Hi all

I think its about time I rewired my boat, It"s currently a horrible mess.

At the moment there are two house batteries and one starter battery.

On the supply side there is a wind generator and a prop generator and of course an engine alternator. I am going to add an Electric Windlass and Bow Thruster to the boat.

I will also be adding some solar panels.

Im thinking that I should keep the starter battery for just that, starting. Im just trying to get my head around the idea of say adding another house battery to compensate for the extra equipment (Windlass and Bow Thruster) or locate them in the fore cabin on their own bank.

Any advice would be gratefully received. As would a wiring diagram :)

Thanks

ChrisJ (and Simon),

I have no experience with wiring a bowthruster and/or windlass. What I do recall is that both take so much energy that you either have a very large, expensive, heavy battery pack up front or need to run your main engine while using them in order not to deplete the bow battery pack. Using a 240v link in beween does not change that.

Therefore, if you use the 240v approach (which sounds logical to me), you still need to take into account the energy usage of the invertor that provides the 240v power. If, say, the windlass / bowthruster uses 1000W, this will use ~80Amps from the battery pack. Therefore (taking into account the losses of converting 12v -> 240v -> 12v) you need maybe 100Amps at the primary batteries if you want to provide the whole power intake, or at least 50 Amps if you want to power half of the power intake from your 240v system.
That said, it seems to me that you need to check whether your alternator and main battery pack are currently up to that depletion for short periods of time. If so, no problem, if not than you need to upsize either main battery pack, alternator or both!