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hi everyone jeff cote here with votingtechtalk.com love saying that by the way wayne asks a question he says jeff can i wire the positive leads of my battery combiner in this instance he's talking about a blue seize acr which stands for automatic combiner relay still a battery combiner to my battery combiner on off switch to eliminate direct connections to the battery if so does it matter if the connections are on the hot side i.e the switch side or the load side on switch versus switch all right and he says he's seen multiple uh different configurations i know there are a lot of difference of opinions on the internet some of the voices that are the loudest are hard to ignore but in this instance and if you look at our schematics and by the way we have this conceptual diagram of the battery combiner on our website and you can geek out and there's a whole section on battery combiners i've written and talked about battery combiners ad nauseum i mean i don't know how many hours just on battery combiners my advice 100 if you don't want to have miracles or magic happen on your boat is to definitely have the battery combiner always connected to the unswitched side never to the switch side never on the loads but always connect to the battery second considering that an acr or battery combiner needs a fuse it gets challenging to have battery combiner connections on a battery switch now that it can't be done but those connections have to be fused the challenge is when we're not going all the way to the batteries which are at either end and we're going to battery switch if those connections also have fuses from the batteries to the battery switch depending on the system what happens is by reusing a wire for multiple purposes if you lose for example one of the wires that's connected from the battery switch to the battery you might not lose just that connection but you also might lose your battery compartment connection and that battery combiner connection might also be the only way for you to recharge the batteries so in general my advice is don't take shortcuts don't do that it's all about unintended consequences sometimes we do things and you know what it might be fine on your boat for 20 30 years but the challenge is what happens when something goes wrong loads and charging circuits should never really use the same wires they shouldn't as much as possible you want to make sure that all your charging circuits which a battery combiner is effectively a way to share a charging voltage should be completely separate from your loads because if you blow a fuse on a load side you should still want your battery to get a charge on the battery combiner now i know it's easy said and done right i'm making more work for you it's going to be harder it's not as easy it's going to cost more money because you've got longer wires it's going to be painful but you know what a little bit of pain up front for no pain later is a good thing and the reason why i know this is because i've seen a lot of people take those shortcuts and then we get called in to troubleshoot these problems that drive people crazy and that make a lot of people unfortunately and sadly leave boating why because it's just too freaking hard and voting's hard enough as it is taking shortcuts with electrical and not saying here that wayne is doing that because he's asking the question but taking shortcuts with electrical rarely pays off and the only thing that it undoes and the saddest thing is it undoes our own sort of trust in our boat and it limits us from doing the things that we might want to do with the boat either just taking it out bringing friends bringing family feeling safe feeling confident and i know it's hard boat ownership is not easy financially emotionally i get it totally get it but with a battery combiner bring those connections to the unswitched side of the battery i.e directly to the battery or to a positive unswitched distribution that is completely separate from the loads and i know it's tempting to go to the switch because it's a shortcut and yes it does work but don't do it don't do it great question from wayne and thanks for asking and thanks for all of you for watching and if you also have by the way comments on battery combiners and what you've done on your boat or what has not worked out for you on your boat because not only do we learn from doing it right but we also learned from doing it wrong share those stories with us and let all of us be better builders thanks for watching thank you for watching this pys video if you've got further questions please ask them below or send us an email via the contact forms on our website and don't forget to subscribe thanks again for watching Videolytics    Tools  View advanced statistics o