Larry wrote: > The advantage I see in using a circuit breaker is that it will automaticlly > isolate a short circuit from the rest of the electrical buss without > causing a lot of smoke and/or damaged wiring or causing the entire > electrical system to shut down.
Larry, That was my point. Neither of my pump/coil systems are on the same bus as the rest of the system, or each other. Those two circuits are my "essential buses", and I have a complete set of each. There's nothing else on either system. If my EIS warns me that my voltage has dropped below whatever I set it to (lets say 12V), then the first thing I do is switch off the master and see if the problem is fixed (neither of my e-buses go through the master). If I still have a voltage problem, then I swap e-buses and see if it gets any better. The secondary system will be isolated from the alternator with a diode, so it's a complete separate system, capable of keeping me aloft for close to an hour. The wiring to each set is completely separate. I've seen what happens when a direct short fries a wire. It melts itself into whatever it's bundled with, and all kinds of things start going bad in a hurry. It wouldn't hurt to put a breaker into each system.. A big enough breaker would guarantee that it wouldn't trip unless something was almost smoking, and I guess that's good enough, so either way works. I guess that's exactly what you've got, and that'd be good enough for me too. I might still do that. One bonus of the above system is that I can hookup a relay so that when the starter is energized I get the combined cranking power of two batteries. There's a lot to all of these strategies, and I'd highly recommend Bob's Aerolectric Connection book, at http://www.aeroelectric.com/ , for those who don't have it. I'm like Dana on this one, you really need this book! Keep those pireps coming Larry!!!! Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
