Surge when starting and charging

[Mitch]

I have my house wired right to the house battery includes all the lights switches and electronics do I need some kind isolator in that circuit to protect my electronics from surge. Thnx

[Tony Meola]

Mitch

Depends on how the Battery switches are set up. I have mine set up so that I can isolate the house from the engines but combine them if needed should a battery go dead.

In fact, the way mine is set up, I can combine the house with the Port Start batteries, and if needed through the parrell switch up on the bridge, I can bring all the batteries online to start an engine.

[Mitch]

I have conventional battery setup 1-2-both but my house power direct from battery 2

[Tony Meola]

That is the original set up which then causes a drop in power to shut down the electronics. Back in the day, with the old graph recorders and loran A which had to manually synced with the signal, it did not matter. Once loran c and other high tech electronics came into being it became an issue.

You can look into a Blue Seas charging relay to see if that will solve your problem

[Navatech]

It's not a surge in power that you're experiencing when you start the engine... It's a drop in voltage that's causing your problems...

There are 3 ways of solving the issue...

1. Get yourself one of the special boxes (basically a UPS sort of thing)...
2. Increase your battery capacity...
3. Get yourself a dedicated house battery...

Personally I would chose option 3... House batteries have very different usage profiles from starting batteries... Adding one or two (in parallel) deep cycle batteries for the house is trivial...

[Bruce]

If your batteries are properly sized along with the cables and kept topped off in charge, voltage should not drop off enough to shut down electronics. If you do have an issue, start on battery 1 then move switch to both to charge batt 2 or use what Tony suggested and just leave switch on batt 1.
If your getting noise from the altenator, a filter capacitor can take care of that.

[Yannis]

I'm glad I understand zill, so I have an electrician under leash !