Hello - I have a 45' Pleasurecraft and it has 3 batteries. I want to take them out to clean and house them in battery boxes, but I am pretty intimidated with all of the wiring. I really don't know where to start, as far as figuring out what all of the wires are for. My concern is I want to disconnect the batteries, but don't want to screw it all up when I go to rehook them. All I can think to do it take a picture of it before, then reassemble per the picture when I'm done... also, any basic safety hints about disconnecting batteries?

Thanks!

better than a picture would be to buy some wire tags, tag the wires and draw a diagram of there location. this will make reconnection a piece of cake. also where saftey glasses and be careful not to short any wires together.

How many wires are we talking about? Positive & Negative for
the engines which I assume you know about. If you have a charger
you may have a wire from it to each battery. Then there's probably one
additional wire to one of the batteries that powers all the 12 volt
stuff.



If you trace each wire & understand what they're for you'll be miles ahead.

I too was wondering what all someone could have attached to those batteries. I have seen situations where someone who was afraid to tie into the wrong line would just run wires for a new gadget all the way back to the battery to get a positive and negative. It sure wastes a lot of wire and I would think it could drain a battery. In order to keep it straight I would just bundle all the wires on one side together and then put a wire tie around them and disconnect. Then the same on the other side. After you get everything back together I would suggest you begin a systematic approach to tracing all those wires to whatever gadget they power and then try to rewire those you can to splice into a closer hot wire and ground and eliminate some of that clutter. I only have my cables and a small charger wire on each post and that is the way most of them are.

I would suggest you go buy two bus bars.  Take all the black wires off the negative of the battery and connect them to separate posts on the bus bar. Run one larger wire from the bus bar to the negative battery post.  Do the same with the positive side (red wires). While you are doing this label each wire with what equipment it goes to. This will make your wiring much neater, and in the future if you need to disconnect a battery you only need to disconnect one wire.  Better yet, buy a battery switch and put it in the line going from the battery to the positive bus.  Then all you need to do to disconnect the battery is flip the switch to off.