www.iFourWinns.com

We just purchased a 2006 288 Vista which has one battery for each engine and a ships systems battery. My question is, when not connected to shore power, do all of the electronics, frig., lights, etc. run off of just the ships systems battery or does it pull from all three. We spend considerable time in Canada's North Channel/Georgian Bay and it is not uncommon to spent time, one to two nights, on the hook and not connected to shore power. Second question is has anyone added a fourth battery to bolster the ships systems side and if so, how did you tie it in. If I do this, my plan is to locate the fourth battery on the starboard side to balance things out. Thanks for your consideration.

_________________
"One Moor Time" 2006 288 Vista
"Kalin II" 1995 258 Vista
"Kalin" 1985 Four Winns 215 Santara

On my 328, everything such as fridges and lights, stereo, etc runs off the house battery.. Even the windlass and generator starting are off the house I believe. The other two only do the starting of the engines.. We can however, parallel over to them using the battery switches to "jump" basically the generator starting if needed, or run short term off them. I added a larger battery to start with, and then, quickly added a second one that I just paralleled to the first, both deep cycle, and can now go easily two days without starting a motor or generator and running the stereo pretty hard for one of those days and both fridges... My engine starting batteries are not deep cycle, and are strictly for starting unless I drain the house down enough, I need to switch to pararrel to start the generator. Going to be changing that generator start over to one of the starting batteries soon I think. Also see a higher amp battery charger in my future for quicker, on the hook, battery charging. Likely an 80 amper..

_________________


2004 Four Winns 328 Vista
1997 Larson Cabrio 290 - sold
1988 Rinker Fiesta Vee 248 - sold

I use 3 AGM batteries for the house, group 24. I some times i go on 3 to 5 day trips and my genset will not power everything, hot water, coffee pot & chargers. The AGM gives me more AH for its size and will recover quicker. Even if you kill them that could trash a wet-cell.

I use a charging relay to combine them and a LED read out to tell me there condition.

Guess I forgot to specify my sizes. The house batteries are 31 series deep cycles.. Fortunately for me, I can run everything on my boat at the same time with the generator running, so if it comes down to it, I can do that, but of course, if I want things to charge up very fast, for the sake of the current charger, you have to minimize the DC use while running the generator to charge batteries, hence the likelihood of going to an 80+ amp charger..

_________________


2004 Four Winns 328 Vista
1997 Larson Cabrio 290 - sold
1988 Rinker Fiesta Vee 248 - sold

An 80+ amp charger is a lot of amps! Your talking about 15amp of A.C. power or about 1400 watts.

A four bank 80 amp charger is about 1,500 or four 20 amp single chargers at say 200 each.

Myself, I have 2 chargers both 20 amps, one 3 bank and a 2 bank from ProMariner. There chargers will do load sharing. I run the genset, make coffee and turn the chargers on. For about 45 min, than start the engines. The 2 alts will put out 90amps each (at idle maybe 75 each) and I run the engines for 15 to 20 minuets.

Good luck on how ever you approach it.