Product Description Marine Bus Bar – 100A, 5 Circuit This 100A marine bus bar with plastic cover is used to combine multiple wires into one “bus”. Our Marine grade bus bar is tinned to resist corrosion and includes (2) 1/4″ studs for larger cables and (5) #8 screws for your smaller loads. It’s only 4″ long and 3/4″ wide, making it perfect for small, compact spaces where you need to gang all your load negatives together before heading back to the battery. It’s rated for up to 100A, which is much more than you’d typically need on a small to mid sized recreational boat. Our tinned marine bus bar is distinctly different than a terminal block in that all the screws are physically and electrically ganged together. (more on how bus bars and terminal blocks are used in your boat’s wiring system here) We call it a Negative (common) Bus Bar because that’s what it’s typically used for. However, it could also be used as a positive bus bar if your situation requires. This might be useful, for example, to gang the positive inputs together with our Bocatech resettable push button switches, which feature molded wire input leads. This bus bar has 5 load screws, but you can put multiple wires onto each. It’s compact, so it can get crowded this way, so if you have more than around 8 loads, it’s probably best to get our 10 Gang Negative Bus Bar instead. If space is an issue for a larger bus bar, you can get two of these and link them together with the 1/4-20 threaded stud terminals and a bit of #6 or #8 wire. There’s a (simplified) wiring diagram below showing how a marine bus bar is typically used in your boat’s overall electrical system. As shown in its common usage, the bus bar is usually located near the boat’s switch panel and the positive breakout terminal block. This way, all the negatives coming from the various loads can be collected together with one main cable run to the negative post on the battery.
