Battery Connections for Parallel/Series

Please refer to my image,

Should I use the blue wires?

cheers

First of all, one wire would do instead of two. I leave it to you to figure out why.

It's pretty much 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

The way you had it before, you had two sets of (two batteries in serial) in parallel. With one blue wire, you'll instead have two sets of (two batteries in parallel) in series.

The voltage and current will be exactly the same, if that's what you're wondering about.

However, this does raise some interesting questions as to what effect this would have if the batteries have unequal charge or discharge rates. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how batteries work to even speculate what that effect would be.

sorry,

I am writing to reduce possibilities of battery voltage differentials

Each battery is made of 6 cell in series. Each cell is 2 V. There is no way that you would parallel each of the cells with the corresponding cell in the other 24 series combination.

I would therefore leave out the blue wires.

Like Carbonzit says, the blue wires make no difference if all the batteries are the same. So how the system will behave with a shorted cell, and open cell, or a poor cell is a very complicated question.