On-Board Battery Charger?

rdcastle

I keep my 2001 GS201 in a lift on my dock. There is, of course, power and water available there. I don't get to run the boat as much as I would like to and so the single battery on board loses charge over time. I am seriously thinking of installing an on-board charger, a second battery, and a Blue Sea mini add-a-battery kit. I was thinking that I would only connect the charger to one battery (house) and thus be able to operate the bilge pump in automatic mode since the boat is not covered and will collect a fair amount of rainwater over a couple of weeks. Using the dual-circuit plus switch in the add-a-battery kit would allow me to combine the batteries should the starting battery be too weak on its own. Any observations re: this plan?

cjjjdeck

I think you're going down a good path.  I have an on-board charger (three bank) and a Automatic Charging Relay (ACR) type device called Charge-on-the-Run from Dual Pro Charging Systems.  I like the product you are looking at from Deep Sea.  But I'm curious as to why you are not putting in a dual bank charger as well instead of just the single bank?

rdcastle

Well I guess my thinking was that charging both batteries and maintaining them would make battery maintenance more of a headache but really the only reason I had was just to keep the bilge pump happy. I will probably end up with a two-bank unit for the simple reason that I dont want to be zapping a single battery with higher amperage. There seems to be a big gap in amperage capacity between the single and double chargers. For this application 4 amps would be great but they are harder to find it seems. I didnt mention that both batteries are flooded cell types and not maintenance free.