Hello! I'm working on a 40' former admiral's gig, and came up with the idea of making it so you're not draining the batteries or needing the engine to be running to have power onboard (there's no genset; just a 6-71 main engine with a good-sized alternator). I know that shore power setups are rather common, but don't know the nuts-and-bolts details on how they're set up. The boat has 24 volt power (powering the engine starter, lights, and just about everything else onboard) and 12 volt power (powering the bilge pump and the VHF). Ideally, I'd like to be able to plug in to a standard 110v power outlet and have both 24 volt and 12 volt power that can power everything (except the starter, of course ).<br><br>BTW, at the moment, the 12 volt power is coming from one of the two batteries (two 12 volt batteries in series); someone was trying to get the boat operational quick and Mickey-Moused it (of course, this was years ago, but still ). I want to put a separate 12 volt battery in at some point, though...<br><br>Any thoughts would be appreciated...thanks in advance!

 

...anyone?

 

Alot of farm tractors pull 12v from the middle of a 24v system as you described. This is from the factory. That way one 24v charging system will do the job.<br>Also there are big rigs, heavy equip, ect. doing the same<br><br> : Eddie : 8)

 

Actually, the 12 volt stuff was wired to one of the batteries, not ot both in parallel...so what was happening was that the bilge pump (which didn't have a switch; again, the result of a Mickey-Mouse job) was drawing power from one battery, discharging it while the other was still fully charged. The result: One battery nice and charged, one dead enough to not give enough juice to turn the engine over.<br><br>And I had been told that wiring the 12 volt stuff to the &quot;main&quot; batteries in parallel wasn't all that good of an idea, either, and that it was better to have a separate battery...but, if everything else is equal, I'd rather put the 12 volt stuff so it's drawing from both batteries in parallel, that way at least they'll be discharged evenly and we won't have to worry about a completely separate system... Next step, of course, is a cut-out switch so that the 12 volt stuff isn't always powered... :<br><br>Thanks for that, Eddie...now, back to the other question...how to turn 110 volts of power from a &quot;standard&quot; plug into enough 24 volt juice to power the lights, etc...?