about whether to have a dedicated battery for the windlass in the forepeak.
I went with the dedicated battery for several reasons. Not the least of which is that my forepeak is HUGE and I had plenty of room in their for the battery box, windlass and two anchor rodes.
$30 for a dedicated 1.5 amp trickle charger and 80 feet of 10 ga wire is a lot cheaper and easier to install than 2 ga or in my case with the Maxwell 2500, it would have been more like 00 ga wire. The wire run alone would have been a major headache with 00 ga, whereas 10 ga was a piece of cake to run.
And then, when I got my new main charger this spring, it had three bank charge capability, so I was even able to eliminate the extra charger.
(I had originally run a combiner between the engine bank and the windlass battery. But, an undiagnosed electrical problem killed the engine bank, which of course killed the windlass bank, because it getting a charge was dependent on the engine bank being fully charged. In resolving that issue, I found a 1.5 amp marine trickle charger for $30, which I found to be a lot cheaper than the $150 combiner.)
It even has a bracket to hang it in the engine compartment or in my case, I hung it on the outside of the battery bank box.
Anyway, after six years I am still very pleased with the choices I made regarding installing the windlass.