House and start battery jumping...

[pjtemplin]

"In a previous lifetime", as a volunteer firefighter, I saw several fire engines that had battery chargers for when the truck was parked in the station. Some of them were set up specifically for Detroit Diesels back then, which apparently had 2-4 cranking batteries and one "engine" battery (which I assume powered the ECM almost exclusively). Do we need to go to that level of separation on boats? If so, is single ECM battery suitable for two ECMs?

 

[SteveK]

"In a previous lifetime", as a volunteer firefighter, I saw several fire engines that had battery chargers for when the truck was parked in the station. Some of them were set up specifically for Detroit Diesels back then, which apparently had 2-4 cranking batteries and one "engine" battery (which I assume powered the ECM almost exclusively). Do we need to go to that level of separation on boats? If so, is single ECM battery suitable for two ECMs?

In theory I would say yes, but in practice you now have two separated batteries, so you may as well have separate start batteries.

If I had ECM's as an option I would now look at a single start battery bank and run the ECM's from the house bank. That way each engine has one battery bank to charge.