Wiring the starter circuit

As part of the electrical rehaul, I had removed all circuit wiring.

After wiring up the house battery some weeks ago, now it was time for the starter circuit. This would be controlled by a single on/off switch, as part of the push to isolate the start circuit entirely. First things first – drill out the hole for the new starter switch.

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I had to move the charger of this (blocking up the hole I was using to thread the power cable through – hence why I wired up the the external outlet yesterday).

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Here is the back of the switch, after I wired it.

Next, I had to hook it up to the starter.

Here is the old cable – not only is it really under sized, its also not a marine cable and appears to be a automobile one with a cheap crappy lug on it. SAE size 4, whatever that is.

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I replaced it with some AVG 1/0, which should be plenty big enough. The engine should start easier as well!

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Note the lug size difference.

With the wiring from the switch to the starter done, the last thing to do was run a positive cable from the switch to the starter battery, and then a negative cable from the battery to the ground hub.

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Note the mess of wires from the battery charger – I am going to have to clear that all up.

The very final thing to do was install the echo charger I bought.

This cool device monitors the house battery, and when it’s fully charged starts shipping charge over the to the starter. That way, I can run all my charging sources (alternator, solar, shorepower) to the house battery and not worry about faffing about with different battery selection switches. Here it is below

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I go into more detail on my planning in the earlier blog post here

I still have to install that link between the selector switch and the starter, but I will do that another time.

After leaving some time for the battery to charge, I gave it a shot and it fired right up! Perfect!

Matt

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