thanks Dave - I am looking forward to it. And BTW would you please tell Ralph that she is making a mistake in gender, I'm a girl.

Hey Ralph, didn't you know that the "real Tigger" was a girl?



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SORRY GIRL I GUESS I REALLY WASN'T PAYING TO MUCH ATTENTION I THOUGHT IT WAS RUSTI WITH THE PROBLEM. I KNOW BETTER NOW, ITS GREAT THAT WE HAVE " therealtigger" ON SITE.

RALPH GLOVER
1976 BARTH 27'

Apology accepted Boy, :-} The Tigger is bouncing around in her Barth trying to fix a bunch of things.

BTW - In never received an answer as to why I couldn't hook up the pos on the coach battery to the pos on the house batteries and get a complete circuit, since both of the batteries have their negs hooked to the frame? Was it just that I had something looses or am I missing some simple principal here?

Rusti

You can do that Tig, but a better thing to do is to go to a NAPA store and they will have a scissor kind of connection where you hook the pos up to it and then when you are camped somewhere, you can flip the switch so that there won't be a chance of wearing down yor engine battery because you left a bathroom light on, or watch TV to long.

quote:

Originally posted by therealtigger:
BTW - In never received an answer as to why I couldn't hook up the pos on the coach battery to the pos on the house batteries and get a complete circuit, since both of the batteries have their negs hooked to the frame? Was it just that I had something looses or am I missing some simple principal here?

Rusti

Hi Rusti,

Your idea is OK. I have been doing that for years. I use the green knob connector. That way my solar cells keep all batts up when sitting. When using the RV, the connection is open. One time the alternator failed, so I connected the banks and ran the genset all the way home.

Caveat:

The wire that runs from one battery to the other will need to be large enough to carry the current. On my coach the batteries are 15 feet apart and 20 odd feet of 0 or 00 cable is costly.

Timothy

Short answer: Heavy cable for starting, light for charging.

Long answer: As mentioned, I parallel my batts only for sitting, and the cable only carries a little bit of charging current. If you really, really ran down your starting battery, then the connecting cable would have to carry most of the starting current if it were the only parallel circuit. But, I believe most Barths have a solenoid for that already, with heavy enough cable. Fixing the aux start system would be a good idea. But if you don't do it, a heavy cable is needed for jumping coach to chassis battery. The jumper cable needs to be at least the same size as the cable to the starter.



[This message has been edited by bill h (edited February 14, 2005).]

At the time I'm talking about, I was trying to jump from the chasis battery to the coach batteries because I couldn't get the starter to turn over at all. I was using my PU truck cables. When I didn't get any current that way either I wasn't sure if I had a bad connection or if I was missing something about the current flow. From what I'm hearing it must have been a loose connection and the current flow thru the circuit should have started the engine.
(on my '85 the 3 batteries are all together.)