Date:         Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:43:28 -0400
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <ron@netcarrier.com>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <ron@netcarrier.com>
Subject:      Re: Hella dual battery kits are back!
In-Reply-To:  <013e01c007db$8555d140$9227a2d1@wd1000086onem>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

> As far as I can tell these kits are not at all necessary... and perhaps a
> waste of money....


This was argued at depth on the list in June.  The end result of the
discourse is that immediately after the subject was covered (in great
depth), listmembers immediately bought all I had of the Hella kits, so take
that for what you will.  There's not a lot of point in rehashing it all
again, but Bill and I have a difference of opinion.  He went a different
route to wire his dual batteries, and is happy with it.  Others used my kit
and are also happy.  There are many other ways of putting a second battery
in your van, with their own pros and cons.  And yes, you could buy the parts
at Radio Shack etc. to assemble your own relay kit, search the archives for
info on how to wire it, and probably save (literally) a few bucks. But we're
only talking $19 here for the complete kit, and I suspect that many people
simply decided that the effort of "growing your own" was not worth the
savings. There's a ton of info in the archives about the subject of dual
batteries if you want to educate yourself about all of your options.

The list member whose comments resulted in the huge surge in popularity of
this kit happens to be a battery engineer at Exide.  His comments are useful
because they provide a good explanation on how and why such a relay works.
(I also appreciated them because even though they were of general
informational content and not intended as a product endorsement per se, they
sold a ton of Hella kits for me - thank you, Beckett!  :-)  You can read his
discourse on the subject in the list archives by following the below link.
It's very informational reading, whether you buy my kit or not, if you're
thinking of adding another battery to your Vanagon.  Also, as a former
product trainer in the electronics field, I was extremely impressed with his
ability to take what is obviously a tremendous depth of knowledge about the
issue, and "translate" it into plain English that anyone can understand.
That is a talent that not all engineers have.  If I were still a product
trainer I'd have offered him a job.  :-)  His comments are at:

http://gerry.vanagon.com/cgi-bin/wa.exe?S2=vanagon&q=&s=&f=thx0980@aol.com&a
=10+June+2000&b=20+June+2000

It would seem a waste of bandwidth to start rehashing the exact same subject
just two months later, so I'll do my part by dropping it now.  It's all in
the archives, so you can read them and decide for yourself.

- Ron Salmon
  The Bus Depot, Inc.
  http://www.busdepot.com