Cleaning up the mess of battery cables.

You can DIY a very good bus for a fraction of the cost of a store-bought bus. The only critical part is a piece of copper flat bar big enough to handle all the loads. I used a 1" x 1/4" bar,IIRC. I chose to tap the holes and use SS fasteners (don't want them coming loose). The bars are mounted in conventional 4" plastic waterproof boxes available at the big box stores. I chose to glue and screw in standoffs for the bus bars inside the boxes (HDPE). You can use your own creativity on how they are secured in the box (or not secure them at all).

A (+) phase bus:

Muddydogs wrote:
My trailer battery's are a mess of wires, the posts were full from the factory then I added wires for the solar, inverter and others. I was thinking about mounting two of these power posts https://www.bluesea.com/products/category/PowerPost_Connectors/PowerPost to my trailer frame behind the battery's so I could attach all the cables to them then just run one + and - to the battery's. Would sure make checking water levels and getting the box lids on easier.

Good idea? Any other suggestions?

I have been thinking the same thing. Just been too lazy to get it done.

Posts are fine and you probably need a bus.

The Trimetric shunt on the neg side gets your one fat neg wire to battery while the other end of the shunt has to collect all the incoming negs. So you need another neg bus out from that to help collect all the negs, since the shunt bolt can't take them all stacked up.

Over on the positive side, you might have a battery disconnect switch that has the one fat wire to the battery and all pos wires from everywhere stacked up somehow to the outer end of that switch. The switch probably can't hold them all stacked so you need a positive bus to take some of them.

The electrons don't care how they get there, but you lose some by stacking too many ring lugs. :) A store-bought bus avoids that issue by spreading them out sideways to several terminals instead of stacking them.

Mine came from the factory like this. One #2 wire from the battery, then several different size wires to various things. Seems like a sensible way to wire the battery.

I was thinking same as you. My battery terminals are full of cables making a big job of adding water to the batteries. I have to remove the cables and remember where each one goes back to. The power post should work.