Transcript is auto-generated.
hi everyone and welcome to doc talk with
myself jeff cote
today i have the honor of chatting uh
with a gentleman who had an incredible
impact on my life
when i bought my first sailboat in 2006
april fool's day by the way
i suffered uh catastrophic electrical
failure after electrical failure
and through my journey of redeeming my
boat
and staying committed to voting the
experience taught me
the importance of doing things right and
this is how i got to know nigel calder
through his books which we're going to
talk a little bit later
welcome nigel to the podcast
nigel was born and raised in england uh
where he began sailing dingies
at the age of 13 he was a rebuilding
motorcycles and triggering all things
mechanical
after college he met his wife terry and
then they set sail on his brother's
28-foot boat
where they were almost run over by
freighter after that incident they
stayed inland
and built a couple of 70-foot steel hall
narrow boats to run the english canals
would love to do that one day
then they moved to louisiana in the
united states and he started his career
working on oral rigs
naturally the work was quite dangerous
and he learned a deep respect for doing
things the right way
nigel and his wife set sail around the
world with their two small children
and prem quarters there was a change of
plans after
18 months now they take shorter cruises
mostly in the north sea
and extensively in the caribbean
as for boats uh nigel has had quite a
few boats
started off with a 20 39 foot ingrid
cutter
a pacific sea craft worked on those by
the way quite lovely boats
followed by a mallow 45 built in sweden
and this was replaced by the same boat
but with experimental electrical and
propulsion systems which we're going to
talk about
it was used by the european union hybrid
marine project
of which nigel was a technical director
for his extensive testing
in hydro hybrid propulsion system nigel
is a member of the american boat yacht
council
and he's also a member of their
electrical project technical committee
by the way for some of you haven't known
nigel has written eight books
and is most well known which i've given
to all my technicians
over the years is the boat owner's
mechanical electrical manual
which is uh known in our circles as the
bible
and marine diesel engines maintenance
troubleshooting and repair
uh i've owned both votes and there's a
lot of highlighting in bookbooks
again welcome and nigel to our podcast
and thanks for being here today with us
thank you jeff i i use the boat owner's
manual myself
i can't remember all that stuff and i
have one once done a job on my own boat
and pulled the book out and read not to
do what i just did so
yeah more these days than ever actually
that's good that's really good so
um maybe let's start a little bit at the
beginning um
at what point did you know that you were
gonna be able to carve out
um you know this voting life for
yourself
how did you sort of why is this sort of
fascination with voting and voting
systems in particular
oh it goes back to the 1960s actually
when they had the first round the world
race
single-handed round the world race the
one that term
robin knox johnson won and in sue haley
you know like a 32-foot
double-ended boat yeah and it was
headline news in england
for weeks and so a whole load of us on
our teams then would
sit at school dreaming about singing
around the world so i guess that's when
i got the bug
and uh so i always wanted to build a
boat
and do that and i didn't get the
opportunity and
until i started working on the oil rigs
because the pay was really good this is
you know the late 70s early 80s
and it provided the income to to build
the ingrid
we bought the hull uh but it had no
ballasts no deck
one bulkhead to stop the sights caving
in and that was it so
we uh we melted down battery posts
to cost the ballast seven thousand seven
hundred pounds of lead
we uh we but we basically we did
everything
on that boat built it ourselves and in
the course of doing that
um i installed all the systems and and
although i'm pretty capable
i don't i didn't know the first thing
about electricity
and not a whole lot more about mechanics
and uh
there was no decent information
available to help
so we kind of struggled through it and i
ended up having to rebuild most of those
systems because i didn't get much of it
right
and uh when i figured out if i needed to
know that stuff other people did as well
you know this was the heyday of
homebuilt boats so there was actually a
market
for that information so and that's what
prompted me
to uh to write the books and at the time
uh
the life on the rigs was either insanely
busy
or else there was a lot of down time so
i had a fair bit of time out there when
i could write
so i did much of the initial writing my
diesel engine book was the first one
and i put on the rigs during the quiet
periods
and then the uh the road owners manuals
followed that one after we uh
after i quit and we went segment
yeah it's funny you know my journey or
even with my own boat
i think i'm at iteration five on my
electrical
my counting at 36 meaning you know i've
had literally
later with it now i'm i'm i'm basically
version five of the electrical
and uh you look back and you're like oh
my god did i learn so much on this one
or okay
i get it you know it's it's
like like a lot of things in life um
it's harder than it seems
i think and that's that's the challenge
with marine electrical especially 12 or
24 volts because you're assuming
you can't get hurt what could possibly
go wrong
and that's probably the predisposition
for many of us
to get into these you know situations
that
sometimes you know it's you need that
information to come from somewhere else
you know and that's a great thing with
forums nowadays and you know books is
one way
and youtube or whatever it is or talking
on the doctor
but it's the getting to that closer to
that end point
that is reliable and safe
yes for that first edition of the boat
owners manual
i uh i went to a bunch of boat shows
where i could talk to the gurus of the
day um
rick proctor dave smead bill montgomery
of belmont
and all those early early leaders in the
field um
and with the uh smart regulators high
output alternators
the early generation of inverters uh i
never could afford to stay in a hotel so
i'd rather rent a car and sleep in the
car
and go to various boat shows to collect
information
and then uh published the first edition
of the photo
manual and i immediately got a bunch of
naughty letters from the american voting
yacht council abyc
because there was stuff in that book
that violated the abyc standards
so i started going to their meetings and
um
i very rapidly went to the second
edition i cleaned it up from a standards
perspective
and that was you know 30 something years
ago now so i've been
going to the abyc meetings ever since
and i i've probably learned more
in in those we used to have two meetings
a year two days of
at each time i probably learned more in
those meetings than any other single
source of information i
have had over the years well i would it
would be sort of the aggregation of all
that knowledge for all those people in
the room right it's it's sort of
all the pain that we've learned through
the years and you're you're just going
dump it you know like put it on the
table you know what are the things
you're worrying about what are the
things that got you in trouble
what are the things that you wish you
hadn't done what are the things you wish
you would have done differently
well because the focus has always been
on safety i mean that's what the abyc
does
rather than specific practicality
it's all those things that have caused
problems that were potentially dangerous
that crop up in the meetings
and then there's a discussion about how
to resolve those issues
when i first went there were maybe six
people in the room
uh and then uh for a decade or more now
we've had over 40
at every meeting we've had so it's grown
um
very rapidly in terms of participation
and they're mostly there are techs
in the room so
and uh they check their company
affiliation at the door
some issue comes up and before you know
it they're all focused on the issue
rather than thinking about where would
my company be on this issue
so it's a really uh it's a great
organization
um that's really focused on safety and
there's almost
no um marketing or company pressure that
that shows up in any of those meetings
which is pretty remarkable
it's the right thing absolutely yeah
absolutely the right thing
i remember a few years ago i was doing a
presentation uh
in alberta and uh one of the attendees
and the host of the
it was actually you've done stuff for
them it's uh
blue water cruising association here in
the pacific northwest i know i've done a
couple of
uh seminars in the past yeah i've
attended them by the way we were there
melissa i dragged melissa to one of the
host sessions in 2011.
i was like oh my god nigel's in town we
have to all the whole office went
um and uh it was interesting because
this tech uh with a lot of
experience in the oil rigs
out in alberta was saying you know
about you know the difference between
sort of what the code is
and he was really emphasizing from a
practical standpoint that it's
you know it's the minimum you know the
bar yeah
and it's funny in our industry it seems
to be opposite it's sort of
almost a holy grail it's sort of this
thing that you'll never get to but you
know what if you were gonna do it
you know maybe try to get there but if
you don't then
you know it's okay and and he was like
no it's
it's i was like what a great perspective
you know it's it's not
your objective it's like no no you got
to have that covered as a men
and then go from it and i think that's
the i guess there's a lot of constraints
that
force us to maybe see it that way and i
think that one of the reasons it's hard
on all of us both from a time
perspective and money perspective
as voters to realize what it takes to do
it right
you know it's it's it's always it's
always harder than we've
all imagined well there's no one
place to learn this stuff in the marine
industry there's maybe two or three
schools
in the whole of the u.s that have
year-long courses
and outside of that the abyc runs
classes but abyc is focused on safety
it's not focused on practicality so
there are
things that we all should be doing like
putting drip loops in front of
connections on our wiring so if there's
any moisture it drips off
that's not a safety issue so it doesn't
work its way into the abyc
standards so that's why they are a
minimum they're basically designed
to make sure that the boat doesn't catch
fire we don't electrocute somebody on
the
ac side or we don't sink it from
catastrophic corrosion
but there's a whole ton of stuff we need
to do and know
that goes beyond the standards so it's
not in the standards because it's not
directly related to safety
yeah for example there's no requirement
to boot
positive connections in a dc system
other than at the battery
uh because it's assumed there's a fuse
in the system and if you short circuit
from a negative to a positive bus bar
you'll blow the fuse
so theoretically there's not a safety
issue but at that point the boat is dead
in the water
but you just blew the main battery fuels
so the obvious thing is we need to build
those connections
but it's not in the standards because
from a safety perspective
they consider having the fuse there is
adequate to protect the boat from a
catastrophic fire so there's a ton of
stuff like that
that um but over the years i've tried to
work into all of my
books and publications and um so
there's at least a one place where we
can go and grab all this stuff
and you're right i mean that journey to
perfection perfection is unattainable
uh and we all chase it for some of us do
the the challenge and it's the same
thing i see it even on my boat as well
is safety is one thing but very close to
safety's reliability
you know being having systems that stay
up and running
might affect safety right you you know
losing your electrical system at the
dock
is annoying a few things are at play but
you know the end of the day
it's you can tolerate it losing your
electrical system when you're underway
passage making or in a far away remote
anchorage
and you don't know where that fuse is
and you it's buried and you didn't put
it there
and you don't know where it is and that
fuse took out your whole electrical
system now you don't have your vhf's
anymore
you know you don't you don't have any
and that's exactly what it is it's that
fear that we're always worried about is
going okay well yeah safety is important
but also as voters it's it's hard enough
to own a boat you know if you lose
confidence in the boat over time
you know some people you know their
dreams are
crushed they end up not having the
stamina to take it and they're like you
know what
my life started enough as it is i i
can't i can't have hard at work
hard at home and hard on my vacations
and so then they go what they buy out
they're like you know what i you know
we're gonna get a cottage instead or
we're gonna just travel
you know maybe we'll go rv we'll just
take whatever complex city
i just can't take that level complexity
or you know
unknowns with a family or with a partner
or with family your friends and that's
also
another thing that we always worry about
is you know is how is the system going
to stay
up and operating without uh
basically losing people's confidence yes
well
and uh you know as you know we've done a
ton of cruising over the years
um months at a time and uh
i i would say the number one reason that
people give up on boating is because of
electrical system problems on their
boats and they just
get frustrated with chasing the problems
and they finally give up and do
something else
agreed and most of those problems are
they should not be happy
their insulation problems their their
design problems
they're built into the boat from day one
i have never done a really thorough
order electrical audit of a boat without
finding at least one circuit that didn't
have adequate overcome protection on it
oh yeah you know coming back to the
business of suddenly losing power
this is really germaine at the minute
with lithium-ion batteries
because you know every lithium-ion
battery has a battery management system
and if their battery minus management
system sees some condition
arising that threatens the battery it
disconnects the battery
well if that's your your navigation
battery and you're going through some
difficult reef entry
and all of a sudden all of your system
shut down because the battery decided
there was something going on it didn't
light
you're in serious trouble so one of the
things we've just written into a draft
abyc standard we've been working on this
damn thing for five years
um because this is this is uh difficult
and controversial but one of the things
we
wrote in there is that these bms's have
to provide an external message before
they disconnect
and that immediately gets rid of all of
those people advertising drop-in
lithium-ion batteries because they don't
have the ability to communicate
if they're going to disconnect uh so
many of those batteries that we're
currently fitting
into our boats but don't will not comply
with that
it's a technical information built in
rather than a standard but they won't
comply with that
when it comes out but this is the the
kind of issues that we really need to be
focused on as an industry because
uh these things happen people get into
trouble they get frustrated they go buy
a set of skis or something and give up
voting
i totally agree and you know i having
deal dealing with owners
for people some people's affliction to
voting is not just sort of this
you know in passing it's it's you know
for myself it was a dream
when i mean a dream it's
all-encompassing it's it's what i want
my the best times in my life i wanted to
be on the water
and to you know because the electrical
systems like you say
might not be reliable uh and to see
those people get out of boating
and to effectively change course on
a life goal a lot of them wait you know
work work work
and then they their talk about it it's
their dream and i'm meeting them every
day and it's like
40 years sending their kids to
university doing the work
you know working extra years to get the
you know cruising kitty up
you know delayed gratification delayed
gratification delayed gratification then
they buy the boat they get it ready
it's always more than anticipate and
then to have those electrical problems
actually stop them and at one point
maybe a voice of reason in the family
says you know what
this is this is just too hard this is
just too hard
we've got to get out so let's talk a
little bit about lithium because lithium
is definitely probably i would say
one of the hottest sort of topics in our
field right now especially within the
marine industry related to battery
systems
and you brought up a good point about
these concept of these drop-in
replacements
it comes out of course um people
want it to be easy right they want the
benefits of you know and i tell people
and correct
and chime in here but foreign
i think melissa has just put up a shot
of a uh lithionics
lithium ion battery with an external
bms and this is one of those batteries
that has a
very broad ability to communicate
outside the battery
um and which is that little middle cable
that you've got there's a communications
cable
um so uh but this means this battery
it's not really a battery it's an energy
storage system
because now we've got the capability to
integrate this battery
uh with all the charging devices on the
boat for example so that if the battery
sees a condition in which it's likely to
get overcharged
it can send out a message to shut down
the charging devices
if it sees a condition in which it's
getting close to
shutting down because of a lack of
charge you can send out a warning
message and maybe uh
turn on one of those charging devices
but so it's got that external
communication capability
the other thing that i want in my boat
with lithium ion which i don't have at
the moment i do have lithium-ion
batteries i won't discuss which brand
they are
um but the other thing i want with my
lithium-ion batteries
is a sticker on the battery that says
it's tested to ul 1973.
that's the most aggressive abuse testing
standard in the marketplace
in the marine marketplace at least and
it means so whatever i do stupid and i
do do stupid things like everybody else
plus i i push these these systems to
their published limits just to see what
happens i mean it's part of what i do
for a living
uh but with lithium-ion if you get it
wrong
it's likely to go up in smoke and you
lose the boat so
with that ul 1973 sticker on the battery
you can be pretty certain that there's
just about nothing stupid you can do
that's going to
cause that battery to catch firing
you're going to lose the phone so you
wouldn't use the boat
yeah that's what i want on my lithium
ion battery is that sticker on the side
of the battery
says it's ul 17 1973 tested
there's not many batteries have it
because the testing is very expensive
yeah i actually went to ul to see how
they do that
oh yeah oh yeah they do crazy stuff like
they put a battery
in a with a metal screen around it and
they put it in an oven and they heat it
up until it explodes
when you know which you can get pretty
much any lithium-ion battery to explode
and it has to have a battery case that's
strong enough to make sure there's no
projectiles that'll come through the
screen outside
you know stuff like this um they take
one cell in the battery and they totally
discharge it and then they fully charge
all the other cells
so the battery is totally unbalanced and
then
they put it on a full out charge rate to
see if they can drive that one cell into
thermal runaway
um which will in a lithium-ion battery
well again it'll start a fire in the
cell
so they do a lot of really really they
take the bms
and uh they introduce a fault to it
and it has to have a redundant
capability so it can handle a single
fault within the battery management
system
so and of course this all drives the
cost of the batteries up
and it makes them expensive but on the
other hand what's peace of mind was
yeah that's a challenge you know i see
it all the day and you know it's funny
people are buying you know some people
you know we're very few people are
putting lithium in a 10 000
value both you know you're seeing i see
but voters that are
buying you know catamarans for you know
half a million
you know 300 400 750 a million dollars
which sounds like an obscene amount
number but i mean that's
some books are costing that and that's
not on the top end that's you know
that's a 40 foot
45 foot 50 foot camera right and
and yet they've they've spent x on the
boat and then they're looking and i have
to have some orders and
it's it's almost like a misalignment in
values and they're like
i need to save as much money as humanly
possible on a battery bank
that will be either underneath my bed or
literally behind my head
yes i tell them i'm like why would you
why would you be a smoker
and have a flammable couch right you
know
i know it's less money to put flammable
material on the couch but why would you
want that and i think that's the problem
is people can't connect the dots
they they they're very um they just
don't want to go there because the price
is that's our job
you have to help them connect the dots
yeah yes
and of course if we do it right they'll
listen to us
yeah and that's what this you know it
goes back to uh
it's a little bit the spirit of this
conversation right is to
try to people have a hard time being
told what to do
in general that all of us certainly
myself but if you tell me why i should
do something
tell me the reasons you give me an
explanation and i'll come to
that conclusion then yeah i'm all in you
know and i think that's what it comes
down to it's not just telling them
voters what they should or shouldn't do
but educating them that's the reasons
why we should do something or the reason
we shouldn't
and then let most people will come to
the same conclusions not everyone
because it all we have different values
excuse me scratching my nose
i was planting a grass this morning
and i think i have a slightly allergic
reaction to that cross seed
oh that's hilarious i this is allergy
season right now i i could i could
sneeze at any given moment and it could
be uncontrollable for
like like 30 seconds same thing i i i
always get a little hay fever and so i
really stirred it up today i think
so what are your reasons for doing
lithium like what would you if you're
talking
what was your performance you know it's
the uh the energy density
there's there's on a volume or weight
basis
there's probably uh people say four
times as much
or energy density or a quarter of the
volume but actually by the time you put
the bms in and stuff like that
you're probably talking two to one but
then you know if we got that acid
batteries we normally
speaking we're using less than 50 of the
capacity at each cycle
with lithium we're probably using 70 if
we really push it 80
um so then you need less of them so by
the time you're done you probably are
talking
a quarter of the batteries for a similar
performance
so yeah and then if you have uh maybe
half as many batteries or even a similar
amount you've got way more performance
and in our case you know we developed
that integral system uh
alternator that puts out eight kilowatts
yeah i saw that
i need a battery bank that will absorb
eight kilowatts
of charging power and on our boat
because we don't have air conditioning
uh but we don't have you know fridge and
freezer and microwave and
all kinds of bits and pieces uh but
in uh on half an hour of engine run time
when we're pulling up the anchor to get
out of
an anchorage or we're leaving the dock
in the time it takes us to do that we
can put enough energy in that battery
bank
with that integral alternator to run the
boat for 24 hours
yeah that's the dream yeah yeah and you
know we've spent 40 years
stressing over the state of charge of
our batteries like everybody else
and i'm constantly checking the state of
a charge thinking maybe i better do a
bit of battery charging and anchor
these last few years because i've been
wanting to push the system
hard for test purposes i've been doing
stupid things like
boiling water and electric kettle at the
same time as i'm boiling it in the
microwave and then dumping hot water
down the sink so the hot water heater is
running
so that i can load the system up just
just to see what it'll do
at one point we had eight kilowatts of
electric heaters on the boat
when we were testing this was in ireland
the weather was miserable
but there were times when we still held
open every hatch and porthole on the
boat to let the heat out
because we had eight kilowatts of
electric heaters running just so i could
load the system up to see what it would
do so what size inverters do you have on
board right now yeah eight kilowatt
inverter
yeah how much eight kilowatts oh yeah
everything maxed out i wanted to see
what would break first
by the way you know what how big is your
boat is it 45 it's 40
well it's they call it a marlo 46 but
it's actually 48 feet
it's a you're the only one that has any
kilowatt inverter on board unless you
have air conditioning there's just
yeah i mean there's no way we can use
all the energy we can generate at the
moment
um but uh it's uh well that's
that's basically one of the things i do
is try to test things for destruction
to see what's going to break first
i'll get a hold of the manufacturer or
whatever and say you know this is what
happened and then
maybe they'll they'll uh fix it listen
we know yeah sometimes uh and if not we
at least we know where the boundaries
are
yeah and then we can go ahead and make
sure that we design systems that are
pretty bulletproof
there was one point with that testing
where i'm where i discovered a means to
create
something called a harmonic vibration
and i could break a belt in four minutes
you know these are
these are timing belts rip timing belts
off a car
that we were using because they're very
rugged and i could make this belt go
totally crazy and break a belt in four
minutes
so so then uh the uh the manufacturer
had to spend a ton of money fingering
and figuring out
how this was happening nobody else could
do it it was it was unique to our boat
and certain speeds and and resonant
features
and and they figured it out and got to a
point where i couldn't do it anymore
yeah that's that that's a i mean
breaking things to learn things is a
good way i mean we we don't
intentionally break things
uh our client base do that for us right
you know the thousands of voters that
we can help out and we learn from we
learn from our own mistakes other
people's mistakes
yeah you know as long as you're learning
from the mistakes then
tomorrow is a better day yeah yeah
so what's your charge rate going into
your lithium bank
uh right we've got it's a 48 volt bank
because otherwise the um the cables
would be huge
yeah so uh we're putting in what we
start out at
eight kilowatts so if we do the math
that's eight thousand divided by
fifty is uh 160 amps i think so it's a
lot
lower than we might be doing with a you
know high output alternator of 12 or 24
volts
yeah um but in terms of energy
you know it's twice as much as we can
get from pretty much any other
even the best of the higher output
alternators on the market
yeah you know the the aps ultimate is
that ocean planet energy cells
yeah those have terrific performance
characteristics at 12 and 24 volts
so what's the output at low rpm on those
alternators
what makes it like what does it make so
awesome well there's two things one is
the
the maximum output actually there's
three things the maximum output
which is typically speaking or these
alternators are radio when they're cold
yeah well when you run them hard within
five minutes
they're uh up to the case is probably up
to well over 100 degrees centigrade um
so then they they uh the output goes
down
so then efficiency becomes really
important and those aps alternators are
some of the more efficient ones on the
market
you know the typical automotive
alternator is maybe 50
efficient much of the time uh these aps
alternators around 70 percent some of
the belmonts are as well
um and then the other thing that's
critical
to all of us is that they ramp up their
output at low rpms
yeah well especially if we're battery
charging at anchor
uh because if you've got to run the
engine you know two and three thousand
rpm to get the alternator
to wide open to a full output you're not
going to do it
so what you thought was a 200 amp
alternator is really 100 amps
yeah um so that that is
is a really critical feature is getting
it to ramp up the output at low rpms
and we spent a ton of money with the
integral system
working on that and we got it to the
point where with the engine at a
thousand rpm we're getting five
kilowatts
out of the uh alternator that's just
amazing
yeah i mean there's nothing on the
market that comes close to it
so i can set an anchor i can run my
engine at 1200 rpm which is you know
not much above idle speed yeah and it's
also quite
quiet and uh and that thing's putting
out um seven kilowatts
and not only that that seven kilowatts
is enough of a load on the engine at
that low speed
to where i'm almost at the peak fuel
efficiency for the engine
so i'm actually getting even at anchor
generating like that i'm more efficient
than a standalone
yeah generator that's what you want it's
that sweet spot i saw that i did i saw
your video that
uh i think it was about last year or
maybe 18 months ago that you
yes yeah yeah you were wearing a lab
coat
you look like such a scientist right
we're we're about to start a video and
they they gave that to me and made me
wear it and i felt kind of stupid in it
but
you were such a scientist i'm like nigel
doesn't mean you could you could have
come in there and sweat
i was like no no it's nigel man he
doesn't need to pretend to be a
scientist
that's the one and only time i've ever
won a lab coat
i love it i love it i saw you on it i'm
like no no this guy doesn't need to wear
one
you can put one you can wear one but he
doesn't need one yeah you know we
we spent oh what my nose is stitching
again
we spent three million dollars of
of uh some big corporation in the u.s
funded that project
three million dollars developing that
wow yeah
yeah that was then and then we had other
money that we put in
so it was a pretty intense
uh development program this stuff is
paper it's really easy we know exactly
what we want to do
but uh but actually making it all work
and then building a controller that can
handle that kind of
power and then uh one of the tests i i
did
was to run the thing up to eight
kilowatts and open circuit the batteries
to see what would happen you know with
an option immediately smoke the
alternator you blow all the diodes
yeah that's what i heard our controller
reacted so fast
and it had such a decent dump capability
that shut the system down without any
damage
oh wow that quick yep
yeah that's what you want because
otherwise you're going to like that i
mean that alternative has got to be
but
you know i drew up a list of design
characteristics that i wanted to see in
the thing
i have no technical capability
whatsoever to
to make it happen but i know what we
want
because i've been doing this for long
enough and dealing with
the with the kit that we have and the
failings that they have so i know what i
want
uh it's a matter of finding the people
that can then take that and translate it
into a piece of kit that will do that
yeah and and that's what we were able to
do with that project
yeah so for for the audience listening
and i mean the challenge that we all
have as voters
not first of all not all of us have
generators so
you know a lot of sailboats don't have
generators of course catamarans are
having
generators more and more now but again
it depends on the size where you're
going to put the generator
you know i you know from a cost
perspective i could afford a generator
on my own boat
and i would do one but where am i to put
it there's just no place
you know i'm going to give up such a
huge amount of space and it's going to
be impossible with service
and so a lot of boaters are stuck with
basically one engine
and that's it and it's not a money thing
it's just there's no other place
and so i think the play is well what can
we do with alternators and
you know we've been asking more and more
of alternators well how can you know
it's
55 then 90 amps and 120 and
220 360 pardon
three six you know one of those aps 12
volt alternators i think is rated at 360
amps
yeah i believe it is and that's just a
regular small frame alternator
yeah unbelievable and then um uh one of
the 24 volt alternators is
is rated at 260 i think which is you
know
quite a bit more that's huge huge
i may be wrong on that i can't remember
off the top of my head and then of
course um
you need a pretty fancy controller yeah
this uh when you're pumping out that
much
current and now we've got these uh wake
speed
controllers which are
like uh the best of what we've had
historically on steroids
i mean that's oh yeah it's unbelievable
really impressive piece of kit but of
course
the problem with that is uh the the more
powerful these controllers get to be the
more
complex they are to program so you
really have to
have someone helping you i mean i can't
program one of those yet i haven't done
it
i know what it can do it's mental it's
it's it's
so one of the things we we've done at
ocean planet is to
create a little piece of kit that you
can plug into uh
one of those that will give you a whole
bunch of drop down menus
to simplify the programming because it
does get to be
pretty complex and if you screw up
programming then you're going to have
problems
yeah yeah i mean that's a trade-off
right
and we as voters i tell them same thing
with going back to lithium or anything
you know you can't have it both ways
you can't have all the benefits of
technology and have simplicity
you know you you're going to trade off
like complexity
for more benefit and that's why i tell
people with lithium i'm like
are do you need it or do you want it
yeah like are you do you need a computer
on top of your batteries what's the
reason why you need
that level and it might be but not
everyone
needs all that complexity because the
challenge is when it does break
then you either do it yourself or you
call it a technician sometimes the
technicians
aren't available uh in your area or
they're in your area but they're not
available for
eight weeks it's four weeks until they
can come on board and that's where
people get really frustrated
and then you know we uh we start pumping
out power levels we've never dreamed of
in the past
so then we need cables this big to
handle it
and then uh because we've got
lithium-ion batteries on the boat
they don't have that charge acceptance
curve that that acid batteries have so
so then the uh the charging device is
running flat out for maybe an hour or
two
and then we discover some tiny little
thing like we put an a
l fuse in there with uh which has got
stainless steel bolts to hold things
together
and one of the washers finds its way
between the cable lug
and the fuel you're done stainless steel
washer it acts like a little resistor
it gets hot enough to where it melts the
fuse even though there's no over current
situation
100 alternator and it blows the ultimate
time
testify did it uh one of my first jobs
uh i literally did it 100 i remember
literally the fuse holder
melted melted because that mountain it
was
a game changer i was like oh my god
and it's surprising how many of us
including myself
i mean tons of that those little washers
are actually not conductive well they
are but barely but they are only eight
percent the conductivity
yeah yeah and you see it all the time by
the way you see those washers in between
things
well you know you have the fuse holder
you have the fuse you have the cable
you blow the fuse you take the fuse out
because you slide it sideways and pull
it out yeah
the washer drops down yeah when you fuse
in and you don't notice you've now got a
washer between the fuse and the cable
and it's this kind of stuffs you know we
uh learn this stuff the hard way
uh and then there is no mechanism to
feed this knowledge out to the rest of
the industry yeah that's a
big problem we have uh i i have
a dozen photographs on file
of brand new boats with stainless steel
washers
in the circuit on these a l fuel
cylinders
all the time yep i'd say it's honestly
it's a
it's a simple mistake that even i could
do
again knowing it knowing what i know
knowing you know honestly it it
shouldn't
you know it the fuse holder effectively
is a bad design because
to have some no one is going to read a
manual to put in a fuse
i mean people don't even read a manual
put an inverter there's no way they're
going to read a fuse manual
and uh they just make the mistakes the
mistakes are
bound to happen absolutely bound to
happen yeah
yeah so i just want to finish up the
lithium so for you the lithium what i'm
hearing obviously energy density is a
big one
uh communication um and this is
definitely the holy grail
with different like not just sensing
voltage
or measuring current which is basically
voltage sensing is how
pretty much most charging is done right
now yeah uh
wake speed is actually using current as
a way to also
assess the situation which is great and
that's i think why so many of us are
fans of the product
but having a battery talk back
and say hey i need this i want that
here's where i am
that's i mean there's complexity there
for sure but there is a lot of benefit
there
but now let's talk a fallacy of lithium
ion
we all know they have a really high
cycle life their iron phosphate which is
most of the petros we see have some at
least 2 000
cycles if it's roughly so if you do the
math
and you you say i can get 70 out every
cycle and i got 2 000 cycles and then
you assume that you can do all of that
and then you look at the cost of the
battery as compared to lead acid and you
do the same analysis with lead acid
it turns out that in the long run
lithium ion is cheaper than lead acid
however the fallacy here is to assume
that you're going to get those 2 000
cycles
i have never met a boater yet to
cycle the battery two thousand times so
if you only cycle that battery say three
hundred times because you only use the
boat half dozen weekends of the year
um then uh it's way more expensive than
a lead acid battery for the energy that
you
you put in and out of that battery so we
have to
we have to acknowledge the the the
single strongest
talking point in terms of the cost
benefit of lithium ion is probably
not one that most boat owners can
actually use because we don't have the
capability
to exploit that height cycle life yeah
and
and that's where i get always concerned
when a product
is using some sort of the same thing
would be nigel to me is
the 3c thing you know a lot of people
are advertising like oh you know lithium
can charge at three times capacity
it's nonsense you look at the lithium
batches we have in the
marine marketplace and most of them
don't want to be charging more than 0.3
c
yeah exactly is substantially less than
an agm battery
and even where are you going to find
that charger i'm like okay 3c
okay that's great awesome perfect all
right good no problem
congratulations good all right now tell
me where you're gonna okay your battery
bank is
let's call it a 400 amp hour battery
bank at 12 volts that's four golf cart
batteries
that is not a big battery bank you know
400 amp hours is
a tiny battery bank for any boat above
30
feet i mean it's it's it's vanilla like
there's nothing to it
it's like it's just a sedan four doors
that's it it's basic
i'm like okay four hundred half hours do
three c of that twelve hundred apps okay
start looking online for a 1200 amp
charger
600 amp charger 300 amp charger
you know where are you going to find a
charger that is ever going to give you
the benefits
of that theoretical charge rating well
in any case we don't have that charge
rate
with the batteries we're using because
those are automotive batteries where
they're built for acceleration
and they're also built to handle massive
braking regenerative braking spikes
so in the boat wall we have energy
batteries that are designed to
accept and deliver energy much more
slowly
so most of the boat batteries
lithium-ion batteries we
have looking at 0.3 c not 3c one tenth
of that charge rate many of some of them
will go to 0.5 c
and a handful of them will go to one
scene in my own
boat because we've got that integral um
alternator that will put out eight
kilowatts and we had an eight kilowatt
a battery bank a kilowatt hour then i
wanted the one c range
and in terms of the available lithium
ion batteries in the boat world
that's pushing the boundaries of most of
those batteries many of them
they don't want to do that so whereas
actually you can pump 1c
and so any agm battery up to about 50
state of charge
so ironically there are agm batteries
which will accept
a higher charge rate than a lot of the
lithium-ion batteries we have
but of course they start to taper off
once they get to
60 state of charge and then it takes off
pretty rapidly
yeah so tell me what's your um with all
the advancement that we've seen in lead
acid
over the years certainly i mean you're
going from flooded lead acid then we
went to the seal that regulated egms or
gel
and now we've got these foam core agms
what's your thoughts i remember still
you had said in that presentation that
years ago
we were all attending like lead acid
batteries
aren't you know they don't die they're
murdered it's the expression
as you said and i've reused that nigel i
can't tell you how many times i've
reused that because
oh man is it true people just
just give it to the battery so tell me a
little bit about the state of the
batteries of lead acid batteries and
what's your take on you know for boaters
and cruisers out there that want to go
out
what's yeah tell me a little bit more
well the first thing is if you're not in
a hurry
to wait a year or two uh the the lead
industry is pumping
millions and millions of dollars into
research to improve agm batteries
um to make them competitive with lithium
ion and they actually
now have the capability of the argonne
national lab in the usa one of these
federally funded labs
where they can they can watch
what's going on inside a battery at
fundamental levels of physics and
chemistry while the battery is in
operation
so all um development in the past has
been empirical you change
something the electrolyte or the blade
and then you test it and see what
happens
but now they can see in real time what's
going on inside the battery and
we've known forever that even
when we 100 discharge a battery we're
actually only using
50 percent of the theoretical capability
of a lead acid battery
so we've never been able to figure out
how to unlock the other half
so if they come even close to doing that
then we're going to see a dramatic
improvement in the capability of
lead acid batteries and then the other
two things they they need
for the mild hybrid
automotive world mild hybrids are the
one that
when you stop at a traffic light the
engine shuts off and then
as soon as you hit the uh accelerator
pedal it cranks up again
so the battery is cycled thousands and
thousands
of times at a high level of charge but
then they also want to be able to
recover the braking energy
so they need to maintain the battery in
a partial state of charge
so that when you brake you can put that
energy into the battery
so you know as we know if you put a lead
acid battery in a partial state of
charge
it dies from sulfation yeah so they need
to cure the sulfation issue
they need to get a very high cycle life
and they need to get higher energy
density
and if they get even one of those things
i'd make it all on three of them
lead asset batteries are going to get a
lot better quite quickly
so we need to keep an eye on that and at
the moment by far the best
lead acid technology for our purposes is
the firefly battery with the carbon foam
plates
um for the simple reason that it's an
agm battery so it has
the normal agm characteristics in terms
of charge acceptance
and so on but you can operate it in a
partial state of charge
for weeks at a time and it doesn't
sulfate and it's the only lead acid
battery in the market that doesn't
sulfate
it acts like it's self-eating at every
cycle you see the capacity diminish a
little bit
but when you get the opportunity to do a
normal full charge again
those sulfates all go back into solution
and it goes back to 100
do you know why that's the case yeah
well i think i don't you know i know
physicists but um the negative plate is
made from a sheet of foam literally
so it's got a tiny pore structure and
when they uh
make the batteries they create a vacuum
in the battery and they suck the paste
into that plate okay and then when you
leave a battery you a partially
discharged state
the the the paste turns to lead sulfate
and it's in a crystal form and
initially the crystals are very small
and they're easily recharged
but if you leave it like that they they
grow together into bigger crystals
so first of all they have less surface
area collectively
so it takes longer to recharge them and
secondly they become more resistant to
charging
so the battery slowly refuses to take
charge
and uh and then unless you crank the
voltage up
uh well above a normal charging voltage
you can't recover
those sulfated crystals the big ones so
then the next time you discharge it
leave it in a discharge state some more
of those happen
and you get a progressive loss of
capacity well i think the
poor structure in the phone is too small
to allow the crystals to grow to the
size
where you can't recover them with normal
charge rates i think it's as simple as
that
so you may be totally wrong yeah the
inventor is one of your guys
isn't the inventor of that battery uh he
lives here
down the road yeah 20 miles yeah he's
very neat
i i have six batteries on i mean i've
got firefly on my boat
um you know one of the challenges of
course is that minimum point two c
that they want as a charger which is
actually one point four
well now yeah ideally they want point
four minimum is point two
point four is almost impossible to give
in most not if you have uh one of these
super high powered alternators i mean
that's another reason for
you know putting all these pieces
together as a package yeah oh
absolutely absolutely yeah that's
i mean the luckily thing is at least the
power motors that have generates you
know what we end up doing is stacking
multiple uh inverter chargers you know
or adding multiple chargers you know the
most i've done ever is
350 amps at 24 volts so basically 700
amps of charging at 12.
and it wasn't about an 80 80 footer
and uh on 12 of those firefly l15s
um so 900 amp hours at 12 at 24 volts
and we were able to off the generator i
mean the generous massive it was like i
don't know
30 kilowatt or something else yeah yep
um and they could they could literally
run in
in concurrently three of one inverter
charger and two of those chargers
and it was a little bit the dream that
you had talked about
about you know having even a large boat
like that an 80 footer which is
basically bigger than a house uh
literally being able to recharge their
batteries in a couple hours
yeah and in a couple hours doing an hour
a night an hour in the in the morning
and at a reasonable times they're
literally running the rest of the boat
the other 22 hours and the boat is
running off batteries yep and knowing
those two arrows they could
you know maybe run the washing machine
or cook yeah water maker
whatever yeah yeah yeah we uh we took
some of those
um firefly batteries and um
i i would run them for a month at a time
in a partial state of charge i would
cycle them
between 10 and 20 percent say to charge
and 60
um and the minute the charge acceptance
rate dropped below
uh 0.3 c rate i shut them down
so that was my cut-off threshold and
over the month i did this every day
um you could see the the whole
battery would walk down a little just
like it was sulfated
at the end of the month i would stick it
back on on an extended child cycle of
14.4 volts you know your normal
um charge cycle uh and it would go back
to 100
state of charge and then i do it again
for the next month so i did that for
three or four months at a time four
months that year i think and then i took
the batteries
and i discharged them down to 35 percent
state of charge and i let them sit for
eight months
so and now i put them back on a normal
charge cycle they came back to 100 state
of charge
and then the next year i get a whole
bunch of pretty aggressive and
brutal treatment on them i didn't break
a single one of those batteries
temperature sensors i see them taped on
the top of the battery every time they
i
if you bolt them to the post that's one
thing and they should be bolted to the
negative post because that's the one
that gets the most heat
but uh positive post is okay but if
they're not bolted to the post
they've got to be at least halfway down
the side of the battery because
otherwise
they're not working because there's an
air pocket in the top of the battery
that acts as an insulator
and i see it over and over again on
brand new boats they've all attached
sensors in the wrong place yeah it's
you know it's funny we we do the same
thing we do a service called an
electrical audit and this is where we
get a lot of our knowledge to be honest
you know going on people's boats the the
amount your my imagination is incapable
of dreaming the things that i've seen on
books
and the good news is you know
collectively we're learning a lot
you know unfortunately some of us are
paying the price and others are learning
from those mistakes
i had a i had a boat owner you know they
they swapped out again on temperature
sensors they swapped out the inverter
for a different one
they reused the old temp sensor because
they had a phone jack on it the old one
was a phone jack
the new one need a phone jack but the
the
i guess the scale was completely off in
terms of what the resistor was expecting
to be reading
and uh they literally killed their
battery bank
because their temperature sensor told
them that they were on thermal runaway
and their battery charger was basically
practically not charging
and they lost their battery bank and
that battery bank was
probably about five six
thousand dollars for a temperature
sensor that had not been switched
yeah that's painful i've got some uh
photographs of some
a big agm bank you know these are 700
each
uh where they're all melted down
because the temperature sensor was on
the top and they did go on
and they did go in the thermal run away
and the temperature sensor didn't know
there was anything going on
i've seen i've seen temperature sensors
not even installed in the battery
i've seen them installed they're more
like ambient temperature sensors
yep i've seen them installed i saw a
boat that had thermal runaway
it was installed actually on a the
negative distribution
huh oh so talking about ambient
temperatures
here's another one that i think is going
to get us into trouble
um you know we've been talking about
high output alternators and we've been
talking about lithium-ion batteries
where you put those two together and
those alternators are running really
hard for
extended periods of time and even if
they're 70 efficient
the case temperature on the alternator
is going to be well above 100c
uh typically speaking we'll set a
temperature center of maybe 110c
and maybe as 120 on the uh integral
system will actually go to 200c
uh and i ran it to 200c to see what
would happen
but what happened was it it has sent
enough heat to the rotor
to where it destroyed the belts
but anyway so we're well above c on the
case
and then uh you know you've got fans
typically you've got one of d10 blowing
out the middle but they may maybe
sucking and blowing out the ends but
somewhere we've got all of that hot air
coming out of the alternator
and if we have a fire suppression system
in the engine compartment and it has a
temperature sensor
that temperature sensor trigger is
triggered at 79 c
if that temperature sensor is in the
path for the air
coming off that alternator you'll
trigger the fire suppression system
okay and we're going to see more and
more of that happening because we're
going to
the heat off of these are powerful
alternators is going to heat up these
small engine compartments
and then we're going to trigger the fire
suppression system and if it's a dry
powder system
it will destroy the engine yeah because
the air intake
yep if so so the other thing we need to
do first of all we need to move those
sensors
to where they're not anywhere near to
the alternator and secondly
we need to make sure that the boat
owners are using
uh gas cylinders and not dry powder
and typically they like the dry powder
because it's a bit cheaper
but it's so wow a lot more expensive if
it destroys the engine
that that would be at that honestly you
get out of boating after there's not
that many people are stand boating after
that
no well i actually i was on a brand new
um
boat in in england came down the river
from the boat yard
fresh out of the yard lithium batteries
uh high alberto snater uh triggered the
temperature sensor
on the way down the river from the boat
from the boat vehicle
and destroyed the engine uh so then they
immediately had to hold it back out put
a new engine in it
that's a bad day i told them what i
thought was the problem and they said no
that's not possible it could
no way it could do that so i'm hoping
they moved that temperature sensor or by
now they may have done it again
Boating Tech Talk