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[Music] good morning everyone good morning thank you for a Bluewater cruising Association for hosting this event your alternator output is connected over a very tiny wire for 3 feet to the starter solenoid voice post in turn that starter solenoid post is connected to an on/off battery switch and in turn that battery switch is connected to a battery this could be an off one all both to switch it doesn't matter believe it or not a lot of boats that have been macgyvered people thought the switches were hassles and they removed them a lot of engines are on switched now they're like well why would I have a battery switch when I can just turn the engine on or off of the key it's a good idea until you have a stuck starter and you can't turn off your starter from keeping starting and your boat catches on fire and that happens by the way every summer here all the time I get called in for that stuff for surveys all the time stuck starters are not a mystical unicorn that we've never seen but I only imagine it's a real thing they do happen and if you don't have an on/off battery switch the only way of doing it would be disconnecting the wire here or there and when there's smoke in your engine room the least likely probability is for someone to go down in the engine room with a wrench and be blinded and find the battery and disconnect the right wire generally what happens is the hatch gets closed back and they're like and this was fun let's get into the dinghy and let's get out of here so your alternator is connected right to that post right here and if it's an internal regulator and we'll talk about external regulators lighten right now honestly it's an on/off thing what you're generally worried about and and and this happens 95% of the time so it's gonna make troubleshooting and alternator easy 98% of the time the alternator burnt out it's that simple nothing else it's not external this wire never fails you could have turned that battery switch off when the alternator is running and you broke the alternator and ie broke means you need to bring to shop to have it fixed but honestly when an alternator isn't working 99% of the time it's the alternator diet and the L turnin died because alternators live in very warm environments they're asked to do too much because our battery banks are huge compared to a car and we're asking them to do way too much work and they're undersized for the battery bank that we put in and they're working at full capacity for way too long and it's super hot engine room and they end up overheating and burning up so troubleshooting an alternator is pretty straightforward because realistically you're not really looking at anything other than if my alternator is working or not and if it's not working the way to know that is to and I talked about this earlier to a few people you are not connected to shore power because you don't want your battery charger to be working you turn your turn the key on on the ignition but you don't actually start the engine you just see what your battery voltage is and your battery voltage might say 12 6 might save 12 8 12 4 it doesn't matter it says some sort of voltage you start your engine battery voltage is gonna drop 10 point 5 10 volts 9 point 5 volts because you're starting and then you're gonna let go the button or the key because it's a momentary thing right a starter is a momentary button and then suddenly the voltage is going to start rising back up from ten point five or nine point five and it's gonna get close you know over time even if you didn't have an alternator the battery voltage would go slowly back to twelve point six or where you started maybe make it point one less but it's not gonna kill a battery to start an engine especially if your engine started relatively well so you're gonna get back to around 12 for 12 six and maybe thirty seconds later as long as your engine is sorely not at idle some alternators work at idle but not all you want to be about 1200 1400 RPM you could be not in gear but you need to rev up 13 about 12 1400 RPM then they pretty much all kicking at that point you turn it on or you rev up and now you should see your battery voltage go above where you started and if the battery voltage does not go from where you were at the beginning before starting your engine let's see you were at 12.5 and it never goes above 12.5 your alternator is done it's done it's finished black and white it's over there's nothing else to it you know especially if you're 99% of the people that have this now if you're one of the few people that have rewired their alternator the house battery and your engine battery only gets a charge through an ACR then yes it's more complicated but 99% of us have this so unless your boat is sort of custom I've touched it or someone knows what they're doing touched it or you're a pro and you touched it pretty much all of us have this setup this setup here is pretty rare question is that a better setup yes this is a much better setup because it's a better setup because it's better to have a high-output alternator connected to a house battery and not go through an on/off switch yeah this is not a it's not just an opinion I mean it's Nigel Calder's everything everyone agrees it's just it's more wiring because then you have a large wire going to your starter and you have a large wire going to your alternator that's too large wires and people that build boats aren't dreamers they're accountants and if you're not an accountant and you're a boat builder you're not gonna be there for long it's it's an expensive business and if you don't count dollars then you're not gonna be in business so boat builders are businesses they're not just dreamers and so that's why they end up doing one wire that does two things and notice that's why there's bi-directional arrows when you start your pull when the engine is started it pushes back right so it pulls to start the engine and as soon as the alternator is on then it goes back to the battery hence why all these are directional arrows here the alternator never pulls really it only pushes right so it pushes current back into the battery but that battery is rarely the engine battery because the engine battery doesn't need a charge the engine battery needs a little bit of a charge and it's gonna get it through an echo charge a combiner or something like that and that's where sometimes it's not as simple to troubleshoot the custom because the custom needs a better understanding of the system but luckily 99% of have this so it doesn't matter now if I've been on your boat 90% of you have this don't do it for everyone depends but if I'm gonna touch your alternator of guaranteed I'm gonna do this the ACR would hook up right here on that battery and it would be a CR would be in the middle and then you'd have an ACR in between the two batteries okay but I remember AC ours are not great for everything they also give you a problem if you have a custom setup there's still a battery switch between the battery and the starter solenoid as there should be by the way at least 20% of you don't have that because the owner thought it was stupid no joke you you should have a battery switch between a starter and a starter solenoid that between a starter battery and a starter solenoid you should have a battery switch you can have your alternator directly connected to battery via fuse bypassing the switch because we talked about it alternator goes to untwist distribution yeah question was unrelated troubleshooting is there any correlation between an inboard/outboard for a 350 engine a 350 engine is gonna help it's it's gonna always be this 100% never this you can't really change it yeah and always this and like for example I know the mercury outputs about 350 about 30 amps of output of alternator up to 40 amps of alternator output at reasonable speeds so they're they're they're putting bigger and bigger alternators on all boards they know that there's even like I think every Ruud has huge outputs now on even smaller engines like 100 100 and worse power 125 horsepower engines it depends on the spec you have to read but yeah there there there now inclined outboard manufacturers are inclined to put larger and larger alternators than just smaller in the past they were pretty small on our boards didn't think they needed it but they realize now that Alborz drive big boats to write as we know there's no limit now while there but there's you can have pretty big boats with just Albertson so it's an option now to have pretty big alternators and you can have a really reasonable alternator on an outboard as you would with an inboard engine short answer yes question was is it a good idea if you've got an alternator in an engine room and it's pretty warm to put a blower to blow air in or out and absolutely on my boat I did it I run my blower every time I turn my engine on every single time I take the air out because there's air cool air pretty much everywhere and I'm sucking I literally have the intake of the air is right behind the alternator like I have it within six inches I suck warm air out of there all the time and then cold air comes from everywhere around the boat it's not colder outside than inside so I take the warm air out of the boat there's cold air everywhere inside the boat it's not really warmer or colder inside or outside the engine room is hot so I remove warm air out from the engine room to keep my alternator cool to try to maximize the life of my alternator when you have your boat and you are connected to Shore power should you have your Shore power beyond when you start your engine and is it okay if you are or not correct yeah you it's a little bit like having your battery switch and I you know it's funny you got to be really careful and I have had the same problem I also thought the same thing before when I got my boat I was like well what does it matter it matters because what happens is a battery charger should not be helping your battery start your engine that'd be one of the first reasons again back to the point I said yesterday there's no place to know that your engine battery doesn't start your engine on its own without a battery charger right like it for example if I need help getting out of a chair right I want to know that right away I don't want to always have help getting out of the chair if I can't get out of the chair myself I'm gonna ask myself why and if you have your battery charger add the dock charging you're engine battery when you're starting your engine your charger is gonna help charge run that engine or start it and the problem is when you're back somewhere at an anchorage in the middle of nowhere you're a battery charger is not there to help so why it happens a lot that people run their engine start it at the dock and it it's okay it's not great but they don't notice hay but they're leaving they want to go they get to a destination now they go to start the engine and it's not enough because sometimes you're only 10 20 percent off from not being able to start your engine and if the charger is enabled you won't know that you're not good enough on your own so that'd be one of the reasons the second reason is also that a battery charger is basically helping to run the batteries to charge them and a starter puts a crazy load and the moment that you press the starter solenoid and you're starting to crank over and it's maybe it's a slow start 2 seconds 3 seconds 5 seconds 10 seconds your charger sees that and says I got a help this is all hands on deck I don't know what's going on with the battery voltage we've got to do something and so then the charger starts pumping 40 amps 50 amps 101 hundred 50 amps into that battery and then when you disc stop suddenly like suddenly you take the moment you take your finger off that starter key or momentary on suddenly the loads are gone the charger doesn't have time to react as quickly as you did the moment that momentary on what it causes is a voltage spike because the charger is not an instantaneous device there's no such thing as instantaneous there is a reaction time to everything and that reaction time could be I don't know 10 milliseconds 100 milliseconds but pointone of a second is still too long if suddenly you had a battery bank that was pretty good shape you're pumping 150 amp on it thinking it's dead but it's only dead because you started an engine suddenly the 600 applet or 400 Apple or 300 and as gone and then suddenly the charger doesn't react as quickly as you disconnecting the load from it and the voltage spike goes up and when you have a voltage spike you have problems so our two good reasons for why never starting your engine when connected to shore power and having your short and having your charger enabled and charging the very battery that you are starting the engine from okay we're gonna talk about this one is intimidating as it should this is an external regulator and it's related to alternators this is probably one of the most difficult things to troubleshoot on a boat if you have an external regulator on your boat you need to truly understand how it works to troubleshoot it it can be haphazard it's probably one of them we get more alternator regulator service calls from other businesses than even clients a lot of businesses don't even know how to solve this problem I get calls from builders from other businesses that would call us in to solve this problem that's how hard this problem is they don't call us in to solve any type of problem this is their above their pay grade at this point and that is not the alternator itself but the alternate isn't work and it has and it's connected to an external regulator and you can see the number of wires that are connected to this device to give it the magic that we talked about right this is a magical device it's an incredible device I do probably hundreds a year it's awesome we'll do maybe two a week three a week in the summer for a week five a week there's nothing wrong about this device but you have to understand how it works to troubleshoot it so let's talk about the things that you need for this to work first of all you absolutely have to have power coming into this right so the power is going to come right here coming down it can it shouldn't come from the alternator itself but a lot of people take shortcuts and are gonna connect at the back of the alternator you shouldn't do that but some people are gonna do that it should come from the battery that's the first thing if it doesn't get power if your TV's not plugged in the wall it's never gonna turn on first step you got to have power second step this device will not turn on unless it receives ignition power that's actually like pushing the TV or the mic or even pressing on if you don't have the ignition power and your ignition key is not on this thing will never turn on because this only turns on if the ignition key is on and if it's wired properly next thing this then has power coming in it has it's been told to turn on and this has a brain and over a period of about I don't know a minute some amount of time is gonna say okay we're ready because it doesn't want to load the alternator ret at the right moment when it starts it's gonna wait about a minute or there's a sort of a timer and I say we're going to wait about a minute until the engine sort of running smoothly and then we're gonna load up the alternator and it does that by the feel voltage and the field voltage is really what our foot does on an actuator driving our car our foot doesn't move a mile to make a car go from zero to 100 miles an hour it moves an inch and that inch is the difference between going dead slow or stop to full throttle right that's what it is that feel voltage is what actually dries your alternator that's what it does and that field voltage is not coincident lean blue and that's how they want it ball Mar wants it in blue and that's what drives that alternator in turn that alternator will send men attack output back to here and that's how your rpm gauge on some engines some engines take rpm from the flywheel some of them taking them from the alternator so way better to have it from the flywheel but a lot of us get the alternator or the RPM of the engine from the alternator rotation and they actually get tacked from an alternator and the other thing that can happen is if ever and I've had that I troubleshoot this problem this summer we had a client that was complaining of his alternator working intermittently but what was happening as the v-belt was not properly tighten and the alternator was overheating remember we talked about that yesterday if you rub two hands together you're gonna warm up right imagine rubbing but like at you know remember this alternator the pulley ratio might be rotating 8,000 rpms a minute right your engine's rotating at 2,100 2500 rpm the ratios might be 2.7 so maybe it's rotating at 6,000 7,000 rpms a minute if it's slipping that's a hell of a lot of slippage and so that's belt slippage causes the the alternator overheat in part or if it's working too hard and it's being asked to charge a completely depleted battery bank as a function of its size if that alternate is too small for a battery bank it's gonna work too hard right and so after a few hours of leaving the dock guess what would happen the alternator temperature sensor would come in here and it would say the alternator is too hot and it was throttle back on the field it would be like a limiter on a car saying you know what you know I should have had a limiter on my car when I was growing up when I was bringing my parent's car I should not have been able to go above 80 kilometres an hour I should have been dead slow zone but my parents didn't have that so I went full throttle and the field voltage is basically then throttled on the alternator when it senses your alternator temperature sensor senses of a alternators too warm and it can also do that it can correct for battery voltage but it can also over correct well not over correct but say hey you know what the battery is now way too warm we need to throttle output as well let's say you've got a really big alternator a small battery back this battery might must overheat it's like eating too fast too quickly right we overheat too right you can't you got to pace yourself right and so what happens is this battery gets warm and then it senses and it sends a code to this device and it says you know what battery temperatures to warm throttle back on the field voltage and that is how an external regulator works external regulars are great everybody wants one every single person the only reason you wouldn't do it is because like most of us we have limited funds that's the only reason besides money there's no downside to this device about in Canadian dollars about $600 there's no downside to this device other than cost and cost is a pretty gap damn good reason but it's there's no like technical downside to an external regulator so the the power from this alternator this is very interesting you got you got a large cable coming down you can take the power tap right from this post right here or you could take this power all the way back right here at the battery you see that so there's two wires power comes from the battery all the way here and then all the way back here or you could have the power wire this come all the way back to the battery well no it's it's like a starter solenoid it's powered at the beginning before the alternator starts by the battery the moment the alternator starts it's then powered by the alternator so the question was is my regulator powered by the alternator or the battery well before it starts it's powered by the battery the moment the alternator starts then it's powered by the alternator because the alternator is higher voltage in the battery and hence the alternator is running the gear okay it's complicated what you would do is you remove variables right so when I start troubleshooting one of those what do I say I say okay you know what make sure your alternator temperature sensor is not shorted or your battery temperature sensor is not shorted let's remove them from the device let's remove those up from the device because solving a multivariable equation is hard so the best approach to solve multivariable equation is to remove variables right first step remove that battery temperature sensor remove that alternative temperature sensor next make sure there's power coming to that device right coming from the battery if you've got power there then measure the ignition wire make sure there's ignition power coming down if it that's energized and lights up once it's turned on after about a minute make sure that you see a volt field voltage if you see a viel voltage and this doesn't turn on then you know the problem is inside the alternator and that's how you troubleshoot that not too hard when I say it but yeah question in the back it the question would be how much field voltage you have in the wire full field means full battery voltage which means maximum output of the alternator and then anything from that it could be 5 volts 6 volts 8 volts a fraction a full field is gonna make that alternator work at a fraction of full output as it should as it gets near the top right same thing when we on-ramp imagine Automan full throttle you're trying to get to 300 kilometres an hour never driven but I can only imagine how fun it would be 300 kilometres an hour you like full acceleration and be like incredible but at one point once you get close to 300 you started got a throwback right you're not going full acceleration to 300 and then stop you're gonna throttle back as you get to 300 right you're gonna pull back on the actuator and that's what that field voltage does because remember this is a sect of lis makes an alternator a smart charger and goes through Balch absorption float question would be how foolproof or reliable is an external regulator I'd say 15 20 years it's it's pretty much like I never replace them unless they got flooded but then I mean there's other problems the alternator is getting changed too and you know it's it's pretty reliable yes and the back if the alternative question is what happens is if this blows while the alternator is running if this fuse blows or is turned off when the alternator is running and if you don't have a Scotty diode in the back of this alternator which is a balm our product you'll blow up your alternator you can't ever ever ever black and white stop a car with a wall you can do it absolutely yeah your car will stop guaranteed hey we'll stop but you do not have a car no more you have a wreck and this would become a wreck you can't stop current by disconnecting it from the battery it's that moment will destroy the alternator and I've done that by the way I did that I remember exactly it was about mid May 2006 and I blew up my alternator hence me being here today yeah question the field voltage when it gets throttled back the alternator output throttles back a good way to stop an alternator from outputting would be to cut back the field voltage altogether disconnect the field voltage the alternator doesn't work you don't damage the alternator and that's completely fine but you cannot disconnect an alternator output on the output you can disconnect an alternator from outputting by disconnecting the field voltage but you cannot disconnect an alternator from outputting by disconnecting the output you can stop an input but you can't stop an output does that make sense hey nailed it I wasn't sure about that okay all right another question in the back yeah and you're right on the point is that was brought up as some boats you need to pull a cable to kill the air to diesel and some boats you press a button but I think the button is just a version of there's a little lever there that's activated electrically to shut the air to the diesel you shut air to a diesel you kill the diesel
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