I've been thinking about, researching and planning this project for awhile now and finally completed it this weekend. It seemed fairly simple in conception but the execution, as always, took way longer than I wanted.
Phase I was to take all the extraneous connections off of the battery terminals and connect them to dual bus bars, one each for the start and house batteries. I installed the bus bars on the sides of the lazarette by using 5200 to glue 3/4" plywood and screwing the bus bars to the boards. As is probably the case for most of you, the wiring inside that incredibly tight starboard lazarette was extremely messy and my goal was to clean up the connections. Phase II was to install an Blue Seas Add-A-Battery system for the batteries, with the goal to make it very simple to select the switch position to on or off as well as maintaining proper battery charging distribution and isolation.
Bottom line, the project cost much more than anticipated, took much more time than I wanted (1 1/2 days), didn't really clean up the lazarette that much, there's still a mess of wires everywhere, but on the bright side, the connections are clean and the project is DONE!! Did I say how much I hate that (%*@#!) gosh darn tight lazarette. I could barely get the batteries back in. :x I forgot to take before pictures before starting the project so therefore no after pics either. Doesn't really matter since it's still a mess of wires in there.
Oh well, my goal for this boating season is to cut down the boat projects to a bare minimum since this has been a work in progress for 7 years now, finish any of the remaining projects by April, and just go out and enjoy using the boat, not working on it this year.