All, I'm doing some research on what it would take to power a winch and one of the hot topics that ALWAYS comes up is "Where do I ground the winch? Frame or battery?" I've seen convincing arguments for both, particularly when it comes to the 250 since the battery is in the back and quality, heavy-gauge wire is expensive. This is assuming that your "ground to frame" is running an appropriate gauge of wire. In other words, you can't run 2AWG positive and 14AWG negative and everything will be hunky dory.
So, I started looking at how the 250 is grounded and lo and behold, I found that it looks like it's actually grounding to the body of the truck and NOT the frame as expected. Please take a look at my picture below and/or your own trucks and tell me I'm crazy and that I'm missing a thick ground wire going to the frame. The green line follows the one OEM ground wire. Please ignore my other messy wires (blue, yellow, red) in there. I was a in a hurry for an overlanding trip and had to get something done. I'll go back and clean those up later.
Based on this info, I'm considering running a 1/0-AWG Ground wire to the frame from the battery and the same thing from the winch to the frame. Then, running a 2/0-AWG positive wire from the battery to the winch (with circuit breaker, etc.). Any thoughts on this approach? BTW, I'm using the chart at the bottom for determining the size of wire I should be using.
So, I started looking at how the 250 is grounded and lo and behold, I found that it looks like it's actually grounding to the body of the truck and NOT the frame as expected. Please take a look at my picture below and/or your own trucks and tell me I'm crazy and that I'm missing a thick ground wire going to the frame. The green line follows the one OEM ground wire. Please ignore my other messy wires (blue, yellow, red) in there. I was a in a hurry for an overlanding trip and had to get something done. I'll go back and clean those up later.
Based on this info, I'm considering running a 1/0-AWG Ground wire to the frame from the battery and the same thing from the winch to the frame. Then, running a 2/0-AWG positive wire from the battery to the winch (with circuit breaker, etc.). Any thoughts on this approach? BTW, I'm using the chart at the bottom for determining the size of wire I should be using.
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