6v wiring grounding question

1sandiegan wrote:
Hey Guys!

I have a '03 Carson Funrunner and after 6+ years of dealing with crappy 12v batteries I'm moving to 2 6v batteries. My question is with the grounding. Before I had 2 12v batteries wired in parallel. All cables came from the drivers side of the trailer and connected to the pos. and neg. posts of the closest battery.

The problem is that with the new 6v's, the ground cables are not long enough to reach all the way to the other battery.

There is a ground cable that went from the frame to the battery, I can easily relocate this to reach the other battery in the 6v system. Now the negative wiring from the trailer is my issue, it is too short to reach and I would rather not cut it and simply splice in a longer cable. So... can I ground these wires to the frame rather than the battery? I would use the existing grounding point for the battery to frame ground cable.

I'm not an electrician, but I'm 99% sure this would work, just not sure if it is 'best' or even 'acceptable' practice. Please any input, below is a bad sketch I did, the top sketch is my proposal, the bottom is how it was wired before I removed the 12. batteries.

Thanks for any input!

enblethen wrote:
Yes, you could use the frame. Or buy a longer cable from auto parts store.
What about reversing the positions of the batteries? Put the positive post on the left side in drawing rather then the negative.
Could you reverse the left side battery and reach with the jumper wire/[/quote[

Glad to hear I can use the frame. I thought about flipping around the left side battery but the ground cables are still too short, I can only reach both posts on the right battery which was fine for 12v batteries but not for the 6'ers. I can't simply buy a longer cable because the wiring coming from the trailer goes through the cabniets, etc. If the frame will be an acceptable good ground I will go with that as I won't need to modify any cable lengths and will look clean as well. Thank you!

Golden_HVAC wrote:
First you need to modify your picture to have a maximum 600 width.

Second - you would wire the ground to the trailer frame. If you need to extend this wire with a couple of feet of #4 wire, that is fine. You can buy this at Home Depot, or other hardware stores. Just attach it to the existing ground point, or a new one if required.

You have the drawing correct where the first battery is grounded and the +6 is attached to the -6 of the second battery, then the +12 is attached to where your old battery +12 was connected.

Good luck,

Fred.