I have a 14ft V-bottom Lund fishing boat. Use it for fishing and whatnot. It is a pretty basic boat, no previous wiring. Here is the setup I am thinking of doing.Batteries will be up front under one of my seats. I am going to parallel two 12Vs together, and then run 4 awg wire to the back of the boat. The positive side will have a 20amp fuse. I am going to run these into two ground bars, one for the positive side and one for the negative side. All my components i wanna run will then hook up to these ground bars as well. I have a trolling motor, navigation lights, and going to put a CD player in it as well. And maybe a cigarette lighter. Do i need to be worried about anything or will this work fine? Should have more fuses or run a fuse panel instead of the ground bars? Any help would be great. The wiring is expensive, and i dont want to ruin it somehow. Thanks.
Ground bar is good for secondary circuits. Run a fuse block so each circuit is protected. If you have a good charging system you have no problems.
Run an 80A fuse at the battery end to protect the #4 GA.Put a 15A or 20A fuse on each small accessory load wire leaving your ground bar.The trolling motor will be your biggest load,it may need a 40 or 50A fuse.
Slicing off the insulation is a bad idea as it will likely cause corrosion problems later on. The best and easiest way I have found is to go to an auto parts store or Walmart or somewhere like that and get some 'Scotch Lock' connectors that you insert the wire from your trailer connector and simply squeeze onto the existing wire on your vehicle. It pierces the wire of your vehicle but leaves only a small nick in the wire and does not damage it. You can hook up the wiring very quickly and easily this way and if you ever remove the wiring it is easy to simply tape up the small nick in the wire so as not to cause corrosion at a later time. Good luck.
It should work for most of what you want to do. I suggest that you run a separate set of wires for the trolling motor, put the fuse at the battery terminal, not at the buss bars. Then use separate fuses for each circuit except the trolling motor which should be fused at the battery. You will need twice as much wire to do this, but it can be much smaller such as 8 GA, stranded for the buss strips, the trolling motor wire needs to be sized for that motor, You might consider moving the batteries to the center seats, unless the balance is a major consideration.
What is the total current draw if all the items are on at the same time? Example, trolling motor 6 amps, lights 10 amps, cd player 5 amps. that ads up to 21 amps peak, might be better with a 30 amp main fuse and each branch circuit has its own fuse of 10 to 15 amps capacity? Put a fuse in each branch item so one item does not take out everything. The way you have listed this, if one item goes bad and blows the fuse you lose everything. With individual fuses you only lose that item plus you know what broke down. Just a suggestion.
