Leisure battery earth

Hi 

My van has been tinkered with a lot (rebuilt!) over the years so no idea whats original or not.

I’ve been wondering whether my leisure battery in my Autosleeper Symbol (2003 plus a lot of mid 90’s) should be earthed to the vehicle chassis or not? - it is at present.

I’ve read lots of conflicting posts elsewhere but really just wanted to know what other people’s were like? Ie what did Autosleeper do on this age of van

(Aware that the vehicle circuit is separate from the habitation.)

Thanks in advance 

Rob

There seem to be two competing schools of thought on how to implement earth points for habitation appliances.

One (often used by home-builders, it seems) is to take all wiring back to a central point - usually close to the leisure battery - to a common earth busbar (i.e. big block of metal with lots of screw-downs) and then on to the battery.

And the other is to use the chassis as your common earth point, and just connect the battery to the chassis by a decent sized wire, which means that all of your feeds to appliances need to be a single wire, not a pair. All of the A/S conversions that I've owned work in this way - though for appliances located close to the battery it's often easier to go back to battery negative than to contrive a chassis earth nearby.

The former method is a bit pointless IMO, because you cannot avoid linking the negative of the leisure battery to the chassis anyway - if you don't, your split charge circuit won't function. The only vaguely convincing argument for the former is that it ~might~ make fault-finding easier.

So... if you want any connection to the van's factory-fitted components to work (e.g. split charge from the alternator), you ~must~ have the leisure battery negative connected to the chassis.

Hi Thanks for the really clear response - very helpful.

Rob