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Aluminum busbar

Sean Steele

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Aug 28, 2020
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I'd like to clean up the battery connections in my camper. Currently, the negative wire from the battery goes to a bolt in the chassis of the camper and several other negative wires go there as well. I'd like to attach a busbar of sorts to the chassis mount location and then attach the other negative wires individually to the busbar. When I say busbar, I mean just a piece of bar stock. It would be manually attached to the chassis in a couple places, probably replace the big self tapping screw with a bolt and attach the P- end of my shunt there then connect the B- end directly to the battery. The bar stock I'm thinking about using is 2"x1/8" aluminum. I'd leave the extra width hanging off the side and attach the individual negative wires to that. Does this sound reasonable?

I've attached a pic of the current "system" for reference.

On a side note, would it be possible to replace the copper bar on the three breakers with a similar piece of aluminum and move the positive wire connections off to the side of that as well? The wires connecting to the copper busbar in the pic are for other devices and not related to the items powered thru the breakers. The two wires on the lowest connection are the Battery + wire and the B+ wire from my SCC.

As you can see, the + and - wires coming from the battery aren't even the same gauge. I have a lot of work ahead of me.
 

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One electrical problem using aluminum is Al-oxide, which is a fairly good insulator. If you want to use aluminum, first make sure you brighten the attachments down to bright, clean metal, then apply Al connection paste. I've never touched aluminum because of this issue, so I can't tell you for how long the paste is going to stay good.
 
One electrical problem using aluminum is Al-oxide, which is a fairly good insulator. If you want to use aluminum, first make sure you brighten the attachments down to bright, clean metal, then apply Al connection paste. I've never touched aluminum because of this issue, so I can't tell you for how long the paste is going to stay good.
I used Noalox, (cheap and readily available at hardware stores)
I ran 2 AWG aluminium service entrance wire from my outbuilding where I house my PIP all in one, to the load center in my house.
So far no signs of corrosion on any of the connections, but it's early yet.
 
Also, use a thicker piece of aluminum than what's on that copper bar in the pic. I use aluminum in my battery builds and it works well because it's so much easier to acquire in say Lowe's/HomeDepot
 
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