My current ongoing battle is with the electrical system. It consumes on average 40% of my time every workday. And I discover new, terrible things about it every single day. The original setup was two equal sized house banks of 250Ah each; each bank consisted of two 6V Rolls 250Ah batteries in series. This setup is not the ideal system for a boat that is trying to both maximize the capacity of the house bank and maintain the safety of a reserve supply for starting the engine while simultaneously minimizing the size, weight, volume, and cost of the batteries. Two equal-sized house banks is a common, simple, effective solution for this. But it is not the best. It is better to have a large house bank of high-capacity deep-cycle (thick plate) batteries, and a separate low-capacity high-cranking (thin plate) small starting battery. This system, though better, is more complicated for two reasons: the charging system must be more advanced in order to treat the two wildly different batteries separately, and the amount and complexity of wiring is increased. So we combined the two identical house banks into one large house bank, and bought a starting battery. Jonny built a bombproof battery box for the starting battery next to the existing house bank. We bought $200 worth of 2/0 cable to run new hot and ground lines to the engine (I put the new cable on the alternator and used the old cable for the starter).
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