[Island Man]

Im the dummy

I finally decided to hook my trolling motor up to a dedicated battery. Had been using my starting battery and got tired of worrying if my motor would start after trolling for a while. Placed my trolling battery up front and shortened the wires to connect it. Only shortened the hot wire since the ground was fixed/hidden figured it would be ok. Hot wire to new battery ground wire to old battery. Both batterys fully charged wouldnt turn.

Got tired of troubleshooting so moved on to installing old fish finder up front for trolling. Had to change some wiring and now everything in console is dead.

Got tired of chasing wires so ran a new hot wire from rear battery fused connection to console. Checked to make sure the new wire was hot while i was back there and yep was nice n hot. All I had to check with was one of those cheap 12 volt testers so had to move around with the 2 foot cord. Wanted to check one more time to make sure the wire was hot after I routed it to the console. Hooked the tester to the front battery and checked the wire, no juice, What the heck. Tried 3 times back and forth each time same results. Coke break geesh.

Figured out (and I did not know this) you cant pull power from one battery and ground from another. Same was true with the trolling motor once I grounded it to the front battery it worked fine. I thought a ground was a ground.

Live and learn.......................now lets go fishing, oh yeh I installed a new Garmin with the new Down Vu Sonar technology.

Reviews after I use it a few days.

 

[Frudaddy]

A ground is usually a ground, but you can't complete a circuit if you never return to the power source. Glad you got it figured out though.

 

[BigE818]

Good job on figuring it out!! lol

 

[rollcast]

You're a better man than me! Electricity is not my thing, although I'm slowly learning that being boat owner = becoming an amateur electrician/ mechanic/ Mr. Fix-it, or alternatively having a large cash flow, which I do not.

 

[Drum Runner]

Started wiring when I was 16. Every boat I've ever bought the first thing I did was unwire it completely and rewire it. That factory and dealer crap is more often than not nothing but a bird nest. When something goes wrong it's a royal pain in the butt to trouble shoot it, get to it, and fix it. 30 foot wiring harness crammed and stuffed in the bilge of a 15 foot hull. How hard would it have been to cut it to length?