Battery charger electric wiring

[Slipin Away]

A while back my Xantrex Freedom 25 charger/inverter died. I am in a very remote area and it took several months to get the unit repaired. During the interim, a fellow cruiser loaned me a portable charger that I could use with my Honda 2000 generator. I was very grateful as I did not want to run my engine to charge the battery. After this incident I decided to put a dedicated hard wired back up charger mounted on the boat in case this event happened again. I purchased a 40 amp, 3 stage marine charger. On my boat 45cc there is a 120 volt dedicated circuit for a battery charger that was not used. I hard wired the new charger to this circuit and mounted it close to the Freedom 25 unit. Provided I ONLY use this new charger in the event of another failure of the Xantrex; how can I best wire the 12 volt output of the new charger

a. To the 12 volt (pos/neg) output of the Xantrex. Which would be very simple and a very short wire run

b. Postive 12 volt to the common terminal of the house battery (as the Xantrex is presently wired) Wiring the neg to an existing bus (longer wire run and more difficult to run)

c. Bringing both the pos/neg leads directly to the battery terminals (very difficult to run and much longer run)
Please bare in mind that this charger would only be used if a failure in the Xantrex system occurred or if the input to the Xantrex was disconnected

 

[uncledom]

A while back my Xantrex Freedom 25 charger/inverter died. I am in a very remote area and it took several months to get the unit repaired. During the interim, a fellow cruiser loaned me a portable charger that I could use with my Honda 2000 generator. I was very grateful as I did not want to run my engine to charge the battery. After this incident I decided to put a dedicated hard wired back up charger mounted on the boat in case this event happened again. I purchased a 40 amp, 3 stage marine charger. On my boat 45cc there is a 120 volt dedicated circuit for a battery charger that was not used. I hard wired the new charger to this circuit and mounted it close to the Freedom 25 unit. Provided I ONLY use this new charger in the event of another failure of the Xantrex; how can I best wire the 12 volt output of the new charger a. To the 12 volt (pos/neg) output of the Xantrex. Which would be very simple and a very short wire run b. Postive 12 volt to the common terminal of the house battery (as the Xantrex is presently wired) Wiring the neg to an existing bus (longer wire run and more difficult to run) c. Bringing both the pos/neg leads directly to the battery terminals (very difficult to run and much longer run) Please bare in mind that this charger would only be used if a failure in the Xantrex system occurred or if the input to the Xantrex was disconnected

Can you just mount it close enough so that you can swing over the original wires upon the Xantrex failure? Just a thought.

 

[Stu Jackson]

SA, it all depends on how it's wired, so there is no simple answer. We have a Freedom 15, and because there is an ATS inside the Freedom, the AC comes to the Freedom first and then goes to the AC panel main breaker. This wiring scheme is one of the many different ones provided in the manual.

Therefore, when you say "...would only be used if a failure in the Xantrex system occurred or if the input to the Xantrex was disconnected..." it's hard to say which of your options would work unless we know how you wired the Freedom in the first place on the AC side.