Foretravel Owners' Forum For owners and Fans of Foretravel Motorcoaches September 12, 2025 ...

Re: Auto gen start trigger voltage

Reply #25 – January 31, 2022, 10:25:08 pm

David I had never really given it much thought or for that matter concern. I can't present any actual hands on information, but the equal charge amperage seems it would be beneficial to battery life. That being said with 4 OOOO cables for charging purposes I would think they would be almost identical at that low charging amperage. However since you brought this to my attention and helped force my simple mind to think about this I am now compelled to put the main cables on the inner/center battery posts to attempt to be more in balance. Who knows if it will make any difference but it makes sense to me. My cables are on 3/8 posts so swapping would be little effort. Center battery will have no cables so hope it can handle the extra charge. Output shouldn't change. I will report back with my findings in 5-8 years. Again interesting
Scott

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Re: Auto gen start trigger voltage

Reply #26 – January 31, 2022, 11:26:12 pm

For those actually interested in the engineering behind the issue, here is some light reading from Victron. In theory they have some idea what is going on.

https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Wiring-Unlimited-EN.pdf

It is too big to attach.

Scott, connecting your plus and minus to the center battery and then from there short links to the outer batteries will unbalance charge and discharge even more than connecting across opposite corners.  Your center battery offers the least resistance to charge and discharge and will do most of the work and suffer the most wear and tear.

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Re: Auto gen start trigger voltage

Reply #27 – February 01, 2022, 01:13:41 am

I'm no expert here, but was talking with a friend about this today.  We were of the opinion that connecting each battery individually to a bus bar, with equal length cables, would be better than connecting the batteries themselves together.  To do this, I'd use a bus bar like this:

Lynx Power In - Victron Energy

Do you agree Roger?

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Re: Auto gen start trigger voltage

Reply #28 – February 01, 2022, 11:05:43 am

Keith, the Victron Lynx power distribution components are quite nice. That can be used for battery connections on one end of a distribution chain and all other loads and charge sources on the other with a battery shunt and main switch and fuse in the middle.

Plus sides are modular design and expandability. They offer the opportunity to fuse each incoming battery and on each outgoing load or incoming charge connection downstream.

The downsides are cost and size.  Each of these is almost 12" long. I just didn't have enough room to connect my distribution system this way but I have all of the same functionality except for individual battery fusing which would be pretty easy to add using a Bussmann MRBF Fuse and holder at each positive battery terminal.

If you look at the installation section of the user manual they show equal length cables for each plus and minus connection from the battery to the Lynx distribution box.  The same is true for a bus bar connection.  This picture was before cleaning up the smaller wires. I cut all of my 34" cables at the same time, maybe 1/8" variation, and then attached all the lugs. That is close enough to all being equal length.

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