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[Music] good morning everyone good morning thank you for a Bluewater cruising Association for hosting this event I'm just we're going to recap before we start looking at each of these individual devices again and not this time looking at why you need one or how you should buy one but looking at how you should troubleshoot it if you do have one so we're going to be looking at chargers alternators solar panel and controllers fuel cells battery Isolators battery combiners AC DC generators and we're even going to be looking at a gavel Ike Isolators as well I want to emphasize this is so important everyone here the magic of unswept versus switched distribution is going to give you a lot of grief on your boat and I I've got bad news bad news is most of you have a wire that should be unsweet on the switch and a wire that should be on the switch is untwist and that's not going to manifest itself until you turn a battery switch off or something that you would expect doesn't so you need is some sort of a failure everything's working but then you turn something on and they still work and you're like what the hell and so this is an incredibly important concept we were on a boat last week battery combiner on a really nice boat you know 40 foot sailboat pretty expensive sailboat you know not it's it's production but it's a very expensive production boat and someone had installed the battery combiner and the battery combiner was installed on the switch side and that mean that you could turn the battery switches off and if the battery charger was on the house loads were actually powered from the engine battery via the battery charger and all this magic happens when things aren't correct so that's what we're going to be looking at right now is we're gonna look at each of those and I'm gonna share with you the lessons that I've learned from working on all of your boats and gonna be sharing the common knowledge of troubleshooting I would say troubleshooting is probably of my weekly life I work about maybe 70 I'd say I do about 25 hours of troubleshooting over the phone 25 hours of my life is it gets to me and then people need help and I walk them through over the phone and so and that's not what the technicians do they do troubleshooting on their own and then collectively all that information gets shared amongst all of us because we find cool things or things that are weird we find interesting and then we ended up sharing with one another and so with that I'm gonna get started question is how do you basically know where my switch distribution is and the likelihood is you untwist most likely it's not named and it's not somewhere most what happens on a lot of boats to be honest it's gonna be you're gonna see if you've got for example a Beneteau boat they're gonna have stacked about 20 connections on the positive side of that battery connection right there you'll see that you'll see them you look at them and there's literally that amount of connections on the back side of a battery switch because they're it's one connection at a time the UNT's even the switch distribution and a lot of cases doesn't exist it's a post or it's the battery switch itself and they're gonna sack a bunch of connections on there it's hard it's hard that's the problem it's really hard people take shortcuts now if you had a brand new and let's say for example North Pacific or a brand new Grand Banks you've got a Fleming I don't know you got a swan or you know a high-end boat or even a trawler like a American tug a Nordic tug yeah you're gonna be able to find this but if it's sort of an older boat they didn't they're basically saying well isn't the battery post here the same as this and while it's above the code I shouldn't have more than four but does it really matter if I have six and then you'll have six or seven or eight connections on the top of a battery post and they're trying to cut corners because that buzz bar there costs over 150 bucks so they're trying to remove it and they're trying to remove this one because that's also $150 so if they don't have to install it's $300 you can save and so they start jerry-rigging and that's a problem is this stuff needs to exist it's certainly on my boat when I work on a boat I can guarantee it's on but is it on everybody's boat the short answer is probably not you're gonna need to sort of understand oh that's the unsweet distribution because I always have power on that post it's almost like having it connected directly in the battery but not in the battery so the short answer is it's really hard to tell okay question fuse blocks should they be switch or on switch it really depends on what is connected to the fuse block yesterday we talked about this concept that bilge pumps should be unswept right carbon monoxide detector unswept radio memory unswept now what is a connection that could be connected there you could have here for example a VHF radio not a VHF let's do another one VHF good as actually should be on switched it could be anything could be a downrigger you know you have a boat with a downrigger you don't have an on/off circuit breaker at the panel and that connection is gonna simply be unsweet it's gonna be a switched connection add a fuse block that you only turn the downrigger and one of the condemned riggers actually connected because the challenge is a lot of us have way more circuits than circuit breakers remember I was joking earlier that the circuit breaker on my boat on my Calley no 36 should be like a household fridge door well I probably have no joke probably eighty circuits on my boat and my panel has only 24 circuits on it so how is it that I have well then I say well I might not turn the fan at the DC panel the fan is gonna be turned on at defend so I don't turn on the fan and the panel and then turn on the fan add the fan I could simply connect it at a fuse block and the fan has a switch that's on and off and so my fan is always energized as long as this switch is energized and that's how I do it yeah the question and you're right the where is my fuse block the fuse block could be hidden behind a DC panel it could be hidden under somewhere like you dropped down it could be in a cubby you know it could be a place that's not obviously super visible but visible enough and accessible enough no problem so we do design that's a big part of what we do I mean collectively our company does about 200 designs a year of oates I'll never work on physically the clients are in South America Malaysia Saudi Arabia Abu Dhabi Middle East they're everywhere around the world every probably state in the States Kentucky Alabama Louisiana Missouri New Jersey like I there's designs go into all these different places we do electrical design it's a huge part of your business now it's it's about 20% of our business is just creating schematics for owners around the world where we just give like an architect I hear you go built you know you can build it yourself you can have someone else build it but we're we're really just being sort of like an engineer you just give them plants and you can build to that plan so yeah we definitely do that we're launching on our website and I've been wanting to do it but I don't have the time sort of different sort of testimonials and some of this commodity literally on big boats like the you know hundred footers or 150 footers you know it's this thick it's you know 200 pages of design after design after design and the pages are like this big you know it's crazy so it depends but my boat I understand what you want I unfortunately that I'm not ready but yes we do we do real have samples of typical designs going out of our website I just haven't come to the time to do that yet okay any other questions before we move forward well good all right excellent okay we're gonna start with something that everyone should have on their boat anybody want to take a guess at what the next thing that everyone has on their boat that's on this slide anybody has an idea what's a popular item on this side that pretty much everyone should have on their boat alternators a good one charger when a star in charger if you don't have a charger on your boat you're pretty lucky that means that you don't have any loads on your boat most of us a show have hands of anybody here in the class that doesn't have a battery charger on their boat everybody has the battery charger yeah that's right yeah everybody has a charger it's pretty rare to have an alternator only boat right where you have no other means of charging your boat other than an alternator that's pretty rare pretty rare right okay so what can go wrong here right so you got to remember what do we say at the beginning we said you start at the beginning and the beginning for a battery charger is not the batteries it's the power that feeds the battery charger right so the first step you got to ask yourself is my battery charger will never work unless I have AC on board and AC can come from shore power or it can come from a generator right but if you're not connected to shore power and or you're not running a generator don't look further for wondering while your battery charger doesn't work and I know it sounds like a silly question but I get that all the time there people are out on an anchorage their battery charger literally not connected shore power and they're wondering why their battery charger doesn't work because it sounds silly but it isn't a lot of people think that battery chargers are powered by an alternator or their engine and they aren't battery chargers take AC in to create DC so without AC you can't get a battery charger to work now you could have AC coming in to the panel and another thing I mentioned and how often did I mention this this concept of turning on the circuit breaker I was on a boat last week maybe two weeks ago on a 60 footer sure enough again panels pretty intimidating lots of breakers on the panel lots and lots of breakers and guess what the owner did not know that there was a battery it didn't say battery charger it said converter and the owner like what's a converter turned it off batteries were dead why didn't know that converter was aka battery charger and relatively this happens to all of us as motors when we get not a new boat but a new boat to us the learning curve for getting a boat is measured in years not months if you think you know your boat after a few months yeah it's I tell people you're like 2 years I'm like oh no you're you're you're still on the journey like it's gonna take you about five years to really know her and then you're gonna be like yeah I think I got it and that's if you're involved and you really are into it if you're sort on the peripheral and you don't boat you'll never get to know your boat never so breaker and what you want to do is turn the breaker off turn the breaker on see a change are the lights lighting up on the charger there's always a some sort of indicator light on a battery charger right there's always some things saying this is on either the needles gonna go up there's gonna be a bunch of bulbs that are gonna light up LEDs something is gonna tell you that this thing is energized right and if you're turning on the breaker on and off and you it's always looks dead then you know that either the devices failed or the breaker that feeds as if Isis failed and most likely breakers don't rarely fail if you've got power AC power of the panel you turn on the breaker that little LED light turns on and then you don't have power here and this thing doesn't light up it's dead now you know what how many times a year do I get a call from someone that had water damage in the engine room a water pump failed water was literally spraying everywhere in the engine room and what did they do they simply wipe things with a rag two months later a month later their charger dies I'm like did you have water down in your engine room nope any flooding nope well we did have a water pump that failed there's a lot of salt water that went everywhere I'm like is the charger nearby yeah it got wet but it wasn't immersed I'm like yeah but it's a piece of electronic equipment and this thing is not waterproof in any world and these buttons can't have any water go to them and you probably have corrosion and more often than not the battery charger will die it's generally sometimes it's gonna be because of water damage not literally being immersed but simply because of a water pump failing in energy room and spraying salt water everywhere you've got to be able to see some sort of light turn on into this device if it's dead dead don't keep going now the next thing you need to worry about is these fuses right here and right here now on most cases you won't have a fuse because people don't read the manual right but if your insulation is done right you're gonna have a fuse on the circuit and sometimes remember this fuses are not just on-off there's some that are resettable there are thermal circuit breakers I another boat just recently another call-out and someone did understand what a thermal circuit breaker was and they push a button nothing happened they assumed everything was working and they had turned off the circuit breaker right and it was basically now disabling the battery charger to the engine battery so just by press bringing the lever back on re-enabling the thermal circuit breaker now allowed the engine battery to be energized okay so you got to make sure that that fuse is intact now if you're curious to see and you don't know one of the ways to measure that would be disconnect your shore power breaker or your inverter charger not the or generator and measure voltage add the battery charger there's going to be a positive and negative post and if you take something like this a multimeter and I brought a bunch because last year I didn't for anybody who wants to buy one I bought it brought a bunch this year if you've got a multimeter on your boat you're going to take a digital multimeter and then what you're going to do is you're going to put the positive and negative connections at the bottom of the charger which on this charger or right here and then you're going to measure for a voltage and you're going to want to measure the same voltage you measure at the battery and if you measure 12.6 here and your batteries 12.6 and you're not connected to AC the only way that your charger sees 12.6 is if it's connected to a battery right it demonstrates that you have circuit integrity between the battery and the charger and that's one way to do it on a big boat sometimes you're like well I don't know where the fuse would be I have no idea is there a fuse I don't know I didn't install the charger and so you do that by measuring voltage right at the battery charger okay another thing that happens is people say to me they say Jeff my battery charger is overcharging my batteries I'm like okay how do you know they're like well Jeff it's charging it's fourteen point eight volts my batteries it's bulked its absorption charging at fourteen eight it should only be at fourteen four I'm like okay how do you know it's 14 four well AGM should be 14 four I'm like great do you have a temperature sensor and they're like yeah I've got a temperature sensor is it connected yeah how cold is it in your engine room they're like well you know it's maybe 55 degrees 60 degrees Fahrenheit sure enough the temperature sensors connected to the battery and if the battery is cold we talked about that yesterday that device is gonna charge higher than normal right because all the numbers that we have in our head of what is a normal battery voltage are always at 77 degrees Fahrenheit so if it's warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit the voltages are gonna go lower if it's colder than 77 degrees Fahrenheit the voltages are gonna go higher so you I've see sometimes battery chargers outputting 15 115 - it's not that they're damaged it's that their temperature compensating for a very cold battery and in the summer when our batteries are in a boat surrounded by water that's really warm again the battery charger will never get to 14 4 it might only get to 14 1 or 14 because the batteries are so hot their temperature compensating down again that's a common one Jeff my batteries are not charging adequately I'm under charging my batteries it never got to 14 4 I'm like yes but we're in the middle of summer where is your boat are you on the outside of Vancouver Island let's say where the waters only 50 degrees Fahrenheit or are you in a place where the water is 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and it's 100 degrees outside or 90 degrees outside well yes of course your batteries are warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit and if your batteries are in an engine room or an engine compartment that gets hot underway and you're running a generator let's say well they're gonna be actually charging at a less of a voltage okay now can't emphasize this enough if you're a battery charger and this is a great test every one of us should do this on their boat you should disconnect all your battery switches on your boat you should have your boat disconnected from shore shore power with a volte meter at they panel or with a multimeter actually at the at the battery is probably better you want to measure what your battery voltage is and then you connect your boat to shore power turn on the battery charger and see if your battery voltage goes up if your battery voltage goes up with your engine and battery switch turned off you know that your charger is we connected to the battery and bypasses as it should the engine or house battery switch it's very important to have your Chargers be connected directly and only directly to a battery and not be connected where we were showing on this switch side battery chargers cannot be switched ever black and white otherwise welcome to the world of magic okay it's a little bit similar to what we were talking about yesterday what did we say yesterday we said a good way to test if your bilge pump works and it works on switch is to actually disconnect turn your battery switches off and go test your bilge pump right lift the float switch where your battery switches off that's something we can all do on our boat you want to confirm that your bilge pumps work even when the battery choices are off because if there's a fire if you leave the boat whatever you do you turn that battery switch off your bilge pumps will still operate that's really important and you also want to know that your battery charger is not connected at a switch distribution but it's connected at directly at the battery all charging circuits on a boat all of them black and white there is no debate on this have to be unswept okay every single one and that's why in this slide I show all these this is a charger charger charger charger charger charger charger and this is simply a few loads but all of these are charging circuits and these are all loads the AC switch on your breaker panel you're gonna want to turn that off first because you want to see what the voltage is without it you know what the house the house battery voltage is without a battery charger is the moment you energize a battery charger you want that voltage to rise if it doesn't rise then your battery charger is not connected to that battery your battery charger if a battery charger should always be energized like all the time would that be fair way to describe that yes I mean yeah absolutely in short yes your battery charger should never ever ever not be energized honestly my battery charger on my boat every time I plug into short power my battery charger is always on waiting for AC to come in there's no reason to not recharge your batteries unless of course you have a old charger that's going to be called not a charger but a converter and that converter is gonna actually boil your batteries but if you have a battery charger that's built in the last 20 years there's no reason for having not maintaining your batteries batteries want to be maintained and the only way to do that is with a battery charger yeah it's a little bit hard to conceptually your question is a little bit different there's no such thing as a battery charging you that the battery is fully charged you're looking for an effective change a battery charger is not gonna indicate if something is on or off there's no sort of state you know it's not like that it's you're looking for a change of voltage there's no such thing as a nominal good voltage it's all about a change of voltage think about the example of a swimming pool I used that last week with someone else you could have a huge pipe coming into a swimming pool and that's women pool it's an Olympic swimming pool it could be literally a pipe the size of meat or white there can be flow into the swimming pool and yet the swimming pool is not full right you could literally have the tap on it's literally an aqueduct coming into a swimming pool and it's not to say that until the pool is full you didn't have flow you can't it's about to change the pool was dry or the pool was at X level and suddenly the level is rising a change of level rising is an indication that a charger is working but you will never ever and this is a good this is a really good question because I give this all the time in this summer all the time people worry and they and as we should but they say Jeff I just turned on my alternators and my batteries are not at 14 for my alternators broken or I turned on my battery charger and suddenly my batteries are not at 14 4 volts I'm like ok alright let's let's talk about this what was your battery voltage prior to starting how big is your battery bank and do you expect to be able to feel a sway Poole instantly of water regardless of size of the pipe going in and the size of the pool it would be impossible how could you can you feel a lake in an instant there's no such thing the only way you could do that is literally if you have a bucket and you have a glass and you take a bucket and you pour literally a bucket into a glass but I can tell you that all of our alternators and chargers are a tiny fraction of the battery bank size remember what I said yesterday I said battery chargers are minimum ten percent of capacity how long is it going to take for something that charges at ten percent of capacity to recharge a battery bank that's a long time right if you've got something that is 100 amp hours and your charger is 10 amps 10 amps into 100 you won't see a full battery instantly it's gonna take hours literally hours and the more depleted your battery bank is the longer it takes for you to get to that so it's a great question because it it clarifies this nuance between on or off battery chargers alternators don't turn on and suddenly actually have a full battery you might see a change but it will take time for that battery to get completely full and that's different than a car because in a car our batteries are tiny and the alternators are much bigger that's why this suddenly as soon as you start your car your voltage is at 14 4 because let's say for example in this printer in one of our service vehicles it's like a 300 or 200 50 amp alternator on a battery that is 100 apps our of course as soon as you start that engine the battery's at 14 4 but on our boats all of our boats think about how big is our alternators as a function of our battery banks ice their fractions and so when troubleshooting a battery charger or an alternator there's no such thing as knowing instantly there's no number you're looking for other than a change it's sort of like I'm trying to lose weight right now I can tell you that I've been at it and it didn't happen overnight I'm working on it but it's a slow gradual change and it's the same thing with your alternator or your charger it's about a change not anything sudden does that make sense excellent question in short you always want to recharge your batteries always batteries don't want to be left in the state of discharge if you can in short you now now is the time to charge your batteries always flooded lead-acid batteries AGM lead acid batteries gel it acid batteries all don't want to be in a state of discharge if possible you're causing and left in a in not permanent but a long state of discharge they're gonna sulfate and so that's why for example if you have a battery charger you want to leave it on all the time and you want your batteries to be on a battery charge or 24/7 always unless you're away from the dock and you're boating and it you don't have to do it but then you're gonna have shorter battery life if you don't you know people that leave their boats and hangars for example and that happens a lot right tons of people do it tons happens all it like tons of people do it and then have their boats in the hangar and don't have a battery charger on even if they disconnect the loads of the battery are damaging their batteries you cannot have a battery unconnect it to anything literally disconnected anything and not getting a charge for six months you can do it of course you can but you're gonna damage your batteries you're absolutely damaging your batteries batteries want to constantly get a charge every day they want to be flow charge forever they do not want to be on their own without a charge and if you don't do it you can do it all the time you can leave them in a hanger for six months you can disconnect all deletes from it but when you get back to that boat in six months your batteries are gonna be about 50% of capacity over six months and you're gonna have probably worn the batteries down by half their life for the first time you do it and then a second year you do it another half and then your batteries instead of lasting you five to seven years are gonna last you two to three years the question is when you're connected to shore power do you have to have your battery switch on all to recharge your batteries the answer should be no absolutely no because the switch should have nothing to do where your battery charger is connected to battery chargers have either single output dual output three output this battery charger has two outlets it's connected at the same time to an engine battery and a house battery you don't choose if it's connected to one or the other it's connected to both and so you regardless of where your switch is that battery charger is going to be charging your engine battery and your house battery even if both battery switches are on or off the battery switches could be they could disappear you could remove them the battery switch is here it it's after the charger so it doesn't matter I'll take offline Daniella will talk about it but battery chargers bypass switches now if you have a single output inverter charger for example and you want to share with another battery then yes you might put the battery switch on to combine but combine is different than on or off that's forcing this battery in this battery to be in permanent parallel but you should not have just an inverter charger you should have an ACR we talked about that yesterday yeah the question is another question is let's say my my battery charger is switch I've come to realize that how do I solve that problem well if and this is a big if if your battery charger is right now on this post which is the switch side if you move it you could just move it on to that post and it would become unswept right now that's the thing to with electrical remember it's like a little bit I give that analogy all the time moving a decimal point on a number doesn't seem like a big deal if you didn't understand what it means right like really I mean moved it to the left one digit move it to the right one digit that's a factor of 10 right like your paycheck goes from a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars or opposite right it goes from a hundred dollars to ten it makes a big difference where that little decimal is right and with batteries and electrical system moving a wire from one location to another location that could be two inches apart is a world of difference and so if your battery charger is connected on that battery switch post right here moving it two inches to this side will solve that problem but where is it your battery could charger could be the panel who knows where they connected it don't know you gotta look for it battery chargers are meant for all batteries we often install inverter chargers on boat and will have what's called an auxilary charger to handle engine batteries like some boats have two engines three engines port engine starboard engine generator those are all engines they've got to have a battery charger absolutely when sizing a battery charger right you generally only think about the deep-cycle aspect of the battery that's going to be really demanding but no all all batteries want to stay on a charger here's another caveat you see this all the time people have a boat with a generator so it was an expensive boat if you have a generator on board it's not inexpensive and the manufacturer most likely did not install a charger on that generator battery but you know what they did instead somewhere buried in the manual they said that you should run your generator at least once a month once a month now that sounds really doable when you loved your boat and the boat is new to you and you say to yourself hey you know what I'm gonna come down to the boat every month and I'm gonna run the generator always and I will never forget because I love her so much I'm so excited of course I'm gonna do my ritual how often do people are able to do that and follow through every month forever I mean forever and they better do it and if they don't then that battery is gonna drain and is running your engine once a month enough for a battery no it wants to be on a charger 24/7 so even then you're compromising your generator battery one of the most popular things that we do in our shop as soon as I see a generator I can guarantee you 95% of generators do not have a battery charger connected to it why because the manufacturer of the boat was trying to cut corners and somewhere buried in that manual is run the generator if you want to recharge the battery and so we end up putting a battery charger for the generator battery and on some boats they have two generators some boats have three generators and so we'll put a generator battery charger and we'll have multiple leads go into all those battery banks because there's nothing more sacred than a generator battery that is your get out of jail card there's no amount people say oh it doesn't matter I'm like no no no you don't understand we're an open conflict it does matter your generator batteries that trump card that gets you out of jail you start your generator you have no more problems on your boat because now power is flowing and so you keep that generator battery always beautifully topped off because that's the one thing that when everything else fails on your boat suddenly you start the generator your chargers work and all the rest of your batteries can get a charge next inverter Chargers so inverter Chargers are both a push-pull right if you think about old Chargers used to be converters and you think I mean it sounds pretty similar but opposite invert convert right this sound like opposite an inverter charger is an inverter converter that's basically what it is so it does two things an inverter can either pull vc power to make AC or it can pull AC to make DC right current can vote both directions right it depends on the situation when you're away from shore power or a generator your inverter charger is going to become an inverter only because you're gonna pull power from your batteries to create AC and when you're connected to shore power or you're having a generator you certainly don't need AC because you're either on a generator or Shore and then you're gonna take AC and convert it to make DC so it's a bi-directional device okay and what I was emphasizing yesterday is for the large part and remember all rules have exceptions all rules have exceptions but 99% of you have an inverter charger with only one single DC positive connection to it okay only one inverter Chargers are by definition can only be connected to one battery bank that's it you're not charging your inverter charger does not connect to four battery banks it's not a charger only it's an inverter charger and since it's only going to have a DC 1 DC positive connection to the device so when troubleshooting an inverter circuit one of the most popular things that we look for especially to confirm that it can invert generally were troubleshooting inverting first because that's when people notice there's problems most people don't even know what to confirm if their battery charger works or not but I'll let me tell you if the microwave doesn't work or the nespresso doesn't work people will definitely know that first step is you've got to see if this inverter is connected to some sort of DC power right because an inverter can't create AC if it doesn't get DC all right that would be the first thing stinked before you do that and a lot of us don't know how to turn an inverter on or off in the remote panel but that's an essential step it sounds silly but a lot of us don't know that our inverter charger remote panels have this little button and some of them are there buried like magnum it's easy it's on/off zan tracks it's a menu structure it's not a one button you have to find it in the menu you can enable an inverter or you can disable an inverter and so some instances clients say my inverter doesn't work and what happened is someone was playing with the inverter charger remote panel disable the inverter at the remote panel the inverter doesn't work but it's not that doesn't work it was shut off at the panel so first step is can you confirm that your remote panel is on and it's enabled for the inverter that's obviously the first step the next step is seeing if there's any sort of voltage now if you have a remote panel if this thing is energized and you have power there you know that your inverter is obviously working and has DC because otherwise there'd be no light on there's no way an inverter can show you an indicator light or a panel indicator if there's no power connected to it right so that's the first thing if you can't see anything then obviously you're questioning why but if the remote panel is energized and you're not running a generator and/or you're not connected to shore power the inverter is not powered by magic it's powered by something and therefore the batteries must be connected to it if it isn't powered and it's a blank screen now you got to ask yourself why is it that I don't have power to my inverter one of the things you got to look for is this switch right here it's a little non discreet switch in between from the house batteries and it's an on/off switch it could be beside the inverter or it could be near the batteries and sometimes it's unlabeled right you don't know and that's which has to be on if it's off the inverter doesn't get power the inverter will never work because it's not connected to the batteries if you have an inverter on your boat and you ask of it more than it's rated for let's say you have a 2000 watt inverter and for whatever reason you load 3000 watt on that inverter the inverter will not just do will not stop at 2000 watt trying to vid invert it will try to do everything you asked of it has no ability to stop itself from trying to give you three thousand five thousand ten thousand it'll do what you asked the only thing safeguarding the inverter from actually damaging itself because it's being asked to do something it can't is that fuse so for example it often happens that people will disk it will tear in their boat over and suddenly you lose shore power and they had a bunch of heaters connected they lose Shore power they had about 40 amps maybe 3000 4000 5000 watts of heating onboard electrical heat they lose their power the inverter was enabled but stand by the innovative orso's oh my god we lost shore power let me try to meet demand the inverter switches internally suddenly from bypass to invert and it tries to run 5,000 watts of load and this fuse blows so if you lost shore power and when you read the doc let's say and suddenly you lost power and then you also lost your inverter it's because you asked the inverter to do something it couldn't do and the fuse which is called a class T fuse right here blew and that's why everyone should always carry a spare Class t fuse if they have an inverter charger always class teeth class tango like classroom class T fuse find your fuse for your inverter charger whatever it is and buy another one you thing I have one on my boat or do I have to I have a lot because when I go boating you know what I want to do I want to go boating the last thing I want to do is worry about my boat electrical system letting me down so I'm a Boy Scout I'm always prepared the amount of spares I have on my boat it's amazing it's incredible I'm ready for anything because in the middle of nowhere why would you want to ruin your trip for a fuse I mean come on and you can't find all those in the middle of nowhere in a channel REE you're not gonna go to one of those places that barely has milk and maybe you have mustard on the shelf and you're like hey you know I'm looking for a class-c about 350 amps you have one in the back shell they're like who are you what are you talking about are you kidding me no way you got to go into town for that Oh where's town oh well it's you know a couple days this way you're like crap classy fuse find out your inverter fuse and if you ever overload your inverter suddenly because you lost shore power or you were running the generator and you switched you'll probably end up blowing that fuse and remember this is a big gotcha inverter Chargers are not just inverters they're also chargers you lose your inverter ah you know what you can live without an espresso maybe but you can't live without a battery charger you just can't you just can't that means you'd have to run your whole boat through alternator all the time being connected to shore power or running your generator is irrelevant that means now your alternator is the only sole source of power for your boat and remember when I asked earlier who doesn't have a battery charger on their boat and nobody lifts up their hands that's how essential a battery charger is if it wasn't essential some of us would lift up our hands some more than one or two a lot of us say well battery chargers not that important battery chargers are incredibly important and when you lose an inverter charger not working your trip is done it's done it's over it's it's it's you're done because an alternator will have to run forever to meet the loads you'd have to do circles around you'd be like well let's go we're gonna stay here but we're gonna motor eight hours a day every day to repower our batteries because it's just not enough you know in most cases it's just not enough and so that's why you can't even be at the dock you can't even go to anywhere like I've had a client once they had to come to the dock they left the boat they want in a hotel room until the technician came and replace the inverted charger because you can't stay on board what are you gonna run the alternators at the dock you know eight hours a day at idle and we know that idle is not enough for an alternate output so what you're gonna start running your boat eight hours a day at cruising rpm to go nowhere so you can recharge your batteries not gonna happen that's done your boating trip is over so don't have your boating trip be canceled because you're missing in class t fuse the question is is it better to have a backup charger and inverter of course yeah but then there's a problem with space and cost yeah we do that all the time when I get to about a 50-footer trawler 42 depends on how sort of far they go I love having an inverter charger and having an auxilary charger that has three outputs and one of those outputs is a backup to the house let's say a 40 amp and I have it as a backup on a terminal circuit breaker that's off I did that on a fever 49 recently and it's right there just waiting it's if he ever loses that inverter charger he can run his boat 40 amps and is no problem it's more than he'll ever run his boat on 40 amps for 24 hours is what is that it's almost a thousand amp hours he'll never run through a thousand amp hours a day there's more power than he'll ever need it's not enough to recharge a battery bank quickly but enough to be connected at shore and run your loads and so we always we encourage and that's why I'm not a big fan of having one single inverter charger like I was in a big fan of having just one bus for all your networking I like redundancy you know it's I don't know maybe is was I like that before being an engineer or I'm like that because of an engineer I don't know but I just don't like to have all my eggs in one basket so yeah having an inverter charger single output make sure that that fuse hasn't blown and remember you can actually troubleshoot a Class t fuse and the only way to know if it's blue or not is with one of this I had a client that didn't have one of those had to end up leaving the dock didn't know left the Anchorage when all the way back to another like a marina that actually had a class defuse two days of Motoring two days of mortaring not like two hours a day like eight hours a day to get to a place where he could buy a class T in the end it had nothing to do with the class T you know why he didn't know cuz he didn't have a voltage digital voltmeter contestant so if you don't have a digital voltmeter on your boat honestly this is not a make feel good present whatever you do you need to have one because if you don't know how to operate it at least you can be told on the phone how to operate it by a friend by a technician your service provider someone but you got to have a digital voltmeter on board question correct yeah the question was if you have an inverter and you have a generator your generator would still feed your AC panel yes your generate would still feed your AC panel even with the inverter down but the problem is without a charger your DC panel which is most of your lows on your boat your lights your water pump right your fridge in some cases some fridges are ACDC but some fridges are DC only are not gonna be powered eventually the batteries are gonna drain themselves how big is that battery charger a battery charger a 40 amp battery charger is about a newer one right not like you know 40 years old 20 year old charger this big this wide bub this thick okay not it's not that big they would generally be near the batteries generally near the batteries now that's a 40 amp 100 amp charger is about this big this big and about this wide almost the size of an inverter not as big as an inverter but pretty damn close pretty damn close inverted Chargers oh yeah Chargers oh yeah absolutely we sell everything yeah all this stuff yeah yeah the question is did I sell Chargers yes Chargers I mean like we have a huge warehouse with tons of stuff I mean you have to but yea Chargers are readily available Pro Mariner you know we talked about that yesterday is that Master Vil Vic Tron I mean there's as long as it's a name that you've heard more than once right if you've never heard of something that's a little weird and if nobody's ever heard about it then that's really weird you know go with something and again it's not to say their products not good but this is an important piece of equipment it's like being on a hot you know it's like being on a mission I don't know in a hospital the perforator or something and you're like it's a piece of equipment you've never heard about before this is the heart of your boat your batteries if they don't get a charge you're done like it's it's game over like your trip is you can't boat without batteries if we could boat without batteries a lot of boats would be a lot happier all right because this is not easy okay now remember we were looking at the DC side but what about actually having the AC not coming into this to actually charge the batteries that can happen too because remember this is not just an inverter the inverter DC goes this way when it's when you're looking at inverting but when you're actually charging it starts from here going that way right so it's like this for inverting and it's like this for charging so when you're now talking about my charger of my inverter does in charge it's very similar to a charger is your source selector switch at the right place is your AC double pole breaker on is your inverter charger breaker on and that's the confusing part I was saying last night or yesterday how many times do I go I'm on a boat and I see an inverter breaker off and it's literally off of the breaker panel they're like oh I don't need my inverter I'm connected to shore power it sounds normal to me it's absolutely right there that statement is a hundred percent accurate the problem is the label is actually not really the right label it's an inverter forward slash charger and that label is extremely rare I see that maybe once out of a hundred so it's a code word it's an inverter and a charger but the owner read the label you can't blame the owner it's an inverter I'm connected Shore power I don't need an inverter turn the inverter off well they don't realize it's an inverter charger and if you turn the breaker off to the AC feeding the inverter charger your charger will never work because without AC a charger not cannot create DC right you can't go without an input and create an output right everything has to have an input so without AC coming into an inverter charger you will never ever have a charger work could you have shore power go directly to an inverter charger and then go to an AC panel yes you could unusual wiring but yes possible in high-end boats people that don't want to want extreme simplicity we're gonna end up putting a very large inverter in line between the panel and the shore power be like a Victor on Quattro but that is extremely unusual extremely unusual there are tons of pitfalls of going that way it's not that straightforward very unusual and generally when it's done people didn't understand what they were doing and there's a lot of pain a lot of pain remember that manual I was telling you about the inverter charger remote panel the pad the manual has hundred pages there's no way a man's gonna read that so there's no way it's almost a joke and that's the reason why electronics manufacturers don't even print manuals anymore honestly most people don't miss them you don't read them hey before I remember when I had my CA T or e 80 a chart plotter the manual is almost imagine how much it costs to print a small production manual 20,000 units likely rly that is 200 pages in color it must be crazy I mean what is that like it's got to be over a hundred two hundred three hundred dollars to print that manual it must be insane and the manufacturers realize how many men are gonna reap that 1% there's no way they don't even bother anymore there is simply no more manuals with any pieces of electronic equipment you want to read the manual now it's on the device so means the device has to be on to read the manual because if it's not on or go online and print it for yourself and honestly it's very rare that I get an owner asking me where the manual is they don't even have bother asking they're just sort of start playing and that's the problem with inverted chargers is they just start wiring them in without reading the manual and hence I make a really good living fixing other people's mistakes it's it's really that when it comes down to that so inverter Chargers big takeaway know how to turn inverter charger on and off at your panel you should know that now if you don't you want to be curious because one day someone is going to muck around and might your nephew a friend I know it all yourself you know I've got clients all the times falling on the resort they're like you know what Jeff I played around the wife was telling me I shouldn't have done it I don't know what I did but come and help and at least they're honest and for those I have super amount of sympathy it's the people that say no the paddle did it all by himself you know I've never touched it and then you go in and all the settings are like completely random so you're telling me that the panel failed but it failed arbitrarily at all these wrong settings like I'm like yeah it's possible I guess but really I don't think so so Jeremy you got to be careful I tell this all the time especially with a lot of sophisticated stuff Jeremy you can't snap your fingers and start back at the beginning of the labyrinth a lot of times when you go down a journey and you start changing changing menus and selections there is no going back there's not a single poison you're like you know what I whatever I did just let's go back to the beginning at that point you're like I have no idea what I did I'm lost and then it's like nothing's working and that happens a lot with double inverters they're supposed to be stacked unstacked and then they're not working and then people are freaking out it's because they went into menus and they start playing with them okay so it happens to all of us honestly there's nothing wrong with making mistakes but try to make sure that you know how to fix them so go back to your inverter charger removal panels and know how to enable the charger disable the charger enable the inverter and disable the inverter through soft keys on that remote panel because that generally is going to be the first thing to fail