trolling motor batteries and charging

[brycer]

Hi I just bought a new 55 lb 12volt minn-kota and was wondering about running 2 batteries in parallel. Since this would still be 12 volts can i still use my minn-kota 2 bank charger on each battery?  I'm not sure how the 2 bank would do since the batteries are still hooked together. Would you just use one bank and let it charge both batteries? I'm sure that it would be a really slow charge if that was the case though. Any ideas of what would work best? Maybe just leave the 2 batteries separate and not do the parallel thing? thanks in advance.

[Coldfeet]

Hooking the batteries in parallel might seem like a good idea but you take the risk of one battery going bad to leak down the other good battery. If it were me I would use the dual battery switch which allows you to switch batteries from a console keeping both batteries seperate from each other this also allows you to use the dual bank charger on both batteries at the same time. You can get the dual battery switches at a marina or Cabelas.

[brycer]

thanks coldfeet didn't know such a thing existed. That will be the answer to what I'm looking for.

[TrekJeff]

The short/drain is a huge factor, when one cell discharges less then the others, the others have to pick up the slack and result in a lower over all voltage discharge.  If you have two batteries in parellel you'll hurt what wouldbe a good battery and if I'm correct when running in parrel, you maintain the original voltage, but increase /decrease the amp load.  OHMS law.

I bought a small breaker board for 12vdc and installed it on my 14ft alum.  I then just rigged the troling motor to that with a battery switch over.  Works great and when I run my depth finder I don't have to worry about battery drain,  The whole setup cost less than 5 bucks...batteries were obviously more.