There are three ways to connect your lead acid batteries—parallel, series, and a combination known as series/parallel. We cover each of these battery configurations in greater detail in our Battery Basics tutorial section of the site should you want to delve in a little deeper or reinforce what you already know.
Safety Rule #2 -- When Installing a Battery Start with the Positive There is a serious amount of stored potential energy available in a sealed lead acid battery. A shorted car battery, for example, can deliver several hundred amps in the blink of an eye. To put that in perspective that is more than an arc-welding machine.
There are two ways to wire batteries together, parallel and series. The illustrations below show how these set wiring variations can produce different voltage and amp hour outputs. In the graphics we’ve used sealed lead acid batteries but the concepts of how units are connected is true of all battery types.
Connecting batteries in series means to connect the positive terminal of the first battery to the negative terminal of the second battery and so on down the string. The interconnecting cables must have equal lengths and resistance to equalize of the load.
Connecting in series battery configurations is when you combine two or more batteries by linking the POS (+) of the first battery with the NEG (-) of the second battery.
Connecting in parallel is when you combine two or more batteries by linking the POS (+) of the first battery to the POS (+) of the second battery. In the same way the NEG (-) of the first battery is connected to the NEG (-) of the second battery. You would do the same for each battery added to the string.