Connecting a little wire to the middle of a big wire.

[LadyInBed]

I hope that no-one who reads this follows this suggestion.

I think that we all know that running a new cable is the correct solution. If the OP takes the advice, all well and good.
I'm just exploring ways of making a T joint and retaining a minimum loss of waterproofing, cable spiking has been used for more years than I can remember. Stripping a small section of insulation and attaching the new wire using a traditional wrap joint or a clamp would be electrically more elegant, but sealing it would be more difficult.
If you could not, or it was impractical to run a new wire from source, what method would you use to tee off a wire?

 

[PaulRainbow]

I think that we all know that running a new cable is the correct solution. If the OP takes the advice, all well and good.
I'm just exploring ways of making a T joint and retaining a minimum loss of waterproofing, cable spiking has been used for more years than I can remember. Stripping a small section of insulation and attaching the new wire using a traditional wrap joint or a clamp would be electrically more elegant, but sealing it would be more difficult.
If you could not, or it was impractical to run a new wire from source, what method would you use to tee off a wire?

I would not tee loads off of the windlass cables, end of.

If i needed to take more than one wire from a supply cable i would likely use a terminal post or a busbar.

 

[WindyWindyWindy]

I would not tee loads off of the windlass cables, end of.

In a way though, you're just adding more wire.
The circuit is still very similar. The tee'd load at an amp or so will be less than 1% of the wire capacity.

A bus bar would be tidier but also include cutting the wire just for the sake of the take off. There are plenty of junctions in the positive side though, so would one more in the negative side make much difference.

There's also the voltage drop in the additional long wire to consider. The second wire might also turn out quite fat.

I'm surprised there's no tidy way to do this (well, perhaps the bus bar) but maybe that just reflects that its a bad idea.

 

[Refueler]

I think that we all know that running a new cable is the correct solution. If the OP takes the advice, all well and good.
I'm just exploring ways of making a T joint and retaining a minimum loss of waterproofing, cable spiking has been used for more years than I can remember. Stripping a small section of insulation and attaching the new wire using a traditional wrap joint or a clamp would be electrically more elegant, but sealing it would be more difficult.
If you could not, or it was impractical to run a new wire from source, what method would you use to tee off a wire?

You're wasting breath ..... they'll never accept your view on it.

Me ? I am always against creating more failure points .. ie .. cut and connectors. As you say - the act of 'spiking' large conductors has been used for years .... done carefully - it works.

 

[Daydream believer]

If one has a busbar at the battery terminal end, say 12 ins from the battery with anchor winch & other stuff from that; then one ran the anchor winch; would that not still cause the "spike" mentioned earlier in this thread. How would the anchor winch know that the other supplies had not come from half way along the main wire?
Surely, the anchor winch should be from a separate battery at best.
Alternatively, the supply to both must come direct from the battery bank. This being possible if there are 2 domestics & a starter- which many have. The anchor winch from the post & a separate busbar for other stuff off the other battery post . Or should there be something within the wiring that prevents spikes.
Or am I sitting in my armchair thinking b..x?

 

[WindyWindyWindy]

I can see other places where this happens, just in an enclosed object.
The starter motor does the same with it's solenoid, grounded negatived(?) to the chassis ground negative of the engine. Admittedly that's more designed in.

Perhaps if I turn it into a more real problem. Although to be clear I am inclined to take Paul's advice on this, he does have experience on his side. I'm on my first windlass install, and he's presumably done and repaired hundreds.

The windlass comes with a relay control box, If I were to be driving that with simple switches.
Then I would have a relay box that requires a negative, and switches that require a positive. The positive to the switches could easily be tapped off the incoming common positive to the relay where there's already a junction, so no probs? The fat negative runs from the battery to the windlass through a cable gland so cannot be tapped off the windlass junction without another hole for a cable gland in the windlass casing.

So where to get that negative? And indeed the positive if that's wrong to take off the relay input.
The suggestion is to run a wire back to, I guess, the windlass breaker for the positive, fused of course, (you'd want it switched with the windlass after all) and the battery for the negative.
It seems a lot of wire, when there's very little current involved (the relay coil in fact) and there's a big fat cable already sat there.

I also don't see that it improves fault finding either. There's just a huge stretch of buried cable that becomes a new and invisible failure point.