House battery connected to starboard correct?

[Jeff6566]

New boat to me, PO may have done some creative wiring..
Can anyone tell me if this is correct for a '95 370 sundancer or standard on other boats?
or if anyone has wiring diagram..
Thanks

 

[Bt Doctur]

Most are wired that way and I think its a bad idea. House power should be just that house.It should never be tied into an engines starting battery. I believe the engine starting batteries need to be dedicated to the engine(s) .
You can afford to kill a house battery but kill an engine battery it`s either a friendly tow or an expensive tow/jump start.

 

[northern]

On our boat the port side is 100% start battery and starboard is start and house. Seems to work. When we got the boat the boat had 3 batteries that were all connected together. Once neither engine would turn over and there was just enough power to start the generator. Very lucky as we were 30 miles from the nearest marina. After that made sure we had one engine with dedicated start batteries. We also carry a 1000 watt Honda generator as last resort for power to charge batteries. Never had to use it. Have lent it to others on remote locations that ran their power down.

 

[ttmott]

I don't agree that it's a "bad idea" to have batteries for house and engine for our smaller boats / yachts.
I have three House / Starboard engine batteries, two port engine batteries, and one generator battery; All 100 Ah batteries.
There is an emergency start feature that can tie the two main banks together to get one or the other engine started in the event of a battery issue.
Each of the three alternators charge the respective battery bank and with the ACR's (in my case) or isolators (most likely in your case) each bank can cross charge the other banks.
The generator also powers the three bank charger which simultaneously charges all three banks. There is always the case of a shorted battery cell can take a system down and make it almost impossible to get an engine cranked; so be smart and have the capability to remove such a battery from the bank. But, this condition can crop up in any configuration.

There is a lot of backup and redundancy in these systems so I don't see any issue having a combined use battery bank and I've never had issues getting the engines started.
We travel to the Bahamas several times a year and spend most of the time at anchor and the boat has a 2KW inverter; The batteries are always monitored and routinely checked as SOP. Again, never an issue.

 

[Creekwood]

Most are wired that way and I think its a bad idea. House power should be just that house.It should never be tied into an engines starting battery. I believe the engine starting batteries need to be dedicated to the engine(s) .
You can afford to kill a house battery but kill an engine battery it`s either a friendly tow or an expensive tow/jump start.

The Emergency start switch allows you to bridge the banks on a dual engine Sea Ray so that allows you to start the house/starboard bank engine if the batteries get too run down. That is only relevant for a dual engine, dual bank setup though. (which now that I read the immediately early post, is exactly what he said)

 

[Bt Doctur]

There are cases where the owners fail to check the water levels in the batteries and keep their chargers on all the time.
The battery boost/parallel switch only works if the port battery has power. Should that go bad or dead from not doing your maintenance there`s no starting anything.