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jeff cote here with boatingtechtalk.com

so we've got a question from a fellow

boater uh

don just watched one of our bocho

presentations

at the seattle boat show and don has a

question

he says jeff just watch and enjoy your

electrical seminar for the seattle boat

show

thank you uh you alerted me to my

underpowered 40 amp xantrex battery

charger i have

three new 240 amp hour deep cycle

house batteries so clearly i don't need

the 10

minimum charge requirement okay preface

all right

this is where the meat of the question

happens at anchor

i use a 2 000 watt honda generator

to charge so my question is what is the

largest battery charger that will run

on a 15 amp service also could you

suggest a brown

okay all right honda generators these

little portable suitcase generators

that we see at the dock they're about

the size of a carry-on

right they run off gasoline uh the

popular ones are about 2 000

watts so the first challenge is

um that those units actually

from what i've seen and i mean they

might all different like for example the

honda 2000

peaks around 11

amps 12 amps at peak output that's what

it can actually give because remember

you've got 2 000 watt peak you divide

that by 120

how many does 120 go into 2000

you know and you've got to factor some

inefficiencies and everything else so

you're probably you're not even running

15 amps off of those things you think

you are but you're not

in my case i had a honda 2000 generator

on my boat in about 2010

and i could get out the most i could get

out of the device was around 11

and it would sometimes trip the breaker

maybe 10

is conservative so if you're running 10

amps ac

right how much does that give you dc

well basically you can do probably in

terms of a charger probably around a 50

amp

charger is going to be running maybe a

little bit more maybe 60 amps a 60 amp

charger could probably run

off of a 10 amp ac source feed so

you've got 2 000 watt from that

generator

and you can put about a 10 or 11 amp

load so about

60 amps is the max size charger

that can be powered directly from that

generator

some boaters are running the generators

directly to the shore power

cord inlet on their boat and then

they're pretending that they're

connected to shore power and they're

going to be running that sort of little

generator

at the back of the boat or some of them

i've seen them on

a tender some even put them even on the

dock

now i have to warn anybody who hasn't

heard that generator there's a big

difference between that generator

running in a forest in an rv camp where

everything around it is

sort of a place where the noise is

absorbed nature can take noise

but on the water as we know our voice

and sound travels tremendously

uh you can have a voice like barely

audible conversation

and your neighbor in a fellow boat

you know i'd say 500 feet even a

thousand feet away can hear you

because the sound just travels on water

so aside from the fact that they make a

lot of noise and they are not quiet

if you're okay with that and so are your

neighbors

um then the maximum amperage you can

pretty much run off of that is around 10

or 11 amps and that's going to translate

to about a 60 amp battery charger

if you have a battery charger that is

higher output than 60 amps like 100 amp

or 150 amp charger

then what you're going to have to do is

throttle back the charger and

you know like a magnum a zantrax or

victron

allow you to throttle back the charger

output so that you're actually not

outputting so much so even though the

charger might be allow let's say 150 or

even 120 amps

you can say hey by the way i don't want

you to be max output i want you to

throttle it back

so you might have to do that when you're

installing a generator

to power your ac

charger to recharge your batteries so

great question

by the way don it's not easy but it can

work

unfortunately as you can tell 60 amp

charger is still less

than your battery bank capacity of 720

so your honda generator will chronically

undercharge those batteries and so you

would need

something else to charge those batteries

either bigger generator or larger

alternator

or something else but yeah it won't for

in your specific situation it won't work

great question thanks for asking

thanks for watching this video and we'll see you on

the next video

you

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