Battery Upgrade
So, I just bought a new 5th wheel toyhauler. It currently has a single 12v battery. I want to seriously upgrade the battery capacity. I had 2 Costco 6v golf cart batteries in my last rig. I think ...
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No. The Trimetric shunt goes straight to the one battery neg, which is not grounded to the frame there. The frame ground goes to the "load" end of the shunt with all the other negs from loads and chargers (solar and any portable chargers)
So you will still need that long neg wire between pairs as the neg parallel link but that wire does not go to frame ground.
The wire from shunt to battery has to be fat, since it carries the total of all the current on the various wires attached to the "load" end of the shunt.
You can see how it all becomes awkward when you have to use the one shunt with two pairs of batts widely separated.
You also need to give up on proper balancing by having the positives from all the "loads" go to the other pair for many of those loads. You pretty much have to go to the "upstream" pair and have nothing on the "downstream" pair, just because of wire lengths and routing the wires.
The shunt can only hold so many wires and stacking lugs isn't such a good thing anyway, so you can have a wide neg buss on the load end of the shunt and then can attach many lugs along that.
I added a copper pipe to mine as seen in the photo, so I can clamp several items to it using clamps, such as when I use more than one portable charger at a time to add their amps.
So you will still need that long neg wire between pairs as the neg parallel link but that wire does not go to frame ground.
The wire from shunt to battery has to be fat, since it carries the total of all the current on the various wires attached to the "load" end of the shunt.
You can see how it all becomes awkward when you have to use the one shunt with two pairs of batts widely separated.
You also need to give up on proper balancing by having the positives from all the "loads" go to the other pair for many of those loads. You pretty much have to go to the "upstream" pair and have nothing on the "downstream" pair, just because of wire lengths and routing the wires.
The shunt can only hold so many wires and stacking lugs isn't such a good thing anyway, so you can have a wide neg buss on the load end of the shunt and then can attach many lugs along that.
I added a copper pipe to mine as seen in the photo, so I can clamp several items to it using clamps, such as when I use more than one portable charger at a time to add their amps.
