Battery Disconnect Switch

[rfsod48]

When installing a battery disconnect switch do you put one on both the house and chassis batteries or just on the house batteries?

[hermanmullins]

rfsod48,
Each should have their own switch. If both were on the same switch it would draw down both the house and chassis batteries at the same time. This could lead to a dead chassis battery.

Herman

[rfsod48]

Generally is there an issue with disconnecting the chassis batteries? The engine computer and radio loosing their settings? Would I be better off to use a disconnect switch on just the house batteries?

[wolfe10]

If you have a means of keeping the chassis batteries charged (shore power, solar, etc), yes it is better to leave them connected.

But, better to disconnect them than to let them deeply discharge/go dead.

[DAWg134]

I have individual battery disconnects for both the chassis and the house batteries. Both are installed on their respective battery ground terminals, rather than the positive.

Although there's no loss of data or settings anywhere due to disconnecting the house battery, when I disconnect the chassis battery I do lose the correct time on the vehicle clock display. All other data and settings, including odometer, maintenance information/intervals, radio presets, bluetooth settings, audio settings, GPS preferences, etc. are all retained.

Although I suspect more and more electronics use EEPROM storage rather than power-dependent RAM to store configuration information, not all vehicles and/or audio systems are created equal and your results may differ. Regardless, it is extremely doubtful that you'd lose any truly critical data, so until you give it a try, you're never going to know how much of a hassle it will be to reprogram your various systems.

[rfsod48]

Thanks for the replies, I plan to add disconnects to both sets of batteries, hopefully this will solve the problem.