Club 80-90 Forums

OK, please humour me, I didn't pay enough attention in physics at school. I'm going to run a wire with inline fuse from my leisure battery for the stereo and 12 volt socket to run from as they currently run off the starter battery. Would it be any more efficient to also wire up a negative wire directly to the negative terminal on the leisure battery, than to just run a positive wire, and earth to the body?

Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question, it would just feel "cleaner" to me to have the negative wired direct to the battery, but if there's no advantage i'll just run the positive wire and earth in the usual way.

(oh, and yes my leisure battery negative terminal is earthed to the body!)

And thats how it should be..

So use the van body

Sometimes it is just as easy to run twin cable and use the negative terminal, boats are done this way as you try to avoid getting stray electrickery in the hull especially if you have an aluminium, steel or wooden boat. There is no reason why not,it is just that vehicles have a ready earth handy a lot of the time. My Merc bus has negative returns as most added items are added to the inner lining with no access to grounded metal chassis. Just remember that you must use the same gauge of wire for the return as the feed.

kevtherev wrote:And thats how it should be..

So use the van body

Cheers Kev, that's one less wire then, which is a good thing.

Googling around the internet in general I found the same consensus, but also showed up that at least i'm not the first person to ask the question!

Oldiebut goodie wrote:Sometimes it is just as easy to run twin cable and use the negative terminal, boats are done this way as you try to avoid getting stray electrickery in the hull especially if you have an aluminium, steel or wooden boat. There is no reason why not,it is just that vehicles have a ready earth handy a lot of the time. My Merc bus has negative returns as most added items are added to the inner lining with no access to grounded metal chassis. Just remember that you must use the same gauge of wire for the return as the feed.

Cheers - that makes sense. In this case the components in question are already ground earthed, so i'll just rewire the +ve