Wiring help Needed

[buswarrior]

Within the battery bank, to the point that the cables attach to the bank, the paths must be equal to and through all batteries or pairs of batteries, between the positive and negative points that the main outgoing cables attach to.

The wiring beyond the bank doesn't matter, it is within the confines, between the big plus and the big minus that you need to analyze/set up correctly. There is no single battery that is any further, or any closer, than any other battery, to the two mains. Some will be closer on the positive, and then further away on the negative, and vice versa. It is finding the ones that are out of sync, that are closer or farther on both sides, than another.

In a simple example: if you put 4 batteries side by side, hooked up in parallel, often you'll see (wrongly) the main cables attached to the end of the row, to the same battery. So, the first battery sees the mains, no jumpers. The second battery sees one jumper each side to the mains. The third battery sees two jumpers both sides, etc... The electrons will pile through the first battery, the shortest path, and the far end battery will give little and get little activity.

Wired correctly, the mains would be connected to either end, on the first and fourth battery. Then the first battery would see no jumper and 3 jumpers, the second battery would see one jumper and two jumpers, the 3rd would see two and one, the fourth would see 3 and none. Every battery has equally a total of 3 jumpers, on one side or the other of the positive and negative. There is no "short cut" for electrons to find a quicker way through a battery and out the other side.

And as for the rest of the world setting a good engineered example...It is fascinating to see the number of heavy trucks with multiple start batteries set up wrong, then they wonder why the far end battery is always the first to fail? There shouldn't be a far end battery in the bank...!

Does that help?

I don't know if that set of pictures changes, with a search engine involved in the link, but the big set I saw, at a glance, there were more than 5 that were imbalanced, which was kind of disheartening. There was no point to looking at them any further. Like everything else, there will be good info in there, and a bunch that isn't. And thank you Dave5Cs for sharing! There are good links in there, just some bad ones I didn't want a novice busnut to mistakenly follow.

Really hard to do this explaining in typing!!

happy coaching!
buswarrior

[Dave5Cs]

Thank you for the explanation BW. You made sense and sorry for anyone that was mislead by the wrong diagram within the pictures. Now darnit I have to go study my house wiring and see if it pans out the way you said it should be. And maybe because of pictures like this there are many problems in these poor wiring jobs also.
Dave

[luvrbus]

Love you death DaveC but I wasn't going to use the diagram anyways 

[jackhanow]

Check out the way they wire golf carts up to 48 volts. I've tested the batteries individually and only have a volt or so difference between them when down to half charge. The chargers are pricey but charge from dead to full pretty fast. My thoughts were to use group 31s for when I'm plugged in all the time and use deep cycle when I dry camp. I've found the deep cycle don't like being plugged in all the time and 2 group 31s are 2200 amps and they can handle being plugged better. Just an idea.

[Dave5Cs]

Clifford Its one of those internet things. You have to pick the right one. Checked mine and it is fine. I hope they put some more stuff on the internet because I finally read it to the end.
Dave5Cs