Battery and charging switches

[Bluedog225]

Good morning,

I have two battle born 100 amp 12v batteries and 300 watts of solar (parallel) at 12 volts.

Am I better off installing switches that will allow me to separately charge and use each battery independently? Or go ahead and parallel the batteries and use them as one battery bank?

I’m really indifferent from a set-up standpoint. But I sense some issue with parallel batteries and keeping them in balance over years of service life that I’d rather not mess with. Or I need to understand it better.

If I go down the path of using them separately, is it useful to distinguish between charging them separately versus independently and applying load to them separately versus independently? That is, do the parallel concerns only arise during use and not during charging? Or vice versa?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Edit-I have seen many of the “different batteries” in parallel threads. Since these batteries are theoretically identical, I wondered if there were a best practice to follow before I set them up. Thanks

 

[pollenface]

I would use both together to share the load unless you want redundancy.

Maybe once a month charge each battery separately.

 

[rmaddy]

Put the batteries in parallel from the start and never worry about it again unless you start noticing a capacity problem over time. That's vastly less work than dealing with them independently over the years.

With two batteries in parallel just make sure the main positive wire and the main negative wire going to their respective bus bars are not both connected to the same battery. One from one battery and the other from the other battery. That will help keep the two batteries balanced.

 

[Bluedog225]

Got it. Thanks!