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[Music] good morning everyone good morning thank you for a Bluewater cruising Association for hosting this event first slide we saw here was the DC conceptual overview we talked about chargers we talked about alternators we talked about solar controllers we talked about fuel cells we talked about an inverter and I talked a little bit about bilge pumps bilge pumps would be right here on this fuse block right this fuse block right here is basically unsweet distribution that could be bilge pumps carbon monoxide detector radio memory right things that always need to be on on your boat so that even if you turn this battery switch off those circuits are still going to be powered and energized so now the next thing we're going to talk about is the last two elements on this slide and they are a battery combiner and a battery isolator and this can cause a lot of good or a lot of bad and either to them okay and we're gonna go talk about that that is where there's a lot of magic on boats nowadays where you turn off the battery switch and your panels energize it be like holding your faucet in your hand it's not connected to any pipes and you open the faucet and water is coming down if that doesn't freak you out that's sort of a horror movie story right I mean like you've the TV's plugged on the wall and it's on like how the hell can something be energized if it's not powered and generally the reason and we're gonna be talking about all the gotchas is that generally the reason is because of this little device right here probably 90% of all boats that have them have it badly installed and when things are working because most people never turn their battery switch off they leave it on most people don't even know where it is it's there but they don't know something and then you turn that off and then you start seeing a bunch of things on the panel your panels still energized your water pump is working and your battery switches off that's when you lose hope in your boat and we're going to be talking this device snacks which is a battery combiner so a battery combiner is right here battery combiners is have different names from different manufacturers blue sees call them for example an automatic combiner relay BP calls it a voltage sense relay zan tracks calls it an echo charge they all have different marketing names but at the end of the day their battery combiners by the way if you think you don't have one in your boat you probably do you just don't know you do they're very very popular any boat that has any electrical system or work done in the last 15 years probably has a battery combiner on their book okay so they're very very popular what is the purpose of a battery combiner and here's a picture of what a battery combiner does it's right here in the middle and I want to emphasize here in this diagram notice that I'm for the first time showing bi-directional arrows alright now I want to remind people that wires don't have direction right a wire is like a pipe water can flow left or right there's no direction in a pipe unless you have a gate valve right battery combiners are inherently most of them there is exception to every rule but 98% of them are bi-directional devices okay maybe 90% but on boats probably 98% this device is a device that effectively replaces you as an operator of think about all these boats in the past where we would go from off one both /all and two right pretty commonplace instead of having people manually turn a switch on or off right they would use this device that would automatically combine the batteries automatically whenever they would sense a charging voltage meaning in the time of Plenty when things are good it's easy to be generous I'm always thinking about Bill Gates it's easy to give 50 billion away when you've got 55 let's be honest he still got five I mean he's gonna be alright you can't spend five billion at his age he gave 50 yes but there it's land of play it's way harder to be generous when you almost have nothing right this device acts like a wealthy person and says you know why I got a lot of money let me be generous but as soon as the battery voltages drops a 12.8 meaning no more land of plenty I there's no charging voltage everyone's on their own right it separates the battery automatically so it puts them in parallel whenever there's a charging voltage and as soon as there's no more charging voltage it says you know what you're on your own I gotta take care of myself first okay now there is no direction to this device meaning the engine battery for example in this instance the alternator charges his battery the moment this battery gets to thirteen point three volts this device senses thirteen point three on this post says okay I got thirteen three good let it out and then it's going to run through the young switch distribution to the house battery and so basically the alternator and we had that question before the alternator's not going to recharge the engine battery but it will also recharge the house battery through a battery combiner okay that's how a battery combiner works it's basically a digital solenoid it's a relay it's a device that basically automatically lifts and closes a drawbridge that's all it is okay that's a battery combined parallel combined all the same thirteen three disconnect at twelve eight this is very important and it's great because some of us let's say for example a lot of my clients will not a lot but some of them are airline pilots now if you're an airline pilot and you don't understand rituals and drills you're in the wrong business okay I'd be very worried if you don't have a really good and you don't know drills Mike honestly and most of them end up flying 747s and all these big planes so now those guys I really not worried about and gals I'm like drills for you it's an eight if you're not good with drills it's like being in the Navy not knowing drills you're screwed find another job like drills is everything it is drill drill drill and they never make and for them it's easy but for the rest of us when I get to a destination I sometimes forget to put my battery switch back to one because I get to an it station and maybe there's a friend there there's something exciting I'm distracted the weather is beautiful I want to go swimming there's a million reasons to be not thinking about your electrical system when you're voting right now so it's not necessarily top of mind all the time and that's the challenge with using your battery switch because the problem is you're inherently part of the system and to back to my example of Benneteau and Juno they don't even have a combine mode on those boats they don't they're like can be people can't be trusted they just can't they're gonna forget they're gonna not remember there is no ability to put your battery back in parallel if you own one of those boats no you can't you can't do it if one fails you got to get jumper cables they can't do it and they're right people are the problem electrical systems are not a problem they're deterministic the operators of the system are the problem and so we're a huge proponent of removing people from daily critical tasks that if forgotten means the next morning you're not able to start your boat because some days you don't start your boat because you want to you start your boat because you need to I remind people all the time voting ninety nine days of lists one day of sheer terror if you haven't had the Dave sheer terror just wait just wait just wait and certain times you got to start that engine now not in 20 minutes not in an hour you don't have five hours the winds are blowing you're dragging anchors someone's coming down on you and you got to go now now now it's sort of like your own version of a tsunami and it's happening in it's real and it's all things are not this is the opposite of what we think about boating and a battery combiner allows you to not be part of that system okay I've never seen one fail ever question have I ever seen a battery combiner fail never not once we've installed thousands of these devices thousands upon thousands now if they're badly installed the device doesn't failed the fuses fails because people don't understand the implications but the device itself I've never seen a battery combiner itself fuse I've seen bad installations of them the combiner was fine is just they were inappropriately fused okay so when you buy one of these devices and you might put win and like for example hunter for years would have a single alternator single inverter charger they had after uh stir for thruster generator battery engine battery house battery five battery banks on a boat right not in comment on a 50 foot hunter not uncommon worked on dozens one inverter charger single output one altar near single output how does one income stream go to five places how battery combiners right that's how we've done so otherwise they need to have five alternators or they need to have five a battery charger with five outputs right how are they gonna recharge five battery banks if they only have one alternator one inverter charger with a single output they do that with battery combiners you can buy them in different sizes 55 amps 120 amps 300 amps you can have them act you can also then end up having them be remotely activated it's super common now super common even with lithium installs where you actually are able to actually activate them remotely you can even have a third party control logic activate it for different reasons or you can have it right at the - it's actually really popular now you'll actually have them add the dashes and you can say I want force combined I know there's not a charging voltage right now and you only automatically do it when there's a charge voltage but well for whatever reason right now I need power with my engine battery I need all hands on deck and you can actually do it at the dash so it allows you to have a manual combined forced over a little control wire somewhere maybe on the bridge somewhere it may be in the app in the cabin and then you basically forced a combine and it shows a big red light and kind of tells you that you shouldn't be like that and then you can disable it I talked about different companies there are directional ones now but honestly I've other than the echo charge I've never seen a directional battery combiner in the field ever they do exist people just it's not part of their toolkit they just don't get it although they're very there's good reasons for doing it it's very rare now all that sounds great here's another one that's a magnetic lash ACR that's a big version 301 you have different types of battery bank sizes and your battery banks are uneven think about hydroelectric dams the higher the difference between one body of water and the other they're more power you get right that's what it is I mean that's where they're building they're not building dams with a 1 foot differential it doesn't matter how big the water is on the outside it's only 1 foot it's not a lot of power but well you've got 300 feet 400 feet of differential that's a lot of power so when you've got one battery bank that is let's say a thruster battery bang that is at 10 volts because you've been killing this thing docking the boat and you're just hammering the battery putting a thruster load and suddenly the combiner kicks in and you've got a large battery bank that's at 13 14 volts because it was running on the alternator and you have a difference of four volts between a massive battery bank and a thruster bank that's now being hammered by a thruster drawing 300 400 amps of thruster loads what generally happens is the fuses that are meant to protect this device will blow because you're gonna have crazy amount of current I've seen five hundred six hundred amps going through wiring because the differential between the two is so substantial that one bank which is higher is dumping everything because this all hands on deck all hands on deck means you're supporting the other battery bank you're trying to equal it out so if this battery bank is tiny and it's got a huge load and this battery banks big as they're putting themselves together and they're trying to even themselves out quickly there's going to be a massive inrush of current that's going to go through and the problem with that is the fuses below but remember this is not Star Trek there's not little computers on every fuse telling you when they blow you don't know that blew and if you're not thinking and you don't have a voltmeter on your thruster battery bank you don't know that you lost your battery bank the charging voltage and eventually the thruster stops working and then you realize that something's broken and you think it's a thruster but it's the battery bank and the battery bank is dead because they didn't get a charge for the last two months three months and now it's done and then you've got to replace that battery bank and so there are issues with battery combining especially when the battery banks are big and or they're connected to thrusters we use them but not in every application it's probably the most popular hammer and an electricians toolkit but it's overused not everything needs a hammer there's way too many of these things installed people just don't get it they don't read the datasheet they don't they're not field engineers they don't understand the implications of their choice and so we commonly are called out for service calls troubleshooting and ACR the ACR is not broken never is never seen one fail but it's badly installed and they don't understand the implications of what they're doing and then people lose battery banks because of it because they may lose their charging voltage and nobody knows that they lost their charging voltage because they don't even know to check so if you have a battery bank for windless upfront and you have an ACR same thing absolutely so a CRS are good but they're also very bad because you need to be able to confirm the behavior that you want right and it gets problematic so it has its application but it's not the perfect solution you know how there's not a single tool that solves all problems this is an overuse tool for too many problems and a lot of boats it causes a lot of grief we use them absolutely but thousands will put in a year over a thousand two thousand but we're not gonna put them everywhere for everything question is if you've got a high output alternator right here and you've got your high output alternator go into your engine battery does it make sense to have an ion put alternator going to an engine battery contacts does your engine battery you really need a lot of a charge especially going through a battery combiner when really the one that needs most of the charge is gonna be your house battery which is over here you're absolutely right it does it and that's a great point on my boat most boats I get to play on and thank you everyone that are in the room that allowed me to play on your boats I don't do this no absolutely not I'll have an alternator go directly to the house battery and I'll have the house battery go back to the engine battery yeah because on my boat I did like that too and a very good question Rob on my boat the alternate goes to my house battery because what needs the most amount of power who's the hungriest I mean is it the teenage kid in your house or your grand great-grandfather I mean this battery here has a limited appetite I can't I mean it's gonna have like a couple of apps it's fine this thing could be my god it's like a 14 year old like on a growth spurt playing football I think this thing could eat so much and this thing is gonna be like yeah I'm good nibbles and it's done so alternators generally high output alternators we always wire to house batteries but but there's going to be on the next thing we're going to talk about battery Isolators and we're gonna talk about that battery Isolators are pretty miraculous devices any other questions on battery combiners question was I changed my alternate recently from 50 amp 200 amp alternator I've got a battery combiner on my boat should I look at that to answer the own question and he said yes suggested and he wondering if I agree a hundred percent agree yes and that's the big thing I mean listen if boating I tell this all the time if voting was easy and it was like playing golf and everyone would do a hole-in-one every time we play golf nobody would play okay the only reason my father is obsessed about golf and plays everyday in light of his back hurting is because he is obsessed at being better at golf and boating is like golf if you want to hit every time a birdie or a hole-in-one you are in the wrong sport it is a humbling activity and if you think it's easy you will be disappointed and if you don't know the errors you're making you will find out later at the least opportune time so always wonder always ask yourself I'm doing this what and if you don't know ask ask friends ask people on the blogs ask you know technicians that work on your boat doesn't matter but ask assumptions on boats no good world or hurt world or hurt yes other question battery combiners have pitfalls right as i brought about and a battery switch turning it on and off has pitfalls which one is better you know do you trust a device or do you trust yourself really good question for me it's about using the right device for the right application I would never use a battery combiner on a thruster application I want I limit my battery combiners for things that make sense I limited the scope and it's like bringing your hammer to everything that's my point you want battery banks or a soorma similar in size they're not going to be discharged too unevenly like if you've got a small for example a Grady white or Boston Whaler or you know boats that have reasonable battery bank sizes you know you've got two golf carts and a group 31 yeah that's fine because the battery banks are never going to be so uneven and even if they are the current possible isn't limited so they have to be similar so again it's it's about knowing the details of a product it's not to say it's a bad product it's saying that that product does not solve all problems and now no problem does or no product does it's overuse is my point but it definitely has this application I still use it all the time and on the ones we do worth foreseeing and we're like okay well we have ever uneven district like huge differences between the battery banks are they running a thruster on that battery bank then I'm not gonna do it like I'm I'm not saying I'm not bringing a hammer to every single situation and that would be my pros and cons of that decision go ahead so the question is well you know what is the solution if we can't use a battery combiner you know is it another switch there's other devices there are other devices like a DC to DC converter for example that is rate limited we do that a lot on their new builds it's it's it's like being a surgeon you know you can either have a knife and you know some needle and you start going or you start having different instruments so the the professional is going to understand the different tools that is disposable dispose to make the right solution for the right situation to me there is no problem that is unsolved right now there is a part for everything and we'll talk about the next one a switch goes back and saying either there can't at work let's go back to switch DC to DC converters solve that problem no problem and we use them all the time for thruster applications it's just that devices not solved thruster problems I don't want to get too bogged on because we got to keep going I'm going to talk about the next advice unless there's a question about battery combiners we're good alright now this device makes me happy you'll see this is one of the devices that takes care of a lot of problems by the way Benneteau Jeannot uses those devices all the time they have for about 10 years quietly people don't notice because people are creatures of habits and they only do what they know but the French Bulbul builders have solved this problem a long time ago that's how they share one alternator and multiple battery banks without a combiner they do it with this device and this device is perfect the battery isolator is one of my favorite devices you have an alternator comes in and this device is directional the batteries never see each other like a gate valve so battery isolator engine battery by the isolator house battery they'll never be more current going on either of those than the alternate can output because these two batteries never see each other they'll never be nuisance tripping on this fuse or this fuse or this fuse based on the alternate because your alternator output is never gonna output more than your alternator sense people say to me oh well my alternator could I don't know can my 100 amp alternator output 150 I mean let's let's think saying I deposited a hundred thousand in the bank and can I get 150 thousand no it's not gonna happen you don't get more than what you started so if you've got a hundred amp alternator that alternator can never output more than a hundred amps ever it's never gonna happen otherwise it would be a hundred amp alternator be 150 amp alternator or 200 amp or 300m and the great thing about this situation here this battery isolator is that because you know the maximum amperage of this device outputs you can know exactly what fuse you put here you know exactly what fuse you put here and now you'll never ever have nuisance tripping and like I said this has been in production Jeannot and Beneteau boats were a really time this is how you solve the problem having one alternator go to multiple battery banks and I cannot emphasize how amazing this device is in the past they used to make these devices with diodes they've been around for 20 30 years Bay liners used to do this all the time they would put a diode combiner in and they would have one alternator going three battery banks but diode combiners would literally drop point seven volts which is about probably 60 to 70 percent of your alternator output would be lost for this automation and Bayliner was like you know what it's a good price to pay I'd rather lose 70 percent than having my operators blame the boat and hate the boat for having losing all their batteries so they don't even put battery combiners on these big 47 88 and all these big all the bay liners they would all have these sort of blue devices with bunch of fins on there they'd be mounted against the ceiling room of the engine room or on the bulkhead and they would actually have one alternator going to multiple battery banks and the operator wouldn't even be able to do combined because they also realize that people are the problem they did it with diode combiners but they were paying a 70% cost in loss of efficiency that's a big deal I mean that's some serious taxation but you know what it's better than nothing they're like what's the alternative expecting that our owners are never going to forget it's ridiculous and honestly it doesn't matter what the reason is for you to have a problem on your boat it's upsetting and you're not gonna blame yourself you're gonna blame the manufacturer and if you don't blame yourself someone on the boat is gonna blame you or the boat and they're like that's it I'm out tap out I'm getting out of this let's do something else a cottage it's not fun this is too stressful like it's not good and so they ended up putting diode combiners now the new ones are ninety-eight percent efficient ninety eight you lose two points three points that's nothing I mean we do that with credit card merchant fees all the time you spend a hundred dollars at a merchant he's only gonna get 97 I mean he's not seeing the whole transaction people live with that all the time it's two three points for automation for convenience no problem and that's why these fat battery Isolators are the bomb they are incredible we put them on every boat we get on their relatively new device and they have Louisville to drop incredible devices combiners are bi-directional they go from battery to battery Isolators go from alternator to batteries see how it's a Y inverted Y the batteries can't talk to each other they have no ability there's no battery to battery it's a battery isolator think about it the batteries are isolated the other one the batteries are combined the batteries will never see each other here for an alternator have slew a hundred percent and by the way a battery charger like a battery charger it's made of an isolator inside that's how they get three battery banks to not ever see one another and have one charge rate go to three places and that's also the reason why battery chargers can have multiple charge profiles is because they charge one profile and it hits three isolator out they're actually have Isolators inside the battery chargers that's how they do them we do a company that sells military chargers actually island systems they only have single output chargers and if you want more more outputs you put one of their devices like this to do multiple battery banks and their military-grade like they go on tanks and likes like real stuff and a great company and they're like just modular like single output charger 100 amp if you wanted to go to multiply places get a battery isolator and then spread it out they'll actually sell the three output charger in two pieces one the battery charger single output and then a battery isolator beneath it the question is I've got a generator shore power and an alternators there nicely and on each one the the battery charger effectively has a nice early built in it to it not the inverter charger but a battery charger if it has a multiple output battery charger inverter chargers or single up with devices they don't battery chargers are powered either by shore power or generator alternators are powered by the engine an alternator if you want your alternator to go to multiple places and you don't want to ever have nuisance tripping and you don't want to worry you get one of these question should a windless be powered by the engine or a house battery to cranking it up in this case in this case because the alternator is going to both batteries directly the wind list can be at either place because both are getting a charge from the alternator if your alternator was wired typically to your engine battery then yes it'd be better to have your windlass be connected your engine battery because that's the battery that gets connected to your alternator that's right when you're running a winless like our cars for example air conditioning radio none of this is running off the battery when we're running our cars effectively your alternator is running those loads right your batteries not affect it's it's only to start once the alternate kicks in the loads are always less than the alternator output it's like we have a big Sprinter van and it has like a 200-300 amp alternator why did you do that it's so that you could refrigeration whatever you want and that big then the alternator always I'll put more than what the loads in that cargo van will need so one alternator charging two or three banks at the same time replaces a diode combiner and the really big takeaway is there's no parallel valerie's right a battery combiner combines batteries parallel and combine or synonymous they're the same word and so you can avoid that and the French builders have been using this for years to their credit this is what the old style looked like this is the diode combiner and these are heat sinks the heat sinks were there because this device created so much power loss through the diodes that they needed to D be able to dissipate the heat so alternate would come on here and then you'd be able to connect two batteries this is a 1 2 3 right so you can actually have 3 battery banks so it's it's hard to see but that's the input output 1 output to output 3 so we just did a boat last week we put two of those in on a boat that needed had a bunch of different battery banks windlass you know thruster forward aft generator like we're doing all these different battery about house bank all of those are going on one of those okay the question is does this replace a combiner or replace it well it depends for an alternator it certainly does if you now remember this device here doesn't do anything for a battery charger if you have a battery charger connected to your engine battery this device will not share that voltage right this is not doing anything for a battery charger if you have an inverter charger this doesn't solve it because your alternator has nothing to do with a battery charger they're separate so this is only good for an alternator right battery combiners would be how do you charge for example you've got an engine battery that has a single output charger and you want it to charge another engine battery then you would put a other then you would put a battery combiner there that's why they're not one or the other there are different devices for different purposes and if it's confusing by the way welcome to the world of electricity okay I mean if it was easy none of us would be digging of course all would be done the technicians would all get it all they in all the manufacturers would get it I wouldn't have a job I'd be doing something else and you know we wouldn't be here right now so the point I talked about avoid nuisance tripping and then the cabling and everything because you know the maximum output that's going to be coming out of that device it's very predictable okay if you have an alternator and you have multiple battery banks and you want to share the voltage you get one of these no the controller outputs how would the maximum output of that device is and with a charge voltage it doesn't separate to multiple devices alternators are single up with devices unless you have a battery isolator yeah well any boat that has two battery banks is gonna have a battery isolator in the future there's no reason the reason they did in the past boats didn't have those is because the diode combiner was taking a 70% cut and some builders are like glass too expensive I can't afford that that makes my alternator so inefficient that I can't do that I can't afford that so I'd rather have the owner get a hundred percent but they're men sort of like by the way here's another thing too I tell emphasize this all the time regardless of money there is no perfect boat doesn't matter you could have ten billion you could have a hundred billion you could have a trillion dollars money does not give a perfect boat there is no perfect boat every boat is compromises every single one is a million choices you do that you don't have this you do this you don't have that pros and cons that's the beauty of a boat because otherwise there'd be one owner owner that would have a perfect boat and even the billionaires all have different boats why because there is no perfect boat everything is a choice do you have five decks six decks you have load x1 deck you have the length all those come at a cost everything it's like even if you can afford to have a big boat do you want to have all the crew on board do you can have an 80 footer but do you want to just be you and the missus do you want to have guests or no guests like everything is a choice there is no perfect solution to a boat regardless of money money is not the limiting factor for perfection its choices constantly choices and an alternator here with a battery isolator is a choice one of the many choices that designers of electrical systems have to choose either you have that on board or you don't and you have a combiner but there is no silver bullet ever about anything so a battery isolator question a battery isolator and a combiner do they play similar roles a battery isolator only really works with an alternator right that's what it is it's an alternator a way to share an alternator within multiple battery banks a battery combiner will share everything it puts combatives together so it could share solar it could share inverter charger it could share a charger it could share an alternator there is no distinction as to what creates a charging voltage on a boat so battery combined rules will do everything battery Isolators will only do alternators so this gentleman here is talking about their boat where it doesn't sound like they have a battery combiner in Isolators but they have a lot of parallel switches anything it looks like the OP the designer of my system shows the flexibility of having me make decisions at the cost of maybe making my decisions because yeah that's what it is and that's why I try to reiterate there's it's always sometimes I tell that people here's the good news and the bad news and the good news and the bad news is the same news there it's not too different use it's like the good news is you got a lot of choice the bad news is you got a lot of choice I tell that all the time when we're talking about navigation systems the great news is you've got a lot of choice the bad news is you've got a lot of choice depends how do you see it and you're right you know the builders and the designers are making these decisions what do I anticipate the operator to be and for example for Genoa and Beneteau they're thinking a lot of my boats are going to fleets charter fleets do not have necessarily very knowledgeable operators right and so they're thinking I need a boat to be reliable and so the last thing I want to do is having someone needing to dial stuff in on a charter for seven days in the Caribbean or in the Med and they're like screw that I'm taking the operator out of the equation just out I can't have him make decisions because then his Charter is done and then he's gonna be upset at the boat he doesn't care that nobody blames themselves for anything everyone's looking at external factors everyone's perfect I'm perfect therefore the problem is somewhere else nobody makes an accident they always blame someone else right how many people are guilty in prison I mean it's ridiculous amount and it's like everyone's a victim so that's where the designer is sort of thinking like well I don't want to be blamed or not and it depends on the operator okay I can't emphasize how important monitoring is you've got to have on your boat monitoring otherwise you're in a land of magic and surprises but you can't say that you're disappointed that things are unpredictable or you don't understand so we talked about battery combiners we talked about Isolators and notice how this is a bi-directional device and this is a directional device so when you get an AC or DC voltmeter people tell me all the time I will talk about a battery monitor just next they say to me they say Jeff I got a battery monitor and I've got a battery monitor my motor I'm like oh you do you got battery capacity volts amps amp hours oh no I've got a voltmeter I'm like okay volt meter that's good that's a start nothing wrong with that but I said do you realize that capacity from voltage is only possible if your batteries have neither been charged or discharged for a 24 hour period you're like well what would you mean I'm like oh yeah it's like your art rental art you're a tress heart right no doctor would ever look at your heart rate at any given moment without context and say you're healthy or not let's be crazy my heart rate I spend twice a day it's 170 165 no problem am i unhealthy and 165 well it depends what am i doing it's context-driven the only indication of health is your heart rate when you wake up because that's something that is at rest and a battery is the same thing and arrest battery voltage is the only one that matters right so if you're looking at your battery voltage and you're using it as a nominal sort of absolute number and you're like oh my god my batteries are at 11 volts they're toast wait a second contacts if you're sprinting uphill what should your heart rate be should it be 65 or 165 well most likely it's gonna be 165 if you're sprinting uphill and so if you're running your inverter and you have a large load on it's okay for your battery your battery bank voltage to drop to eleven and a half your starter might bring down your battery voltage to ten and a half does it mean it's a dead battery no it means you just apply to 300 a plod on the battery and the battery's having a hard time sustaining it but as soon as you take away the load the battery voltage will slowly creep back up so voltage is only an indication of capacity for DC when and this is very important when it's an @ res voltage okay so DC volts indication of capacity for an address battery and that would apply on our boats really well with engine batteries because you stopped using an engine you shouldn't have any of those on it you come back to that battery 24 hours later you move the little toggle on your DC panel and you check your battery voltage and if it sells 12 6 12 8 you got a full battery right but you can't do that on your house battery because your house battery is constantly being used to know what the capacity of your house battery would be when you're actually using your battery you'd have to say everyone stop using the battery for 24 hours let's put it at rest 24 hours later let's come and see it and then let's temperature compensate it and then we'll know what our battery capacity is how practical is that it's the definition of impractical you can't stop using your boat while on your boat to know the capacity of your battery hence it's sort of a context only useful thing but still useful to see changes right ie you know you plug in to shore power before you plugged in you're at 12 suddenly you just plug into shore power you're at 12 8 o increase in voltage your battery charger kicked in or your batteries were at 12 point to where you started the alternator and suddenly they're at 13 3 my alternator is working you're looking for a change right you're certainly looking for an effect a cause and an effect what made this change I'm always constantly looking at my alternator output I don't look at them but I'm like what's the voltage before I started the alternator what's the voltage after I started the alternator if I don't see a rise and it did move I know that my alternator is broken I do that every single time I start the engine and honestly all of us have a voltmeter at the engine panel and you should be looking at that vote mean and say hey is it rising the moment I started the engine because if it didn't rise and it's not higher than when you started the engine before you started the engine then you know that your alternator or a connection between your alternator of that battery's broken the other thing too is that when you've got an AC panel make sure that your AC volts are actually you a lot of them if they're wired properly are gonna actually tell you the voltage before you turn on the breaker as you go to destination marina's it's very important to realize that those destination marion's were not built understanding or knowing that boats were gonna have bigger and bigger electrical systems I have voters that come back from not destination marinas like marinas on Vancouver Island like really expensive ones and the dock power is not 240 it's not 220 it's not 200 it's like 190 right 190 volts because there's so many other big boats at the dock they're drawing so much power they can't give the power everywhere and these are big boats you know like a 50 foot boat 50 years ago was the largest boat I met a client once and his father was the bigshot lawyer of the city and he became the mayor and he had the largest bill in this city was like 50 feet 50 feet is not the largest boat in the city now okay it's not and so there's a lot of boats that are coming these marinas have huge power consumption and what's happening is before you plug in and you turn on your breakers make sure your voltage is high enough because if your voltage is too low and I had that happen to a client on a big boat this summer you'll break stuff low voltage means if the appliances are running can blow and that's expensive those are big bills they hurt it's not a couple dollars it could be tens and on the bigger the boats it's hundreds you could lose a lot of stuff on a boat for low voltage like really low voltage so use your voltmeter on your panel AC meter before you turn on that double pole breaker and say is my voltage high enough do I I know that I want to connect but should i right and make sure that it's not 90 volts like on a 120 volt circuit the other thing too that people and I can't emphasize this enough a lot of times the DC voltmeter is getting voltage at the panel not at the battery okay this is a really very important to you take away it's like taking your heart rate here versus at your heart there's a difference of your heart rate in two places you want to go back at the heart right at the source so a lot of times volts at the panel are volt measuring voltage not at the battery but at the panel and therefore voltage under load is different than voltage of the battery that's why you could have a battery at 12 eight and the panel might be at 12 4 right because there's voltage drop across that line so you why as an owner you want to know as my voltmeter actually connected at the battery or is it connected at the panel 99% or 95% of you are gonna have it at the panel why because it's much easier to run a wire for one foot than it is to run a wire for 30 feet if you're gonna go obviously annal analog meters are absolutely it's if I'm not gonna use the word they're not absolutes they're not accurate you're just using them as a sort of a gauge to see about an incremental change I've seen these to be off by 2 volts 2 volts like yeah I mean you need to change them out to digital or you take them and you say it doesn't matter what the number is you're looking for either a big change up or a big change down but the number itself is irrelevant it's a change indicator more than anything do not use it as a nominal indication of your battery capacity like I have an analog voltmeter on my engine panel before and I change it to one of those and was off by Oh more than 2 volts now I knew that so you sort of do an offset right you're like engine battery could be at 14 it's at 12 in the panel when it's a 10 it's a 12 you know like I knew there was two off by two and I was always looking I knew what the offset was and I was always looking for change and then I put an OLED display right something like that and now it's super accurate these are they're just I mean they're cheap back in the day these are still cheap these are like 20 bucks 10 bucks they're not expensive yeah the question is is it a good idea to replace analog meters with digital yes but this isn't expensive but this is very expensive so it depends on how deep your pockets are and what your pain point is on your boat this is not ten dollars this is a hundreds of dollars yeah so that's a problem okay I'm going to talk about battery monitors any questions on volt meters no pretty straightforward the the reason why you care I just want to emphasize why you care about a volt meter is that you might not care but one day you're gonna want help from someone and that someone might be your technician it might be me whoever it is and honestly if you don't have a voltmeter and you have an electrical problem and you don't have a multimeter on your boat there's no help to be given it's can't if I have no feedback what's your battery voltage don't know do this don't know ya battery don't know does his work don't know have you ever changed don't know I mean I can't walk you down a path if you can't walk you have no eyesight you've got to give me feedback like is there a path beneath us or not if there isn't and you can't tell me then the conversation is okay bring the boat back to a place then your trip ends and then bring a technician in with a multimeter and then you can solve it but if you've got good Volta meters on your panels it's amazing what you can do with very little tools if you know what you're doing so highly recommend make sure your volt meters on your panels are operational and and don't care that they don't so give them fixing get them fixed before you leave the dock if they don't so that one day when you're in the middle of nowhere you can get air support remotely okay it's incredible what we can do with a voltmeter on a panel for troubleshooting alternators inverter or chargers all those different things it's really powerful yeah and if it is not if the panel with something but it better be of the panel yeah ideally I'd rather know what happening at the heart of the battery if not then I can again I can play with it you know because information is power right for troubleshooting cause and effect cause and effect all right battery monitors battery monitors right here and I am a huge proponent of battery monitors I love these devices there are about anywhere between 225 to three-fifty Canadian they're great what the big thing about what they do is it sort of gives you a fuel gauge for your batteries and what that means is it tells you how much battery capacity you have in your batteries expressed as a percentage anybody can understand a percentage I'm at 50% 70% forget amp hours forget all of you thing I told you anybody can understand what 80% of a battery capacity is right I mean it's pretty easy and the other thing that's really amazing about them is they also tell you the rate at which you're discharging your batteries if you have a powerboat you'll have a very idea of correlating speed to cost right if you have a powerboat sail boaters don't really know that but if you're a powerboat trust me you have a very direct correlation between financial pain and your speed right and you know that you know that you just there's no other way around it you know that at this speed you're paying a lot and batteries don't give you feedback and it's really nice to be able to quantify what are at that given moment what are you putting on to the battery what is your current draw because the speed at which you are discharging your battery will directly affect the longevity of your battery right if you've got a 100 amp hour battery bank and you're discharging at 20 amps you know that that's that's not a lot of time to the 50% mark right but if you've discharging at 2 amps you're like oh pretty good I've got a lot left because it's not only where you are when you're driving a boat where your fuel is it's the rate at which you're going will affect how far you'll be able to get right your range is directly affected by your speed so if your fuel burning and you're like max throttle and you're just going full open throttle your fuel tank will not bring you as far and your range is limited if you reduce your fuel burn you'll go farther and batteries are the same it's a weighted scale so battery monitors actually take that into account and it will take the whole magic of should we recharge the batteries should we stop charging the batteries because remember earlier we talked about 85% how does someone know what 85 percent is without a battery monitor there's no way you couldn't how you guess I'm at 85% how the hell do you feel that you can't feel that there's no way but a battery monitor would tell you right and then that's the great thing is not only does it tell you when you should start charging remember I told you it's diminishing returns you Shango below 50 on a flooded below 30 on an AGM below 20 on a lithium or Firefly well that's your floor but your ceiling is 85 on all those batteries except lithium the great thing with this is it actually tells you what your bookends are right it takes the whole magic out right magic is not good on a boat you want deterministic you want to have predictable knowing where you are super super important when you're buying one of those make sure that you can get a battery monitor that expresses battery capacity as a percentage because every single crew member on that boat is gonna get you don't need to be an engineer to figure a battery percentage right and honestly you know you can say that everyone at 50 percent we got a recharge at 85 percent we stop it's your book it it's you know you don't need a big manual everyone gets it and I have a lot of owners where the maybe the male counterpart has a little bit of bravado doesn't care so much where the wiser one on board is like no you know what we're not we're not doing this like I'm not losing my fridge in the middle of the night because you don't want to recharge the batteries like we've spent X amount of dollars with all this produce everything in the fridge it's not gonna talk over the night we're gonna run the alternator or we're gonna do whatever needs to so that we can spend overnight without actually losing our battery bank and so then it's not a he-said she-said anymore it's like oh yeah we're good for the night and then you're not because then that way you've lost all your trust all your cred is gone it happens all the time to motors like are we good for tomorrow oh yeah we're good and then they're not and they're like you burn that bridge that bridge is done like there is no coming back from that bridge I think it's like yeah I'm gonna ask you again sure yeah and then it's like then you overcompensate you're always too much charging this actually takes the whole guesswork out of it battery monitors believe it or not are actually pretty complicated to install about 50% of them are not properly installed and the reason is the shunt is actually the shunt is the device that measures all the current going in out of the battery bank and oddly enough and unfortunately people don't understand that because they don't read the manual and they believe in shortcuts because they don't read the manual anything they're smarter than everyone else because I mean that's who we are and what happens is then you have these battery monitors that are giving these incredible readings like I have owners that come to me and say Jeff my battery my fridge doesn't draw any power it's amazing it's the most efficient fridge you've ever met it draws no power I'm like well that's amazing I am so envious of you like I'm like that's incredible yeah and my heater too my heater does not draw any power I'm like really you've got blowers and everything yeah no power at all who can see on the battery monitor I'm like okay great okay so let's recap and I saw the guy I'm like so why am I here yeah my batteries are draining all the time too fast I'm like hmm hmm all right how could those two be unrelated I wonder did you give me all the information and it's funny because then we laugh and he's like and we all end up laughing because you know what that's the thing about voting it's humbling I don't care what you do online you could be some of my clients are surgeons some of these have 6000 employees they're CEOs you go on a boat you will be humbled I don't care you could be an astronaut you could be whatever it doesn't matter boat ownership is humbling and then you're like oh so that's why my batteries are always empty but my fridge never drained my batteries I'm like yes because they didn't include the fridge in your shunt your shunt was your fridge was going directly to the battery because they wired directly the battery because it was added later on and they bypassed the shop and so was your heater and that's why you have a miraculous fridge or miraculous heater that draws no power but also your batteries were always drained like three times as fast as your battery monitor said and then you come up and you're like yeah that happened to me too and we all laugh about it but that's what it comes down to right so battery monitors if your battery monitor is doing something better than anyone else's battery monitor it's not because you're lucky it's because it's not actually incorporated or it's not calculated all right so the shunt is this little device over here and that device think and bypass it it's sort of like counting cars on a bridge you know if you're gonna count cars going on a bridge you're not gonna take just one entry point you're gonna put yourself probably in the middle of the bridge right a place where no one can bypass you right and the challenge is overtime installers maybe your shuttle is properly installed once but then the person who installs your heater bypasses it doesn't know you change your refrigerator and it's not working well and the Installer doesn't get the panel it's too complicated he's like you know what we're gonna have hardwired to the battery because it's too complicated you know I'm not gonna look at the panel the panels I don't know what to do and they bring it right to the battery and the negative they put right to the battery but what they don't realize is they're bypassing this shunt and most installers on your boat don't know everything about everything there's no it's not possible I only know electrical but that's a small little world that's my world but there's a bigger world out there and so there you're gonna have people that are doing heating systems that are doing refrigeration systems they're doing doom downriggers that are doing stereo systems and they don't understand what a shun does and then they end up bypassing it and that's how sound systems don't draw power that's how down riggers don't draw power that's how refrigerators don't draw power so they don't draw power is that you're not measuring it okay there is no magic on a boat it's just a sign that there's something wrong so the question is I have a battery monitor installed on my boat and the battery monitor is not showing me an increase of charge on my engine battery or my house battery my alternators running what happens is you've got to remember with batteries there's something called a common negative right we hear that word all the time common ground common negative your engine battery and your house battery are tied together via a negative cable otherwise they would not be common common means actually they're one and the same on the negative what probably happened is that battery monitor the negative side coming from the engine battery the house battery is probably going battery to battery and it's not going to this the common cable that's coming from your engine battery from this cable right here to this one here would have to go on there it bypasses the shunt and that's the issue is that the shunt is bypassed by the jumper cable that is putting the batteries common of course I was 100% and that's generally indication so if something's weird it's because something's wrong you know I've got solar panels think about you doing solar panel it's a great do-it-yourself everything is easy until you do it by the way right that's why we you know criticize hockey players right the net was open come on and it's like one of 3,500 kids you know plays bit like hockey how many hours it's the same thing solar you're thinking you got a controller two wires you go right to the battery you can bring the positive to the battery but if you bring the negative to the battery you bypass the shunt your solar panels will never output and I get calls all the time the solar panels don't work the solar panels don't work I'm like are your batteries getting charged yeah this is a voltage go up put a blanket on the solar panel okay all right measure the voltage take the blanket away there's a voltage increase yeah the voltage increases but there's no current I'm like how do you know the battery monitor tells me there's no current did you bypass the shun the shunt I'm like yeah you can't bypass the shunt when he is the shutter what are you talking about I connected the battery um I can but the battery monitor is not a spiritual device that is connected like telekinetic like mmm the battery says little it's it's it's like a counter like think about when they put those little nomadic sort of like hoses on the road to count cars this device if you bypass and you go on the sidewalk it's not going to count you like it needs to go through the shunt the shunt has to be a single choke point for everything so your negative has to be here on the DC Nation all of them every single one bang on all the negatives have to go through the DC through the DC distribution which in turn is a single choke point is your shunt effectively when you have a battery monitor you only have one cable connected to the DC negative of your battery it goes to the shunt from the shunt to you DC distribution and that's it nothing can ever bypass the device if it does you'll either have a fridge of this and draw power or you'll have solar panels never give you power or an alternator that doesn't give you power by the way all this stuff is hard and it's humbling and it's like golf that's just part of it it's you don't get angry about it you just go yeah it's a boat of course it can't be easy I tell that all the time to my team nothing's ever easy nothing until you do it everything is easy until you do it and then when you do it you're like oh yeah that was humbling everything there is not a single thing that can bypass a shunt you bypass the shot you don't measure it you don't measure it it's not inaccurate because if you're missing ABS going in or ABS going out then what the hell is your battery monitor for it's a fraction of what you're doing you don't want that yes all right so what that did is they screwed up the polarity of the shunt they God their wires so the question was when I charge my batteries it's negative and when I pull it's positive right it's the opposite of what it should be hearing what you're saying that your solar works fine positive amps your loads give negative amps then the polarity the shunt is fine to me if your alternator does negative it means your alternator doesn't work you got to replace your alternator look into that I think to me it's because you've just confirmed the polarity you can't have polarity right for one and not the other it's impossible there'd be all wrong or all right so it's not the shunt it might be your alternator alternators are not hard to test by the way it's not a painful thing it's not that bad and they're not that expensive and then in boat bucks it's not a bull buck I'm a voter - I understand bring it out of the Dow yes go ahead if you install a battery monitor and you're installing a shunt the tion has to be in line as a choke point for all things that are going in and out of your battery yeah forever not just now but later so this is an AC panel and remember I talked a little bit earlier how important it is to have a meter and a voltmeter it's essential to have a voltmeter an AC voltmeter and an ammeter is really gonna help it's disconcerting disconcerning to realize that I don't care how expensive your boat was you get about a three million dollar boat goodbye a million dollar boat you can buy a three hundred thousand dollar boat you can buy a 50 thousand dollar boat all boats have more AC loads than your Shore power can run and or even your generator doesn't matter everyone has to do load management on a boat unless you have a really big boat like if you have a huge boat then they'll start a second generator and they'll sink them but we're talking we're in the you know 125 range at this point you have an engineer on board and it's a completely different Star Trek right level but like if you're a normal person the reality is that all of us either have 30 amp Shore power a 50 amp or you can even have a generator it could be an 8 kilowatt it could be a 12 kilowatt it could be whatever you want generally you're gonna it's very easy for you to overload your generator and/or your Shore power especially Shore power because 50 M goes pretty quickly and so if you don't have an amp meter on your panel you're always gonna be frustrated the breakers are gonna concentrate at the dock because you don't know how to manage your loads you're gonna not be able to run your hot water a water maker your galley appliances your garbage compactor or not sounds silly but some boats have that but even on my boat I have a 30 amp Shore power receptacle right v 30 amp on a sailboat is pretty usual right up to probably 40 43 45 feet maybe around 50 they'll have to but 40 up to 45 on a sailboat you've got a 30 amp hot water tank is gonna draw easily 15 amps maybe up to 20 a heater like a little ceramic heater 12 amps a microwave 12 apps already there you got a hot water tank and you've got a short power and you've got a heater running you can't run anything else otherwise you gonna trip the breaker right you got a run load sequentially that's on a little boat and the big boats I have some clients that have 65 footers you know and they've got to run things sequentially to you know first they start making water maybe then after that they're gonna run their hot water tank and then they're gonna start running chargers and they're going to chargers but you've got to manage your panel you just have to it's just part of it it's just and if you don't want to manage it then you're gonna pop breakers and just you're just gonna get frustrated so get ready to start walking because you're gonna do it and if you have an amp meter at least you can start loading them up one at a time you go well I'm drawing 50 amps I got a 50 M shore power I can't draw more than 50 so around 4045 you gotta start like deciding what are you gonna run now until something is done and then you can start running else and it's like money honestly money's the same as a great analogy you can't do it all at once we all spread our expenses over time we're all doing that with money power is the same thing like money nobody has ever have enough and you got to be you got to sort of manage it slowly at a time because you can't do everything at once the polarity light we talked about that's essential and that is actually this little red light here if you don't have one on your panel you should absolutely get one and it's important because it tells you on some destination marina's believe it or not they're actually gonna have the polarity wrong the marine world is sort of a great world where you don't have to do things professionally and hence why I have a living otherwise if it was all done right I mean I would never repair anything because everything would be done right and Marina's will have you know people anyone why are there marinas in certain places destination because they're cost conscious they can't afford to bring an electrician norther they have one and so they get there's sort of general maintenance guy to wire the docks and you can wire a boat ACU and swim and swap the hot in the neutral and so that's what this light is for is to tell you that right now the neutral is energized not the hot and your if you have that on your boat you're one step away from death so there's two it's like first step would be putting a bullet in the gun and then and then the next one is then you roll it and then you pull the trigger so you're not guaranteed to die but the next one if you have another error on your boat which is a permanent connection between your DC ground and your AC neutral which house electricians would always do if they wired your boat because that's what it's like online and that's a common error about 10% of the boats have that so it's a gun with 10 chambers on it if you have that error which is 10% of us do because most people that wire boats are not professionals and they're just sort of amateurs and you have reverse polarity your whole engine block your sink your shrouds your through halls everything on your boat is gonna be energized with 120 volts and you can touch your engine block and not get electrocuted because it's like a bird on a wire because you're now your whole boat is at 120 the challenge is the 120 going in the water and that's where if you're in a port that has a lot of fresh water which is not highly conductive right so if you're if you're in a marina that is salt water only in no fresh water then the electricity is gonna go through salt water versus a person but if you're in a marina that has a lot of fresh water going in fresh water is not conductive but human beings are more conductive than fresh water and that's where the kids get electrocuted and die and they drown so those are pretty somber but that's literally what happened to the instructor of a byc down in Portland he lost his son like that almost lost his wife another kid almost drowned but his kid did drown and it was because of this situation reverse polarity combined with a neutral ground tie on a boat and every household electrician that would come in wire your boat would think that's who would be together because that's what they do in homes and again they can't be bothered to read a manual so it's not their fault honestly I don't blame them it's just the world is more complicated than we think it is so reverse polarity is a really big deal so if you see a reverse polarity light and you brought that up you should freak out now in your case it's not a reverse polarity it's a floating ground right but if you're in a marina that is sort of not a top-notch marina and it's sort of the middle of nowhere reverse polarity is a real threat oh yeah you're done and then pretend you're not they're like just get over it you're not at that marina you just you just move on question is if I turn off this breaker would it disable the power like am I going disconnect not on all boats and that's why the code is double the indeed that's the hot and that's a neutral some boats like my Catalina from nineteen ninety had a single pole on the hot only so you would literally have your whole boat energized and you'd stop the current from leaving double pole is you lock the front door and the back door single pole is you can come in the house but I'm not gonna let you leave the house by the other door hence why double pole is absolutely essential because if you have a reverse polarity and you have a single pole and you only have a pole on the hot then your whole boat is energized you're done it doesn't matter the robbers in the house he's just not leaving the front door the question is is there another way of checking if you have reverse polarity if you don't have it on the panel you some cords are gonna have it actually on the cord itself like some you know like new adapters they're gonna actually show it on the shore power cord this is a light this takes less than I mean if I did on my boat its minutes to install a reverse polarity liked minutes you know you have to have the right light drill a hole connect it but by the time it's done half an hour and it's done I mean there's no reason to not have a reverse polarity light and especially places like this in the state it would be criminal I mean the liability would be so intense you'd lose everything they'd probably go after you're in loss and they would go like this like you're done like litigation and the states is so intense there's no way you're gonna encounter that in the United States I mean it's a big deal they really worry about that because they'll take more than just your house right but in Canada people are a little bit more lacks right the so you you I encounter marinas that have reverse polarity it's not uncommon it's not uncommon it happens but that's one failure and then you have to have the other failure which is about 10% of us half so it's like a ten gun chamber right first you gotta have the bullet and then you just hopefully you're not one of the ten and if you're one of the ten then you're screwed there is absolutely and I see this all the time and I can't emphasize enough especially on AC panels whenever you're doing maybe some of you are gonna try to work on your AC panel no harm there it's like on a house right and nobody's stopping you from working on your boat it's your boat is a Wild West good that's the good news in the bad news right goes both ways the love of God please don't wire your whole boat like with one color you know or randomly assign colors depending on your personal preference right yeah so I've seen AC panels where certainly I mean it's disconcerning eye and we did a job recently huge job almost three weeks of work and I can't I mean at my library three works at work is a lot of money the only thing we did on that boat was fixing the MacGyver job that was done by the previous owner three weeks of work and I didn't touch the whole boat I just started the journey three weeks three weeks of insanity and a lot of it had to do with a lot of stuff like that just get it done you know like just want to use one wire for everything context-driven you know I always know that I'm driving on that side of the road so you should know not to drive on the left side of the road yeah you know that's my rule so you should adapt and then it makes it absolutely impossible for people to reverse engineer where they've done because there's no rhyme or reason it's random so it's very important to follow the code and the colors because then it makes things predictable right like we all drive on the right side of the road here in North America right because it's predictable you know like I always know that incoming traffic is gonna be on my left but the road you could drive on the left or the right it's just then unpredictable right and then you got to drive and you got to be like game on this is like Mad Max and that's what happens when people don't follow code is then either owners or technicians then you end up slowing like this you're like oh my god am I gonna die all the time because you don't know what you're encountering so this is what an AC panel looks like pretty complicated everything but that's basically what it is and honestly AC is probably the most simple thing on a boat there is there's nothing more simple than AC system on a boat that's it it doesn't get easier than that it's pretty predictable and very modular but that's what an AC system like looks like again we talked a little bit about this the conceptual diagram when you're adding panels on your boat I want to emphasize this because all of us over time are gonna be adding stuff and you see this all the time when we're doing electrical audits and you look back in like how did we get here well we didn't get it here at once it was always one more one more or just another one I'll do this I'll do that and then eventually you get to a point where you're like I need another panel like it's not enough like all might like 20 circuits are not switched like everything's always energized and you end up adding panels or sub panels we do that a lot now right where they have a boat and then we'll add another panel to add more breakers well you always want to do when you're either working with a panel or it's always doing a lot more than you think if you need 4 do at least 8 you know I often do 4 we'll put a 12 in because I anticipate growth we're always adding more stuff on a boat never just do what you need anticipate growth okay and the big thing too is so that's the spare breakers and the DC modern metering right here right if you've got a battery monitor you know you voltage here is really good for troubleshooting the difference between voltage of the panel like measuring heart rate here versus heart rate here it's better to have voltage at both places because if you've got it at the battery on your battery monitor I'd love to see what battery voltages at the panel because we're troubleshooting is great I got battery voltage of the battery but none of the panel I know it's not a battery problem it's a distribution problem why switches fuses you know you can chase it if you only have one reading then you've it's hard so metering at the panel is always essential you see how they have source selector switches here 1 2 3 you might have engine battery you know Jen said battery and thruster battery your house battery depends pretty rare that we end up changing panels but sometimes you're left with no other choice like will do that you know some bullet at one point you're like I can't work with this anymore like my panel has been outgrown by the loads on my boat and so we'll end up changing stuff on the boat and we'll end up putting new panels off but labeling is super pourraient right super important making sure you size the right breaker under signing the DC feed wire right a lot of times what we've seen is even on my Catalina I used to be a gauge 10 wire feed in the panel but gauge 10 is only 30 amps excluding voltage drop and then you start adding radar water pumps you know all these different things and then unrelated you know your voltage is terrible at the panel and things start breaking out and then people I can't use the panel anymore my previous owner why'd the fridge back to the batteries why because the panel was unreliable when it would turn on a 5 amp load would cause a voltage drop so high that the panel would drop the voltage and the fridge would stop working so then you end up taking shortcuts right and so it's really important sometimes as we add more and more stuff on a boat to really worry about that feed wire so that it can handle all those loads these are other things that you want to have like how many times of us have opened a DC panel and it's not enough accessibility it's for us to actually even open the panel right the wires are so short you're looking at it make sure that you can actually not just close it but open it again right into cure lights and it's funny I had another technician well actually nice technicians but a client he was an electrician and he was telling me he always knew if the technicians that worked for him as electricians were good or not based on their need nests and that's a really good sign for electricians if you're not organized and you don't care about your workmanship generally that means you're not detail-oriented and if you're not detail-oriented you should be an electrician I've never except once in my life have ever seen something badly installed that was neat only once one boat once every time that I've been on a boat where it failed it was it looked like chaos and was bad I've only been on one boat where it looked perfect and it was a problem because that person is always worried about details everything sort of bothers them you got a deeply disconnect everything label everything the wires are not going to be long enough you bring to distribution blocks you take the distribution blocks bringing them back to sir because that's how all the bolts are built now there's no more boat almost that is built even Beneteau does it like that again Joe no they all do it they'll bring all the circuits to the sort of a point in the back of the panel where the circuits are terminated and then it'll take from that point to the panel so you have junction points that's the this way to do it like Grand Banks does it like that like North Pacific doesn't like that Fleming does it like that North often doesn't like that I did on my catalina when I change my panel I went okay everything I'm gonna go like what are the builders doing I mean the builders are avoiding pain they want their boats to be reliable and so we ended up putting literally distribution in the back all the circuits go on the distribution and they were long enough to get to the distribution those busbars and then from there then there's terminal strips and then I take new pigtails and I bring them to the panel and when I drop my panel now I can have my panel all the way down like I'm not looking through a crackling I can't see because all the previous owners we're always making the wires too short the wires not long enough oh well that's tomorrow's problem you know and then you can't open the panel you got to undo a connection to draw the panel further and then undo another connection to bring it down further and then it just becomes a nightmare yeah sometimes it's worth doing right because the panel is the heart it's not the heart but it's it's a nervous system of your electrical system this is what a nice panel would look like that's a retrofit that we did on a boat but that's love right I mean it's love it takes time right and that's where those terminal strips are right everything is terminated right so all the existing wire got terminated here all labeled on both sides and then new pigtails are coming coming in and there's drip loops and it's it makes a difference notice this is a shore power receptacle right if you have a generator or not doesn't matter the galvanized isolator is installed on the grounding connection right that green wire on your Shore power receptacle and notice how I'm installing it really really close to the shore power receptacle that device stops straigh DC current from going over an AC grounding connection okay and what it does is it protects you for about I think about two volts of stray DC current happening over your AC grounding connection that device is not expensive it's worth every penny you can buy them as failsafe there's no single reason why a boat shouldn't have one other than for gala tea or but honestly this is not an isolation transformer in Canada something like that failsafe is about 400 450 for this device this will save your underwater medals even as a sailor you might have an expensive prop or not some props are pretty expensive your propeller shaft your strut all those things if a ver if ever there's a bad boat beside you you could have the perfect boat the perfect boat and you have a bad neighbor or that neighbor doesn't even know its back some people love their boats too they love their boat and something happened on their boat it's an accident and the two boats there could be a difference in potential and it's possible for your boat to be used by that boat to go back to shore and that can be really really serious very very serious and you want a device to protect yourself in a marina there's a lot of marinas that are hot use that word it's common those are expensive bills very expensive it takes a long time to fix you know you got to haul the boat out again it's measured in weeks and months it's not going to turn around it's not going to be a day and then you can really affect your boating season so galvanic isolate devices but here's the tip you actually have to have it installed near and nothing again like the shunt can bypass this device if you install it at the panel I can see a lot of people do because they're like oh it's good son pal what does matter well they don't realize this and it gets ends up being bypassed and if it's bypass it's ineffective it's useless it's a waste of time and money so it needs to be a choke point and that's why we always install them and the code is to always install them as close to the AC shore power receptacle as possible so that nothing can ever bypass that so reduced Ray Lewis low DC currents on shore power and it's to protect your underwater metals straight current not not like you remember our dissimilar metals underwater I mean even if you're in the middle of Pacific Ocean just floating if you've got an underwater stainless steel propeller shaft and you've got a you know propeller yeah you need a sink one of them is gonna go to dissimilar metals and they're connected but that's a slow thing right like I changed my sinks once a year once every six months one every two years but when you have straight current corrosion that can the damage can happen in a month two months so your zinc's were great before but then suddenly they're gone because they're not just protecting your boat they're protecting other boats and they get chewed through right away okay when you buy one you basically buy one with the different amperage either 50 or 30 amps and you want to make sure you get a fail-safe one meaning if it ever something inside ever gets damaged it's still going to be a wire they used to be open they would not be a wire and then you'd go back to what I was joking around like Edison days of electricity two wires and so that's why it's essential again a fail-safe one they call them Pro safe FS 30 s okay and basically that's what it is you see that little Newmar it's again same idea so you buy them a 30 amp or 40 and if you have multiple short power outlets you're gonna have multiple volts so like I did a Grand Banks recently you know a bunch of one at the for one IVF we put - question is Jeff I have a boat in a marina i hollow my boat every year and my sinks are in a good condition do I need one of these and and the problem is that the past is not an indication of the future this device does not protect your boat against dissimilar metals on your boat that have a natural corrosion you're not you're not you're not protecting this will if you didn't have a zinc for example on your boat this doesn't protect your boat from the normal corrosion that happens there you're protecting against outside influences so the challenge is saying why didn't have a problem next year this last year that means I won't have a problem in the future the problems are not related to your boat it's the boats in your area so like for example two years ago there was a marina downtown that there was like a dozen boats some of them were like crazy damaged like 50 70 thousand dollars worth of damage from one bow that went rogue and that owner was not a bad owner was a very good owner paid his bills did great work nothing wrong with it but it affected multiple boats around it there is a device and that basically disconnects the battery it's a low voltage disconnect battery switch and it says when it senses too low of a battery voltage and says you know what screw it you don't have any more battery voltage I'm disconnecting and it's a battery switch that disconnects the batteries or not the batteries loads on the batteries but it's like not for 300 or 400 amps it's like 50 amp circuit so there's nothing to disconnect an inverter from batteries other than you not enabling either having a low voltage disconnect enabling that on the inverter charger you can do that saying at 12 volts I want you to disconnect the inverter you can have that or you disabled the inverter yourself but there's no device in between the batteries in the inverter charger question is I don't have a reverse polarity light on my boat but I have an isolation transformer okay first of all isolation transformers aren't perfect there is no downside to an isolation transformer other than weight cost and space every boat wants one every single boat other than those three factors when you have an isolation transformer it doesn't matter what happens at the shore never polarity is irrelevant on your boat well it's not the protection it's beyond that it's it's like you have Superman on the inside of your shore power like you're you're completely immune to it you're immune to both polarity and straight current it's it's Superman at your shore power all it's all boats that have a lot of crazy amount of underwater metals like sea race stuff like that like have a lot of stuff it's it's a box that's guaranteed it's not even an option they all have it any boat that's expensive has an isolation transformer you don't even have to tell me your boat I know your boat's expensive there's another way because the nice station transformer is a couple grand 3 grand it weighs 250 pounds it's this big everybody wants one I want one well where am I gonna put on my boat 250 pounds on a sailboat whereas the space and can I afford one and my underwater medals are not that expensive but if you've got a powerboat like north ovens liens like all those boats any big boat guaranteed is gonna have an isolation transformer and then reverse polarity is irrelevant you could plug in every marina that is reverse polarity they fix the polarity on the isolation transformer and on top of it Straker and corrosion you're completely immune the only problems you'll ever have on your boat with corrosion are the ones you're gonna cause inside your boat hence everybody wants one but wait costs in space
How To: Marine Electrical Seminar
How To: Marine Electrical Seminar – Introduction - Episode 1
Understand and Wire Your Boat’s Electrical System
How To: Marine Electrical Seminar - Charging Sources - Episode 5 of 12
Understand and Wire Your Boat’s Electrical System
How To: Marine Electrical Seminar - Wiring Essentials - Episode 8 of 12
Understand and Wire Your Boat’s Electrical System
How To: Marine Electrical Seminar - Trouble Shooting Tips - Episode 7 of 12
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