Charged Up

Battery Charger, June 2006

We'll be keeping the boat in the water, so I want the bilge pump always at the ready in case there is any serious leak. The pump runs off the house battery, so the battery needs to stay charged even while the engine is not running. With many projects ahead, I took a simple approach for this to get it out of the way quickly. I installed a very basic Guest 2611A, 10-amp, 2-bank charger that plugs into an electrical outlet. Installation is easy: connected the positive and negative leads to each battery, plug it in, and turned on the shore power. The only hard part was finding a suitable location to mount the charger. It's air cooled, relying on passage of air behind the base. As a result, it's best to mount them on a vertical surface, but horizontal will do in a pinch. In a pinch, I installed it horizontally, on the floor of the storage area behind the battery switch.