Larry wrote: > The advantage I see in using a circuit breaker is that it will automaticlly > isolate a short circuit from the rest of the electrical buss without > causing a lot of smoke and/or damaged wiring or causing the entire > electrical system to shut down.
Larry, That was my point. Neither of my pump/coil systems are on the same bus as the rest of the system, or each other. Those two circuits are my "essential buses", and I have a complete set of each. There's nothing else on either system. If my EIS warns me that my voltage has dropped below whatever I set it to (lets say 12V), then the first thing I do is switch off the master and see if the problem is fixed (neither of my e-buses go through the master). If I still have a voltage problem, then I swap e-buses and see if it gets any better. The secondary system will be isolated from the alternator with a diode, so it's a complete separate system, capable of keeping me aloft for close to an hour. The wiring to each set is completely separate. I've seen what happens when a direct short fries a wire. It melts itself into whatever it's bundled with, and all kinds of things start going bad in a hurry. It wouldn't hurt to put a breaker into each system.. A big enough breaker would guarantee that it wouldn't trip unless something was almost smoking, and I guess that's good enough, so either way works. I guess that's exactly what you've got, and that'd be good enough for me too. I might still do that... Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
