I am upgrading my house bank charging system and have purchased a Balmar XT170 alternator. I will be using the WS500 for the exciter and plan to install the optional shunt and battery temperature monitor. My question is, I have an SG200 battery monitor shunt monitoring my house bank (2) Lifeline 8D 255 Ah, I plan to place the two shunts in series on the negative load side of the battery bank. Will this create any issues? Better yet, can I connect the WS500 shunt wires to the SG200 shunt spare port and reconfigure the WS500 for the new shunt range?
Thank you for your assistance.
Rick V
Hey Rick,
This was a great question so I have moved it to the User forum.
To answer your first question, yes you can place the two shunts in series without any issues.
And secondly in most cases you can re-use or share the existing shunt you may already have onboard from your Battery Monitor. The WS500 has parameters that allow you to set the range of the shunt and even reverse the value if it happens to have been wired backwards.
The only limitation is that you dont really want it to have to read any more than about 80 mA, which is well within the range of most existing shunts. For instance a 500/50 shunt will only generate 50 mA to the WS500 when your system is drawing 500 amps!
Like you plan to do, it\'s a good idea to place your shunt on the negative side but if that is not possible it is ok to put it on the positive side, but remember to include 1A fuses on both sides of your sensing wires. This usually only applies to Alternator centric (Big alternator, small engine) applications where the shunt is mounted at the output of the alternator instead of at the battery.
Hope this helps,
Rick
OGSS Tech support
Hello, for sending wires, what side is the positive side on a shunt that’s on the negative wire to the batteries only?
A current shunt works by having a short length of thinner conductor and measuring the voltage drop in millivolts across, so you have to ask which side is \"more\" negative. And since the negative battery post is the \"most\" negative part of your system, it will be the side of the shunt wired to your negative battery post. The other side of the shunt will be a few millivolts more positive. :)
hope that help !
