1990 32 foot carver Montego with twin 454's

2 - 30 amp shore power

One of them controls the a/c water, heater and receptacles...no problems there

other one controls radio, lights, all of the gauges, inverter and the battery charger

note...
last year the Hearth inverter/charger (pic attached) cooling fan went out (4 inch fan like a computer cooling fan) I never use the inverter anyways, but never disconnected it, and I replaced the battery charger with a new charger of a different type and everything worked normally for the rest of the year

Now I just installed 3 brand new batteries just because old ones were 5 yrs

I took a pic of how the batteries were wired to install the new batteries the same way.

When I connected the invertor cable (neg) it got hot and smoked for 2 seconds and I took it off immediately, disconnected both leads just to be safe.

I assume that for some unknown reason there is now a short in the invertor...The boat has been in the water for a month this year with no problems until I changed to new batteries.
btw I labeled the positive and negative from the inverter to make sure I wired it back together correctly

no harm no foul...I thought... a week later 2 of the 3 batteries were completely drained and did not charge back up even while on shore power.

? #1 Does that mean the shore power on that side goes through the invertor to charge up the batteries and run lights
gauges etc.? If so, may I just remove the old inverter and hard wire everything back to the batteries? Do I need an inverter that we rarely if ever used?

A question you might immediately have is why 2 of the 3 batteries died and not the 3rd one, (I think it didn't drain because there was no neg cables of any sort connected to that battery, remember I took off the inverter cables completely) which bring me to the next question?

Did I wire the new batteries correctly even though I took a pic and did it exactly the same...is it possible the marina installed the batteries incorrectly before they launched it?

Attached is a pic of how they were wired with the inverter cable attached at the beginning of this year. Now they (the inverter cables) are disconnected...with no negative connection of any kind, except for the battery charger cables...small black and red cables go to battery charger.

What is the correct way to wire batteries?

Also I have never used the battery switch since we bought the boat.

THANKS for you help and I know message is long but trying to give as many details to help get to the answer.

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