Parallel Battery Trickle Charging

[Iron Duke II]

Is it best to put the positive clamp on one battery and the negative on the other to make sure they charge equally?

 

[BigPapa]

As long as you have a good crossover cable it doesn’t matter, it’s basically one big battery.

 

[AH64ID]

As long as you have a good crossover cable it doesn’t matter, it’s basically one big battery.

Exactly, no need to over complicate it.

 

[Iron Duke II]

As long as you have a good crossover cable it doesn’t matter, it’s basically one big battery.

That’s what I understood. Just went through and replaced the oem terminals with military style. The cables being in Arizona since 2003 has preserved them.
I had a set of Autozone Gold batteries that lasted 8 yrs doing this with a 1.5 amp tender. Not sure the pair of ACDelco Pro 42 month models will come close to that.

 

[BigPapa]

This reminds me of a friend who was having trouble with his shutoff solenoid on his ‘97. I told him how to hook it up directly to his battery for testing. He had modded the truck to one battery several years before. Anyway, he still couldn’t get it to work and what he was telling me just didn’t make sense. Finally, I drove to his house to help and when I walked in the garage, he had a jumper wire from the solenoid to the positive terminal of the battery in the truck but he had another jumper from the solenoid to the negative post of a battery he had sitting on top of the engine. He said his jumper wire wasn’t long enough to reach the negative terminal of his battery, so he sat the other one up there and connected to it. I told him it didn’t work like that….