Fried Battery?

Hi,

I accidentally hooked up a negative wire to the positive terminal and a positive wire to the negative terminal on the battery in my boat last week. After a minute, as I was hooking up trolling motor batts, I noticed smoke. I immediately unhooked the battery. The smoke was from the coating melting off of a negative wire going to my fuse panel. The wire melted broke into two pieces, I twisted them back together and wrapped electrical tape around it.

Two questions...

The battery had just come off the charger, but when I got to the access it did not have enough power to start the motor. I hooked up one of the trolling motor batts and it worked fine.

1) Did I fry the battery? Is there anything that can be done short of replacing it?

2) Should I replace the wire that melted, or will it be ok the way it is?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Fried Battery?

In my experience, the battery should be fine if it was okay before the mishook. You probably blew a fuse or circuit breaker. Doing what you did is similar to a load test on the battery, and those are done all the time without incident.

Replace the wire. While you're at it, check every other wire on the boat. Chances are good that it's not the only one you fried.

Chuck

Re: Fried Battery?

Put the battery on a charger ASAP, they don't like to sit around in a discharged state.

In addition to checking all the wiring, depending on your engine you may also be replacing some electrical components (rectifier, voltage regulator, etc.).

Re: Fried Battery?

metriccrescentwrench said:

Put the battery on a charger ASAP, they don't like to sit around in a discharged state.

In addition to checking all the wiring, depending on your engine you may also be replacing some electrical components (rectifier, voltage regulator, etc.).

Click to expand...

If this is an outboard motor you probably will be replacing some parts....

Re: Fried Battery?

Hopefully you lucked out and only shorted out the negative feed to you fuse panel if nothing else was turned on. Definitely replace the burnt wire and check your other wiring going to the fuse panel too. Good luck!!!