I was doing some freelance work in a building that was undergoing some renovation and found about fifty feet of E90298 cable made by National Wire about to be thrown out. It had ten 20 AWG wires inside a durable UV resistant cover. It even had a shield around the bundled wires. The wires were also tinned making it perfect for the marine environment on board as it would be more resistant to corrosion than bare copper. Best of all I could not beat the price FREE! I love to recycle where I can and this cable instead ending up in a landfill is perfect for the instrumentation project interconnection.
I love it when a plan comes together like this. Because I only needed eight wires to measure the four individual battery voltages it meant I had two spare wires that I might use down the road for something. The only issue I thought might be a problem is each of the 10 wires in the harness were different colors. Which could be confusing down the road in trying to figure out which wire was positive or negative when connecting or trouble shooting. But this was easily solved after I first assigned the color coded wires to each battery:
Because of the various colors used to connect the batteries I decided to cover each wire with two different colored heat shrink at the battery end. Red for the wires that went to the positive battery terminals and black for wires that went to the negative battery terminals. These would help avoid confusion and mis-connections even though the Anderson Powerpole connectors where color coded. It just adds helps eliminate confusion. It would also add another layer of protection for the wires:
.I also put on some General Purpose 1/4-inch Braided Cable Sleeve
over the heat shrinked wires. This not only kept the wires together making for neater wire runs but, also added another layer of protection to the wiring harness:
All I needed to do now was crimp on the Anderson Powerpole pins and insert them into the proper color coded powerpole housing and the battery end of the instrumentation project was done:
For the helm end of wire I chose to enclose each pair of wires in white heat shrink:
and connect them to the helm panel meters box:
After an operations check out the project was just about complete. All that I needed to do was to add a little sealant to the back of the Anderson Powerpole connectors to water proof the wires and also inside and outside of the meter enclosure box where they connect up. I used Marine Goop
. Once that was done it was time to move on to wiring the battery current meter.
So I used it to switch the four digital panel meters for the individual batteries on and off. I installed the switch first since it is rather large and I wanted to make sure it fit correctly:
l:
. I realize now that I only needed one of these not five because four of the meters would only be measuring around a nominal 12 to 14 volts so buying a meter that measures up to 99.9 volts was really overkill. I could have saved a few bucks by buying cheaper digital panel meters that only measured up to 30 volts or so 
. The advantage being that they only had two wire connections as opposed to the meters that read up to 99.9 volts which had four. Though when using them in a 12 volt application you just twist the meter power and measuring lines together and the same with the two ground wires. So other than a few extra bucks out of my pocket it was not a real critical mistake. Still it was money I did not need to spend but, oh well. So it goes.
. I'll explain why I chose to do this in a future Instrumentation Project post.
which is where I will mount the meters. First I made and outline of the 
. I transferred the outlines for the meters to the panel and cut them out with a 
:
to eliminate any glare from the polished aluminum plate once it was installed in the cockpit. Once that was done and I mounted the meters to the plate all I had to do was install it into the box. Since the panel was made to fit the 
.jpg)
.jpg)
Posts
