RE: Adding a battery to my trailer

[OC Campers]

 
I m going some extended dry camping soon and was thinking of bringing an extra battery along. After thinking about it for some time, I though I might drop my extra propane tank and mount the battery there, it would also be nice to set it up wired in series with the existing battery so I have a couple questions for you battery gurus:
 
 1- To wire the batteries together, do you just jumper the hots and grounds together. Also would you need to run a large battery cable wire between them or could you use a smaller gage wire?
 2-Assuming you can jumper the batteries together, is it O.K. to hook a smaller group 24 battery to a group 27 battery?
 3- will the extra battery cause extra unwanted load on the charging system?
 
 Randy

[mike4947]

 OC Campers
Here s some good reading on 12 volt battery systems and should answer anything you need to know:
 http://www.dcbattery.com/faq.html#1
 http://bart.ccis.com/home/mnemeth/12volt/12volt.htm
 http://bart.ccis.com/home/mnemeth/12volt/12volta.htm

[LKaskel]

 OC Campers
Randy,
 The connection of the batteries together is correct.  Hook the red to red (+ to +)and black to black (- to -).  You should use at least the size of the wire used to connect the battery to the camper.  Do NOT use smaller wire.  As far as the converter/charger is concerned if it is charging batteries that are partially charged you will probally be ok.  If the batteries were very low (" very"  is a difficult state to measure) that could most definantly harm your converter/charger.  Best case is the charger would overheat and shut itself off until it cools worst case it could do some real damage.  I dont see anything wrong with connecting a group 24 and 27 battery together in this fashion.  You would benifit most if both batteries were in great shape.  If one battery drains alot faster than the other it may actually work against you.