Battery Monitor Wiring

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neil1967

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I am moving the battery monitor on my yacht. The PO wired the battery shunt to the monitor using 2 coax cables, linking the shields together at either end, which, if nothing else looked nasty. The manual specifies shielded twisted pair, which I am finding difficult to source, except on 30 meters reels. Would a good quality non twisted pair shielded cable suffice - the cable run will be about 4 meters? If not, any suggestions where I could source 4-5m of shielded twisted pair?

Thanks

Neil
 
Thanks for the replies - I had previously looked at maplin, but had not come up with the twisted pair shielded microphone cables, just the straight shielded cable. Got to be an improvement on what was there originally.

Neil
 
pvb said:
As long as it's a twisted pair, it doesn't need to be shielded for a battery monitor.
Click to expand...

We dont know what monitor. BM1 requires three wires IIRC and thats excluding the orange wire to the starter battery on the newer ones

bearing in mind the toubles that occur with them sometimes i wonder if shielded twisted pair would be something to try on them!
 
VicS said:
We dont know what monitor. BM1 requires three wires IIRC and thats excluding the orange wire to the starter battery on the newer ones

bearing in mind the toubles that occur with them sometimes i wonder if shielded twisted pair would be something to try on them!
Click to expand...

Just a thought but standard cat5 network cable is 4 twisted pairs so could be used for anything requiring more than 2 connections. Unfortunately it's not shielded, but is cheap and easily sourced.
 
VicS said:
We dont know what monitor. BM1 requires three wires IIRC and thats excluding the orange wire to the starter battery on the newer ones

bearing in mind the toubles that occur with them sometimes i wonder if shielded twisted pair would be something to try on them!
Click to expand...

Most battery monitors require 3 connections to the shunt, but only 2 of them are the shunt sensing leads which need to be a twisted pair. There's no need for a shield. I just twisted a couple of single wires together when I installed my Link 10 monitor.

And I don't think battery monitors are troublesome if they're installed properly. We know from the posts on here that many people don't read the instructions!
 
sailinglegend420 said:
My BEP did have a problem without the shield - depends of your electrics layout. I twisted mine as suggested in a drill and then stripped the shield from a TV aerial cable. Now perfick!
Click to expand...

That's interesting.

People have had troubles with the BM1 that the combined might of the forum has not solved although as PVB says often the trouble has been not reading and following the instructions properly.

I just wonder if any of the outstanding problems might have been solved by using shielded cables. We will probably never know.
 
Thanks for all the replies. My monitor is a BEP and aside from the shielding being used to reduce interference, I believe that it is used as the negative feed to the unit it's self, so I can understand why it wouldn't work without the shield. I have ordered some maplin shielded twisted pair designed for a microphone cable to use for the shunt wiring and some multicore burglar alarm cable for the battery voltage feeds etc. Hopefully it will all work!

Neil
 
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