disconnect there's a factory installed fuse on the trailer frame. I didn't see the need to add a fuse from the battery to bus or from the bus to the disconnect switch. I did fuse the inverter and solar controller. The fuses I purchased are not quite as compact as westend's and I had problems getting more then 2 fuses in the box. Any more the 2 fused lines and cable lugs would have been touching.

RJsfishin wrote:
Quote:
You will need one main fuse between the battery and the buss bar
------------------------------------------------------------
What for ? Just to add 2 more connections to where you were trying to make less ??

Because that is the correct way to do it. If there is no circuit protection between the battery and the bus, the cable connecting the two can fail and fail horrendously. In Muddydog's system he has the original circuit breaker to protect that part of the circuit.
Best practices are to have circuit protection within 18" of the battery but for RV's and IMO, having the fuse or circuit breaker either on the positive terminal or close to it, is the most elegant.