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I'm curious as to the reason for disconnecting the batteries when they are not being charged (other than eliminating the chance of killing the main battery due to loads on the auxillary battery or vice-versa).

I run a similar setup as yours and during cold weather I often leave the two batteries manually connected together to aid in cold starting. So far I have not seen any problems.


Supposedly if you have two batteries, and there is a slight voltage difference between the two as they self-discharge, the lower voltage one can pull current from the higher voltage one and end up discharging both of them.

I've not seen this happen, but with my solenoid setup, it automatically disconnects them when the ignition is turned off. And as soon as the ignition turns on, the solenoid kicks in and parallels both batteries for starting.

r.c.brown@ieee.org
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Project: 4Crawler
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