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I'm wanting to add navigation lights to the little tug. Right now the only thing that is connected to the battery is the feed to the motor, feed to the controller and a feed to the horn. The wire for the motor and controller are 10 gauge and 8 gauge. I was able to find good connectors for that size wire, but not for the smaller wire for the horn. I would like to run a larger feed forward and then hook up the horn, lights, etc.. Any suggestions

Thanks, Chip

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A secret to a good marriage is to have a quick mind and a slow mouth!!!

Chip, you can run pretty much whatever you want, but ABYC says that nav lights are "critical equipment" and shouldn't see more than 3% voltage drop. The BlueSea website has some good tables for calculating the drop over the length of the run. That said, the TT shouldn't have runs long enough to justify more than 16AWG.

One thing that would probably work in your case is to have two busses forward: one for the critical equipment and one for 'accessories' where 10% is acceptable. It's important to make sure that there isn't any high-current loads on the 3% bus (or to up-size the wire guage accordingly)

I'd suggest running a 10AWG and an 8AWG forward to independent fuse blocks: the 10 will power the safety/nav stuff @ 3% and the 8 can serve domestic needs and any toys you might want to add later.

The caveat: depending on load analysis, measurement of wire runs (always calculate round-trip distance) YMMV

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-Brian

"Do or do not. There is no try."
- Yoda

Brian,

Thanks for the response. My feed run is only about 5' and from there the runs to each item is less than that. Now bear with me and my one remaining marble. I'm wanted to keep this simple and not have wire running to the battery for each item. I haven't done much homework into this, but I did find a site others might be interested in, if they don't already know about it. http://www.ezacdc.com/Scripts/default.asp

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A secret to a good marriage is to have a quick mind and a slow mouth!!!