Battery Switch

[Irish Mist]

Hi All
On my 2011 R29 in the battery storage I have a bunch of red battery switches. All are on or off except the very top on is 1, 2 or both. Does anyone know what that one is for? I found it was off and I normally have it to both. I forget now what it is for.
I tried tracing the wires but thought asking the team might be easier.
Thank you

 

[knotflying]

I think it may be the parallel switch to join the house bank to the engine battery.

 

[Osprey]

I looked at the R29 users’ manual publisher by RT. This manual shows installation of 5 battery switches: house, engine, parallel, bow thruster and stern thruster. They are all dual position, (OFF and ON). There is no switch with 1, 2, both ON positions. Perhaps your R29 being older, was setup differently. One possibility is that the thrusters were wired to the multiple ON positions switch. I can imagine ON #1 for the bow thruster, ON #2 for the rear thruster and BOTH for bow and stern thrusters. OFF being no power to the thrusters.
All battery switches are normally labeled as to which circuit they control. What label is shown for the multiple ON positions switch?

 

[SkookumR29]

We also have a 2011 R29 and our battery switches are arranged as follows.

House on top (on/off)
Engine (on/off)
Parallel (off/1/2/both); this is normally left off
Thrusters (on/off); supports both bow and stern thrusters
Inverter at bottom (on/off); this is always left on, or inverter/charger will not charge the batteries, nor will inverter be able to make 120-volts when desired.

 

[Irish Mist]

Thanks everyone
All my switches have labels except that one. I have had the boat since 2012 and I have always left it on both.
After the boat was launched this year I felt the starter was not quite right just seemed a little sluggish and the thrusters for sure where not peaking out the way they used to. All my batteries were replaced 2 years ago.
When I was checking the batteries for lose connections I noticed that this switch was not on both but switched off. I must have been fiddling around in the fall before the boat got put away.
With the switch back on both or all ( not sure exactly now what it says ) life is good again. At some point I will do the deep dive and trace out the wires but I thought I would just ask here to see if anyone knew for sure. Everything has always worked great and the last 6 AGMs lasted 8 years. Hoping to get the same from these. Thanks everyone for your comments.

 

[Wee Venture]

Just a thought… You’ve probably already considered this, but one of your switches is probably a battery combine (parallel) switch. If none of the labeled switches specify that, then it is probably your unlabeled switch. If you leave that switch in the combine (“both”?) position, then it will bypass your ACR and combine both sides into one bank. This might explain why your starter cranks better. But if you are combining the engine and house bank, this means you may not be able to start your engine if you run your house bank down while off of shore power. If it combines your engine and thruster batteries (unusual but possible), your house bank would be isolated by the ACR (if wired normally) but any drain on either the engine or thruster battery would be a drain on both.

Rather than tracing wires, you could read the separate battery bank voltages after being off shore power or running the engine for awhile. (It might help to disconnect the solar panel also.) With the unlabeled switch in the “off” position, see if you get different voltages from the different banks. Then set it to each of the other positions and see if that equalizes the voltage. If, for example, your house and engine bank are different but when you switch to “both” they equalize, you know that switch is combining them.

John