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Winch earth


ianmayco68

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Hi all , I have searched and read through numerous threads but I’ve come across both answers as okay, should the earth for a winch go to the battery or will a good chassis earth be okay? It will only be used occasionally to get me or someone else out of trouble.

cheers Ian 

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Both will work, but to the battery will give you less resistance, and less connections = slightly more speed, especially at high load, and less chance of corrosion causing issues later down the line. 

I would always fit direct to battery. 

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I reckon a good chassis earth at both ends will be fine for most people, most of the time. It might (probably will) have a slightly lower stall load and run a bit slower under high load, drawing a bit more power, and run a bit hotter.

The separate cable isn't really separate of course, it's in parallel with the chassis connection in most cases (and if it isn't, why not?) but the quality of the connections may have a bigger influence than the chassis/wire size in a lot of cases.

I measured the losses of a few winch isolator switches last year, but the results were so depressing I wanted to recheck them before I published them anywhere, and never go around to it. There's a surprising number of connections in a typical winch circuit (~12) so making each of them as well as possible quite important.

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Cheers all , decided to go to the battery as I’ve upgraded all the cables and the last thing I want is to do it again and after a another read of the destructions with my glasses on it says earth from the bottom of the winch back to the battery, which I missed before .

cheers Ian 

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I always wire a winch back to the battery. As said above, that gives you less connections and so a better chance of having a low resistance. I did make an exception on a Tdci I recently fitted a winch to. The battery negative is crimped and hard to get a good connection for an extra cable. But there is a very good earthpoint close by on the transfer box, with a nice thick cable directly from the battery. So I wired the winch earth to that and double checked to make sure resistance was <0.1ohm from battery to winch. I wouldn't trust just any chassis earth point.

As TSD says, a typical battery switch is more than that, but you do want one of those. On the same car, I needed to fit a battery main cut-off. Normally I would put that in the negative cable, but that would mean the current for the winch has to pass 2 switches. So I wired the winch cut-off in parallel with the main cut-off, both directly off the battery positive. Should be as good as it can be.

Filip

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image.thumb.jpg.8c15bc113d084ab403a0f42549af16a5.jpgCheers all .This is the solenoid in the plastic box it came in , image.thumb.jpg.c9a7264ed91a65f26933f056e818c1af.jpg

would I be okay to take it out of the plastic box and house it in the top of the wing ? Reason I’m asking is I’ve upgraded the cables and they now won’t fit the box where the exit holes are . Would like to fit the solenoid here .

image.thumb.jpg.8c15bc113d084ab403a0f42549af16a5.jpg

cheers Ian 

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