I've owned my Beneteau (373) for a year now, and read several posts in several forums discussing the re-purposing of the black/negative switch and changing how the shutoff switches are wired. While I'm not the original owner of this boat, I'm 99.9% sure my wiring is all original. Also worth mentioning: my electrical system knowledge/skills are fairly basic. Personally, I cannot see any reason to change the way it was originally installed. Here's how I use shutoff switches, and it all seems to work almost* perfectly for me.
As far as I can tell, the main reason people seem to not like the original setup, is that they leave both banks switched on... run their "house electrical" needs off both batteries (because both are on) and then are surprised that the house electrical drained the starter battery. The original (and my) way seems simple to me: "ON" means that battery is connected to the system. "OFF" means it is not connected to the system.
Is all of the Beneteau rewiring switches fuss really about people finding this setup to be not-intuitive? I guess people just don't like having to turn off the starter when they are finished using the engine eh?
* One improvement I would make, is for boats with multi-battery "banks" as their "house", to have a separate switch for each individual battery, and is on my to-do-list, since I upgraded my house bank from the original single battery, to two parallel batteries (for a total of 3 batteries on board). Additionally, I agree that the black switch has some use only in very specific situations, and I could easily live without it... but having a feature I hardly ever need to use, is hardly a "problem" for me... It's fine as-is as far as I'm concerned.
- When I "open up" the boat to use for a day, weekend or multi-week cruise, I turn on the "house bank" red.
- When I "close up" the boat, (basically any time I'm away all day or longer) I turn off the "house bank" red.
- When I want to run the engine, I turn on the "starter bank".
- When I shut off the engine, I turn off the "starter bank".
As far as I can tell, the main reason people seem to not like the original setup, is that they leave both banks switched on... run their "house electrical" needs off both batteries (because both are on) and then are surprised that the house electrical drained the starter battery. The original (and my) way seems simple to me: "ON" means that battery is connected to the system. "OFF" means it is not connected to the system.
Is all of the Beneteau rewiring switches fuss really about people finding this setup to be not-intuitive? I guess people just don't like having to turn off the starter when they are finished using the engine eh?
* One improvement I would make, is for boats with multi-battery "banks" as their "house", to have a separate switch for each individual battery, and is on my to-do-list, since I upgraded my house bank from the original single battery, to two parallel batteries (for a total of 3 batteries on board). Additionally, I agree that the black switch has some use only in very specific situations, and I could easily live without it... but having a feature I hardly ever need to use, is hardly a "problem" for me... It's fine as-is as far as I'm concerned.