Transcript is auto-generated.
hey everyone welcome to this collaboration and first in our ask the expert session here on boating tube in collaboration with pacific yacht systems i've been a great fan and viewer of pacific yacht systems content on youtube and for me it's a bit of an honor and i say i'm a bit kind of star struck to have the one and only jeff cote from pacific yacht systems here this morning jeff how you doing doing wonderful thanks for having me on your show and i'm also honored that somebody wants to talk to me about voting to be honest i think i think this whole youtube thing is making people feel a little bit maybe more important than they are i'm just another boater like the rest of us so thank you for the occasion that's cool i'm blushing if you can't see it underneath i'm getting around here the beard is hiding most of the red area i mean it is it is quite i mean you are a pacific your system is yourself a prolific on on youtube again i've watched a lot of your stuff your seminars you've got the you know literally daily content on ask pys now and i'm amazed that clearly you're a business and you know you sell this stuff you sell the service but you give out a lot of free information to boaters about you know wiring cabling batteries charging and the seminars you put out i mean what was the sort of thinking behind that pacific your system to create that content well i think as boarders there's a huge sense of collective feeling when we're on the water um you know boating is not an individual sport at all we see that in the racing we see that and everything there's a huge sense of you know this is hard we can do it alone and we need help and there's a you know there's a lot of division on land but once you're on the water voters help voters and you know maybe it could be a political divide it could be a religious divide it could be cultural it could be socio-economic whatever all the craziness that we have on land that separates us which are you know potentially bogus on the water those are gone and and you see that and so that sort of sharing and helping is part of a real big attraction of people go on the water it's almost like all these things you know like i remember talking to boaters on the water and you're like you would never get a chance to meet these people and likewise they would never get a chance to meet you and so that attraction for the water finds us there's a certain commonality there and i know as a boater i was overwhelmed when i started voting um certainly if you're aware of it you know you're gonna know that it's a lot harder than you were probably told or thought and as a voter i think for me i came so close um you know there was so much hardship on our boat when we bought it on april fool's day um that i felt like i'm not saying i almost gave up but i know that a lot of people wouldn't maybe have they they might get frustrated if their boat is not reliable and as a boater i think you know to be able to fulfill one's dream and to be on the water and and enjoy the beauty of the world and the serenity of it and slowing down and all the things that we have a hard time doing on land we can do that on the water and so for me these youtube videos are about helping other voters information is not what we really provide to our clients information is everywhere it's on the internet it's it's way more than that so i'm not protective of the information we're a service provider and so to me sharing information is not giving it away it's i have it people want to listen um and to be honest the the feedback that you get from some of these voters are tear-jerking you know like you get people that are sending us emails and saying how we changed their life you know we gave them confidence to their family come on the boat how as a human being could that not be fulfilling yes you'd have to be dead inside you'd have to be dead i mean helping others is probably an intrinsic trait of being us right um and so for me to be able to help someone and hundreds and thousands of people everywhere just because i spend five minutes answering a question the payoff seems to be a hundred percent worth it and that's the drive to these youtubes um is just helping other boaters fulfill their dreams really and i guess this is probably a sort of mixture of people some people that will take the information and will go and act on it and do it themselves others will kind of show it to their local technical person or their you know because again it makes you globally as a globally available as a company but then there's the other people that kind of go thank you for the information but can you do it for me because i'm a bit a bit frightened to do it myself and they obviously 100 yeah so really really interesting so in the in the session this first session i really want to again i watch all the rcpys and against a lot of the seminars and i'm on a lot of the forums as well and really you know i know a lot of your speciality and expertise and what the questions you get is around batteries charging cabling and fusing so i thought that would be a really kind of great place to site you know the power source charging the power source and then wiring the power source so let's start off with batteries it's always an interesting um subject around these these great big lumps of lead and and plastic that we we stick on our boats that power all the services you know fridge lighting navigation and engines and such like and there seems to be kind of two main types if you're going to break it down from a high level you've got the kind of lead acid which are essentially are the old truck batteries which have kind of evolved a little bit but are still essentially truck batteries and then there's these new fangled whizzy lithiums that everyone's kind of talking about can you can you talk us through you know why would someone choose lead acid why would someone choose lithium and the kind of benefits and and obviously the disadvantages of both yeah the the the reality is there's no such thing as one-size-fits-all we know this in clothing we know this in our homes we know this in our cars we know this in a lot of things and i think in the marine world there it's so hard and it's so overwhelming that a lot of us think that if someone else does it i should do it because i don't really don't know what i want and so therefore if they're talking about it i need it and my first step is always to say hey listen you know this is not you know you're gonna have to find something for you and that for you is multiple things right it might be you know what side but what kind of boat do you have what do you do with your boat what kind what kind of energy do you need i mean are you going are you a day tripper and you're going for four hours out and coming back do you need a lithium battery if you're a powerboarder doing that you know um and so the question as as an owner and as a boater is figure out what our requirements are and then basically apply solution this is where my engineer side of me comes in where i'm going you know let's tailor a solution to your problem not what repeat what the other neighbor or fellow border did because you might have the same boat you might be in the same town it might be the same year but you're going to use your boat completely differently than your neighbor and therefore the electrical system maybe one of them comes out of the factory perfect and for the other boater same boat it could be brothers and the other boater is doing something different they're staying overnight they're going out for a week so that's the first thing to realize is that you can't really copy what your neighbor does and you found the secret sauce power usage and your kind of usage of yeah yeah and so i mean the big two fields that you're talking about are lead acid batteries and they come in multiple sort of flavors flooded absorb glass mat agm gel um fireflies which is sort of a carbon foam agm and there's even more than that and that's on one side of the sort of the spectrum and the other side is lithium batteries and so you've got these two camps um the lead acid batteries like you say have been around either you'll be curious we've been using them forever um and when you're doing those sort of projects you know um you what they offer is simplicity at the end of the day there are batteries right and you compare that to lithium lithium is not just a battery yes it provides energy but there is an electronic component to that battery and i tell people all the time you know bms is a computer i mean that's what it is it's a it's it's not the little pocket calculators that we had from the 19 you know 1990s this is a real full-blown computer um the people that designed these bms's are electrical engineers they're actually programming you know they're they're full on intense like this is not a joke right because there's a certain level of automation in what the bms has to do to make the looking battery safe so you know if you compare one to one you go one is vanilla you know lead acid battery the other one has a computer right now you got to ask ourselves and i tell this all the time why would anyone want a computer when they can have something that's not a computer right you there's got to be a trade-off because one is like basically non-technical i mean batteries exist everywhere you can make a battery out of you know like people do these little experiments it's not complicated 11 lemon and a cup bit of coffee yeah yeah exactly right so simple versus lithium so why would you go with something that has a computer where you can buy something that doesn't have a computer and i think the reason why people would consider lithium would be the big reasons are saving space so you get a lot more energy density usable amp hours out of a lithium battery than you do flooded so anybody who has very big space constraints and that happens um where they can't simply put more batteries like they cannot do it so lithium for sure winner there next one for lithium a big win is also weight you know that less volume also translates to less weight racers are going to care about that um there's going to be some power boaters that are going to care about that too that you know want a really light boat but want a lot of energy all right all good so far you know these are all wins right and everybody will like less weight less space okay perfect um so those two are big selling features the other one too that lithium that's a big advantage of course is the number of cycles meaning cycles is how does it how often can you take a battery from a hundred percent down and there's a lot of confusion around that isn't there because yeah there is i think that's just like i charged it up you know that's not a cycle is it you know you go out and and use a quarter of the battery or whatever and then you go and charge it back up again that's not a full cycle it's from 100 down to yeah every cycle is way differently right it's like our own lives you know every day is not the same some days we work a lot harder and it's a lot harder on our system than other days not every day in our lives is a hard day or an easy day but every day is a day every cycle is a cycle some site but they're weighted differently right so you can obviously like if we go back to flooded lead acid battery for example and we take a deep cycle battery as an example a deep cycle battery can be discharged to 50 percent right so you take it from 100 and you bring down to 50. you can do that 300 times let's say on a standard battery for that answer better but if you take that same battery and you bring it down to zero you can only do it 50 times so you can see that wait a second i'm trading off the deeper i go on my cycle the less cycles i have and the opposite of bringing it from 100 to zero is bring it from 100 to 99 and then you'll get like 15 000 so psych and that's what happens in our cars our vehicles basically offer us five six seven years of battery starting because we go from 100 all the way just to 99 92 95 and then bang again so the battery can do 10 15 000 cycles what's interesting with the lithium is it gives you let's say something ridiculous like 5 000 cycles you know all the way down to 20 of capacity now that sounds great but we've got to ask ourselves too and that's a good one is am i going to be using my boat for 5 000 nights in the foreseeable future am i going to have my boat for 5 000 nights over the next 20 years um and what's the cycle to me and sometimes that cycle might be a two-day cycle right you might start the battery on you know a saturday morning and you're still bringing it down and you're bringing it down on sunday night so that's now two days was a cycle depending on how you size the battery bank so sometimes we have to be careful between these comparisons and saying 5 000 cycles all these different things most of us unless you're going offshore cruising and you are living on your boat will have a hard time finding the return on investment to take advantage of those number of cycles most of us don't vote every day not every day is a cycle so some of us only build 30 days a year 60 days a year okay so now you're buying a battery that has 5000 cycles you use it 50 days a year still that's your lifetime right and then that's a lifetime so this whole promise of you know 100 years of battery in a hundred years i mean you know you're paying today dollar for something that is going to give you a return for 100 years nobody is going to be cherishing that lithium in 20 years 20 years something so revolutionary that is going to be garbage like it 20 years from now is going to be mind blowing on the battery world so you gotta the advantage of those cycles for lithium the important thing is quantifying and thinking am i going to take advantage of that because that's used a lot on the internet as an advantage but it's irrelevant if you're going to make use of it so that was the third thing right we talked about the first space volume and then cycles the other one too that's really good about lithium is their ability to sustain a voltage as they're discharging meaning they're not like a battery a lead acid batteries a lot like us people you know you start your day you might be a little bit more energized and if you've worked at six years you know you're gonna be tired you're not gonna have that same pump and the lead acid battery as it's depleted the voltage drops and as our voltage drops then the loads as they get lower and lower some of the loads are more susceptible to voltage being low and they start becoming intermittent a prime example that is a refrigerator right you know refrigerators aren't going to work you know when the battery voltage is 11 volts because the fridge doesn't sense 11 volts it's 11 at the battery by the time you get to the fridge it might be 10 2 10 3 and the fridge is going to come out so if your loads are pretty big like some people are running air conditioning you know stuff like that off lithium that's a great thing it it it the battery doesn't sag it just this miracle thing it will sag at the end but for a long period of time it's going to be relevant that's another big win for lithium um the other big win for lithium on paper is their charge acceptance rate and that's called car so now a lot of people will flaunt this sort of concept oh you know it's got three c means i can recharge my battery at three times capacity and they're right three times capacity but okay so let's try it and i gave this analogy to someone else it's like bragging that your bank account can take any deposit you know my bank account can take you can deposit a million dollars if you want i'm like it's not going to happen and nobody's going to be able to recharge a battery at 3c 3c is imagine two golf cart batteries or an 8d battery or whatever it is like a group 30 even two golf carts we're talking about you know in 12 volts we're talking about 220 240 amps hours do three times of that as capacity that's a 660 amp alternator charger you can't you can't go to your channel and say hey listen um yeah i'm not looking so much for a water hose to recharge my battery i'm looking for literally an ocean like it's there's no such thing the biggest the biggest alternatives we're seeing are you know maybe about 300 amps that's pretty much at 12 that's pretty much the threshold chargers are maxing out at maybe 150 amps at 12 volts so then you're saying oh i'm going to put in how many alternators well engines can't have limitless alternatives so you'll never this is where i get a little scared and i had another conversation with another voter on a podcast about this and i was saying when you start bragging about features that really don't have any benefit then that's where you know that the conversation is not accurate it's not truthful boasting about benefits that aren't really going to mean anything other than bragging that's where you're comparing data sheets in the boarding world that's irrelevant yeah so to recap lithium space volume depth of discharge cycles the ability to take a high rate of charge all those things are like really and that non-voltage sagging but then why does not everybody have that there are some drawbacks but the drawbacks aren't that big you just can't take advantage of them the challenge is is that doing lithium um is not straightforward yeah it is not it is not straightforward and most people unfortunately as a boater i tell people all the time there's nothing wrong with do it yourself but the first part of the do before you even do you have to educate and most of us like to do more than educate you know that sense of let's do it let's just get it done and that's where you can get a lot of troubles because they're comparing their experiences with batteries and they're going oh well it's just it's called a battery then therefore you know it's just going to be drop in drop in replacement and um it isn't it really isn't it's it it's intense um it's not easy the challenge is the manufacturers of those batteries um some of them are offering bms's that control only one positive post what that means is all it's like a typical battery it looks like a battery there's only two posts there's a positive and a negative you're like oh great perfect but what they don't realize is at one point if you drop in a lithium battery and this happened to a boulder this summer drop in battery look drop in battery at lithium um didn't change the alternator the long journey up on the coast eventually the battery was being overcharged by an alternator there's no communication at this point the bms this is a simple bms right that bms is not talking to anybody it's like my job is to keep this battery safe no problem great but what happened is the battery was getting overcharged the lithium said okay you know what i can't take it anymore you're charging me i'm full so what it did it's not communicating with anyone it's just doing what it needs to do it's sort of it's a computer it's going i'm shutting down right until you start putting a load and then the owner lost the battery bank the battery bank was gone it was zero volts and then now not everything shuts down so this is where i'm a big fan not of the necessarily budget batteries because to me budget and water and not having it reliable or predictable is a problem my philosophy is when we go voting we want to have our lives better than on land and simpler and less stressful than our day life and so what i recommend if we do lithium is i say okay go lithium but go big meaning buy a battery that has the ability to have both a charging post right yep so it's called a bus charging one and a discharge and then have the ability to say hey listen i'm not taking any more charging i'm stopping it's done but the loads will keep going right so there's inputs and outputs and that's where when we do those lithium battery banks that's what we're doing we're definitely putting battery banks that have these dual dual input output so that the bms can control one and not the other and that makes it a lot more reliable but then that gets more involved and then you have to think about two you know like these alternatives alternators have a hard life you know they're in an engine room it's not warm it's hot you know and they're working hard right neal and those alternators when they were charging a lithium the lithium battery is so hungry so thirsty for power that you're basically running your alternator at max output pretty much for the duration the battery will not it's going to charge all the way to 100 or near so the alternators end up burning out and then that's where then you start putting these high output but like heavy duty duty alternators and then you put external regulators to recharge the lithium so if you hear all these words then you're going whoa this is not a battery anymore like you're telling the system an ecosystem yeah yeah and it is and that's where the comparison is a little bit misleading because you can't really replace one to one when you go lithium you have to really think about the system you have to really imagine and how do you start the engine are you going to charge the engine you know now if your alternator is recharging your lithium what's recharging your engine battery right your engine battery is probably going to be flooded or agm how do you recharge different battery chemistries it gets the whole new level now this is the world i cherish and love it's complicated right it's hard um you know a lot of decisions pros and cons but if you're a typical voter and you're not wanting to geek out too far that's where lithium becomes a little bit more questionable yeah and the other factor of course and people forget this you know this is not monopoly money right this is real dollars and not everyone needs to drive a lamborghini or a bentley or whatever we want mclaren to go and enjoy boating you know for me as a boater i remind people once you're on the water it doesn't matter if you're on a 150 meter yacht or you're on a literally five meter yacht you have the same view it's the same experience people on bigger boats don't have a better time than people on small boats and so whatever barriers we make to ourselves to bring the bar higher and higher and make it more expensive to go boating the less of us are out there on the water enjoying that splendor that beauty that relaxation so i tell people it's not that lithium is for everyone there is absolutely a need for lithium and lithium solves a lot of great problems but don't be fooled you don't need lithium everyone doesn't need lithium and you don't want to be in that situation because then it would remove people from boating and as we know boating is not something we want to stop others from enjoying it's a it's a very it's an incredibly fulfilling sort of hobby or lifestyle so that's my take between the flooded lead acid and the lithium is that it's not for everyone it doesn't need to be not everyone needs to drive a lamborghini there's no some people do but not everyone yeah and i guess again i am guilty i've done a lot of research so i'm currently in the process of building a lithium system for our boat um you know we go away and stay away for a week on the time and we want to start using the water heater the immersion heater through the the inverter um so our power draw is gonna gonna go up because we'll have showers in the morning and stuff if we're away for a week um so you know our lead acids just couldn't couldn't take the draw so but yeah it's absolutely right you know we've gone from having just standard alternators charging you know a start battery and a house bank but now we're looking at okay we need either to go the dc dc route to charge the lithium off of that and you if you do that you're not going to get a lot of amps in there or you go direct to the alternator and you've got to start looking at you know either you know bauma or a wake speed or you know one of those kind of more advanced um voltage register that start you know reducing the field current as the the capacity of the battery kind of goes up but as you say then the complexity and i do love geeking out and all this kind of stuff so it's gonna for me i like that and enjoy that but as you say i think for a lot of boaters there there could be you know some confusion around the fact that there are these as you say drop in lithium batteries but then you are going to cook your alternator or you know you are going to have these these single um charge discharge and then you will lose kind of everything because it will cut off or i mean worst cases you you cut the power to the alternator and you lose your alternator you know if you yeah if you cut your alternator then you know you need either an alternate protection device or something to just reduce the field current rather than just completely cutting it because you'll you'll kill an alternator which is very bad so it it brings a good point right the the question is you know there's a certain segment of us and i have to always divide myself in parts there's a person inside of me that's a geek loves all this stuff um it's challenging it's complicated it's sophisticated it's creative to do it you know it's a puzzle all those things there's the engineering me the geek in me that wants all of that but then i also have to be realistic because i see pain right i see disappointment you know we we do about a thousand votes a year so i see the disappointment on the other side all this stuff is what i would call sales it's marketing it's it's all promises but then we have to be considerate of the implications of those things and when a boat is unreliable and the boat um you know has problems the battery bank the bms is acting up the alternator burns out you know a lot of us don't have you know 52 weeks of vacation a year not all of us are you know we're working for a living and our time off is extremely precious and i tell people i'm like remember you if you're going to take on complexity it has to be for a trade-off and there is a reason to do it but i invite voters i'm like listen there's also something to be said if you really don't need the battery then why go through all this complexity to have something because when it fails then at this point you're not going to be seeing a mechanic like you're you're now an early adopter now you're going to be in a marina you're going to talk to an electrician you're going to be talking you're going to be talking to another boater and that voter they can't help you now this is not a battery anymore now it's getting more complicated and that's where i remember myself and i see the pain in people when they lose their vacation when their vacation that they've worked all year for that they've i mean they bought the boat years ago but they're paying them orange they're you know they're doing all the things that we're doing in anticipation and if something stops you from fulfilling that dream or living that experience with your family your loved ones your friends whatever it is or by yourself it can be pretty devastating and that's where i go okay pros and cons is it is the complexity a requirement to get the benefits like you were saying for your vote where i need to run these large ac appliances that are coming off the inverter whatever it is but make a decision go yes i am making a conscious decision and i'm willing and if you're like yourself technical then maybe you're going to be the one solving it where it gets even harder is the people that are doing it but aren't really aware of their limitations and then when it fails troubleshooting is the highest order and the hardest thing to do doing building is easy that's if you think that's hard you're in a world of hurt troubleshooting when it doesn't work is the hardest so it's one thing as voters to do things and do when things go well but when they go south then what and that's the challenge too is that these voters then are on their own they're you know how are they going to troubleshoot this problem you know their wife their son their daughters or girlfriend could be anyone they're like so now what what are we gonna do how do we get out of here what happens and you're like you're at a whole new level of game and so um i'm i own we do lithium we absolutely do it but we do it and i i vet it i'm like let's see if lithium is right for you yeah because and also the last thing is money i mean you're going to drop some serious point not in not in necessarily buying the battery but you're gonna draw some serious coin and doing everything around it yep yep as i as i well know by the the cost of my belmar alternators i never had to purchase so yeah very good one thing on on lithium's though there that does seem i mean clearly there's been a lot of stuff in the press around around lithium as a technology there was the whole kind of samsung thing a while back and these kind of hoverboards all the kids were buying that kind of started catching fire and stuff like that there is this kind of misconception that if you put lithium on your boat then your boat is going to be this huge fire risk and suddenly you know they're going to miraculously self-destruct at any point is that true of like the the kind of the the chemistry that they're using for lithium on boat or is that a different kind of lithium technology that they're using in kind of mobile phones and these hover pools yeah i i don't know yeah so that world i don't know i know that they have the same thing on the boeing the dreamliner yeah i i that i can't tell you because it's not my world but when we when we think about lithium you're right the bms is everything right the the that's what the job of the bms is therefore is to protect the battery from being in this sort of self-destruct potentially self-destructive state so what i recommend to people is you have all these people that are getting in the foray of getting into lithium they're doing this in no-name companies um companies that basically if they go down under they're just gonna start they're just gonna change the you know the name on the front they've got no brand name recognition there's nothing to lose for them they don't have a branding they're selling on low price alone and so what i tell people i'm like okay and i was talking to a lagoon owner recently i said to him i said you know he was going to cheap out and buy the lowest cost lithium batteries out there and i said listen you just bought a boat for over a million dollars these batteries are under your bed you're going to sleep literally on top of these batteries i said buy a battery from a manufacturer that has something to lose they care and i've seen let's say for example the big companies like victron master vote lithionics um they're actually that's it like they they if they look if they go down and people sue them they're gonna lose a lot more than just selling lithium batteries and so what i tell people is like i make sure they have a skin in the game right make sure that they really care about that bms that they're not willing not to take on risks and that they're not going to release a product or a software version that isn't a hundred percent embedded because it's a risk or war thing right you you know being sued could take down a company right and a bad name would take their whole product line out so make sure that they're not cutting corn and yes it's not as attractive as some of maybe the budget battery choices but the flip side is you know very well that they're very much incented to not have any problems and so it all depends as a boat owner is what are risk tolerance some people i tell people some people ride a motorcycle without a helmet to them that's not risk behavior that's freedom you know you know and so all of us as voters have different risk tolerance um i'm definitely as an engineer more on the spectrum of this is a recreational boat there's no reason to put your life or the life of someone else in jeopardy on a recreational boat if you can afford it then you should afford to pay a little bit maybe a premium i say to not have to worry um we haven't heard of fires to me the the the i mean you hear about them but not i haven't seen them locally you hear about them for me it's more the reliability i wouldn't be so much worried about the fact that they're going to catch on fire that often i mean i haven't seen it personally um but it would be that the system you're going to have component failures around it like you talked about mail like the alternator like all these other things that might be stopping you from voting um so yeah i think there's a little bit of fear monitoring there but the flip side is it's healthy because without that you get people that are just gonna jump ship and then and then when people don't have a good voting experience and it's your one week holiday or your only two week holiday most people might give up voting they might go i'm out you know this is this is so much easier to rent an airbnb or just go to some islands some you know just just buy your experience but not be responsible to fulfill it and so that's where i have a little bit of hesitation with too easy yeah i guess i guess um you know one of the things i've kind of learned through what the research that i kind of did when we looked at it is you know lithium is kind of a big umbrella and there are lots of different chemistries you've got lithium polymer lithium ion lithium phosphate lifting cobalt and titanate i think so i mean i i used to fly you know radio controlled you know planes and helicopters and that's kind of lithium polymer and they are hugely hugely powerful but they will blow up at a moment's notice and they will you know like a firework it's like a firecracker when those things go but as far as i'm aware the the most of the kind of marine lithium the victrons and the the the main ones are lithium ion phosphate which is kind of generally seen as being quite inert when it comes to um you know that kind of explosive kind of tendencies that you've seen from you know this kind of umbrella of lithium that people kind of get a bit kind of worried about when you say lithium batteries it's all boeing samsung hoverboards i think generally there is the the fact that the the chemistry that most companies are using is is reasonably safe and say quite inert when it comes to um you know discharging and charging yeah it's the absolutely the only ones we've used are the lithium iron phosphate batteries yeah one last thing i wanted to cover off with you which i know is i say just watching some of your content is a pet peeve of yours around wiring and and you always talk about the difference between is it welding cable i think you call it and you know people that go i just put welding cable on there versus kind of tin or marine wire i guess it comes back to you know some of the points you'd be making about you know you want to you know don't cheap out and you know the boat you want to be able to use it but just kind of talk us through kind of wiring a little bit and you know again why why should we use proper marine core cable versus you know welding cable um and and fusing because again i know that's another point that you see a lot you know just talk us through that a little bit and give us some kind of best practices around that yeah so as as voters you know we're always both budget and time constrained we know that that's in our whole life it's not just you know at home in our business in our lives for everything and so with this sort of crunch of time we want to have do more a lot of people end up just doing um and doing what's available so it's going to be either choosing the wrong size cable or choosing the cable of all the same color i i can't tell you how many builds i've gone where all everything is all black you know and it works they're absolutely right it absolutely works you can absolutely the color of the wire does not affect the conductivity of it that being said um troubleshooting removing a piece of equipment and then having two black wires and you're like which one do i reconnect to the new piece of equipment that removed now everything becomes contacts right it's sort of like everybody could drive on the left side or the right side of the road and you in england do it differently than we do in north america but it's about consistency right it's about being predictable because if we both use both sides of the road there would be no road you just simply would you know we get to stalemate and so color is important and following the code is important because a lot of people i hear them they say oh well i know which one it is i'm like oh so you know the context you have to know that this cable was on the left this cable was on the right when you remove an equipment or you troubleshoot now you've got to keep the cables left and right and i'm like how great but to them it's like oh well i just need to buy one reel you know instead of buying a reel and cable of red or and let's say yellow or red red and black i'm just going to buy one all red gonna save on the cable less scrap it's going to be really hard to maintain so that's one thing is color coding is absolutely essential if you want a world of hurt in a world of pain you don't do it but i strongly suggest that people follow the code there's a really good reason for that it makes it much easier in the future the next is the type of wiring um people buy these welding cables and think that you know they're getting a deal well no the manufacturers are not making higher margin on welding cable or less and more on marine they're they're just different types of cabling and we've got to remember on a boat and i've seen this welding cables a welder doesn't sort of buy a cable and say hey babes you know i bought this cable it's going to last me 50 years pop had it now it's my turn i had to get down yeah it's gonna be a family legacy you know it's a big investment huge investment this cable is a wear and tear item it's gonna last a year two years i don't know they're just gonna check it away it's it's it's it's meaningless you know it's just like whatever it's like a coffee cup you know just buy another one but on a boat once you put a wire on a boat the chance of you removing that wire and doing a wire refresh on a boat is zero it's never gonna happen nobody ever does wire refresh if you did that we'd all i mean we could nobody could afford voting no one it means every wire of the boat so i've seen welding cable that literally over time it's almost it looks like an orange like a tangerine like it literally it's not only i'm not talking about cracking i'm talking like it peeled off wow it literally is now sort of the the the jacket is become brittle because it's been there for 15 20 20 years and then that brings and now you're seeing i had a boat a work boat where luckily they would have i mean the boat would be gone if it hit on the positive but it was the negative the hall was actually carrying part of the negative current on an aluminum boat because the jacket had become brittle over time and now they had crazy corrosion problems on that boat because one of the cables was actually you know going onto the hull so that's one reason why you wouldn't do welding people the other reason why you wouldn't do welding cable is that that jacket actually if it becomes ever in contact with oil or fuel will actually melt off so now you have a jacket it's like going on the rain and then over time that jacket is literally going to literally disappear off your back you're like oh well yeah i should have so i've seen welding cable where there was a fuel drip landing you know fuel filters are above it where the jacket of the welding cable was gone the only reason it didn't short is that it was properly affixed every six inches and because of the stiffness of welding cable the two cables were literally an inch away a couple centimeters away from one another and the jacket was gone on both when they touch if there's no fuse it's basically game over so that's another reason the other reason is that corrosion you know it's a boat is not a super again healthy environment for electrical conductivity and so all the strands are untined also the other big challenge is the stiffness of the wire boats vibrate so you've got all these cons right and you're going if you're aware of all these cons and you do a welding cable good on you there's no harm you're making an informed decision you and that's a choice you're like i hear all this but i need to buy the lowest cost cable you know that to me is important and there's a reason for that my take on it is a little bit different and i say okay these are all negatives what is the time to put a cable in the boat do i ever want to do it again do i want to make it two steps forward and one step back you know and that's where i go no it's not worth it not worth it at all we've got to put good stuff so that there's so much things that break on a boat that you don't want to have to have shorter life cycles go i'm gonna have to do that faster and that's why i'm a big on you know making sure the connections are properly crimped putting heat shrink right all these things matter because you want to make sure that your boat is reliable so that's my take between a welding cable and marine thin cable the strands are much smaller they're much more flexible honestly i i would personally never put a welding kit even if i was told to there's no way it but some people do some people do but i just you know it's a choice but i wouldn't do that never and and and fusing i know they say it's a it's a big thing for you as well so here's again here's one for you then so you talk about if again i've watched somebody you talk about fusing the cable not necessarily using the device but fusing the cable does the fuse go next to the device or does the fuse go next to the battery where should people be putting the fuses so again let's say we've got an alternator do you put it near the alternator do you put it in the battery if we've got a searchlight do we put it near the search side do we put it in the battery which ends i'm playing the devil's advocate here but you know where where would where would you put the fuse yeah well the the fuse if there's gonna be only one fuse it has to be at the start of the circuit um and it has to so you think about um and it's funny this is such a confusing topic it's so confusing and honestly if you're listening to this and you're confused welcome to the club but here here's here's what we need to think about um when we think about our homes buildings everything it's it's absolutely either criminal or negligent to and you couldn't do it i mean you would lose everything in north america you i mean you were talking done done you can never ever ever ever ever energize a circuit without a circuit breaker anywhere like that's literally having tnt and having you know rags full of oil and pain in a corner or what happened and just waiting for an accident to happen it's not a single trades person whatever ever it's it's not inconceivable it would never happen right but what happens on boats is it's interesting that whole philosophy everything that we've learned about avoiding electrical fires on land for some reasons get lost as soon as we go on the water and it's sort of like oh that's good for land oh and by the way land means also your car every circuit on your car is fused everything is fused right and the fuse block is not near the tail light near where is the fuse block it's at the start of the circuit it's one location everything fans out so the challenges what happens is people get confused and they think oh i have a fuse or i have a fuse on the battery or i have a fuse on the panel but what they're not realizing is not all fuses protect all wires fuses are sized for both an appliance and the maximum amperage that a cable can handle and if you don't if you take a fuse and you rate a fuse for example for 100 amps and the cable is only rated for 30 and the appliance is only rated for 50. your cables in a fuse it's not a few it's better than the wire that's right and what as a boat owner i'm like why would you now i can imagine myself as a sometimes imagine myself as a not commercial but a like i don't know a fisherman in a small village and i'm trying to put food on my table and i am in a sort of sustenance sort of mode and i'm like life is hard yeah maybe they can't afford to you know they're just getting out there they're going to try to make a living you know that's different they do what they can with what they have but for the rest of us are recreational voters why would you and this is what i tell people i heart like when you invite someone on your boat you're inviting them into your risk tolerance they don't know that normal human beings are assuming that everything around us is relatively safe you know you don't sit on a couch and it's super combustible there's a reason why the materials that build the couch they learn that right they don't want this thing to have a cigarette lineup flashes up in a bang so why would we tolerate a lower risk or higher risk on a boat and then the problem is that the people that are coming on that boat either your guest or the next owner don't realize that risk tolerance and that's why it's not up to everyone to make that decision you can't build your car based to your risk tolerance i don't need seat belts oh yeah you do handbrake i don't do hambrick tail lights headlights you don't need that signaling don't worry about that and then the next owner would buy the car assume that these things are there not knowing that they're there and then that's where it gets really hard their risk tolerance is different and so for me is like established baseline let's not take undue risk unnecessary risk a fuse is not a five thousand dollar line item right and so you fuse all the circuits and you fuse them always of the source of power right what's confusing is this you get you buy a vhf radio and the vhf radio has a fuse connected and you're like oh it has a fuse so then they're like oh but the cable's not long enough to go the battery so then they run a long cable all the way to the battery and they're like oh my circuit is fused well no the circuit's not fused the circuit from the moment the fuse starts to the radio but everything from the battery up to there is infused and i've got videos on youtube that show that and that that fuse will never blow if the short is in between the battery and the views so if ever the wire shafe you know i don't know that you're putting two pieces of structure together and you squish them and they connect screw whatever it is now you're in a world of hurt so the fuse has to be the power source and generally on a boat for dc that is basically it starts at the battery and every time you change cable size and you go from a larger cable to smarter cable then you have to bring you few sizes because you fuse for a wire and an appliance and the vhf radio might be powered from the 15 amp breaker let's say on the dc panel but the manufacturer of the radio is going to say i want a 5 amp or 7 amp or whatever it is 8 or 10 amp and i want a 10 amp fuse for the appliance so you'll literally have sometimes a circuit breaker for the wire at the start of the circuit from the panel and then a smaller fuse that is extremely tailored exactly with what the manufacturer wants for the radio so you'll have a fuse for the appliance and if you and a circuit breaker or a fuse for the the wires and that's the approach and it's important to remember that a lot of people talk about this code as this sort of ideal where it's this thing oh utopian vision yeah it's like it's like either our health or eating habits oh yeah well you shouldn't have that but that's that's what they say but you you know you can compromise no the code is and i i don't understand i remember even getting the voting issues like well the code is just for those naysayers then i realize is these people are propagating these lines the code is not an ideal it's the foundation it's the bare minimum and yet you've got these voters that are going oh no no no don't worry about that what they're telling you is they're saying i don't worry about anything which most likely in a lot of cases means i'm not really thinking about it because i'm not if you don't think about something you're not going to worry about it um and this whatever happens it happens but again what are the consequences of a boat fire versus a house fire you know um we know what fires can do when you don't have accidents that happen in england if you're on the ground and there's a fire you can run through the window come on the other side sure if you're on the ground floor but how many doors and windows that you can leave on a boat are there and when there's a fire on a boat is this sort of like a marshmallow fire a little camp and you have a little bit of smoke and you're like oh no this is complete whiteout we're talking you couldn't see your hand in front of your face like it is it's not flock it's it's your loot you first can't breathe can't see and then you have to get out of your boat and if the fire is near the companion way near the door so how are you going to go out and then once you're out of the boat where are you going you know are you at the dock or are you in an anchorage is your dinghy down well then you jump in the water okay you jump in the water what's the water like is it cold is it warm are you far from shore you know now your boat's down can you swim to shore is there another boat all these things it's sort of the bar needs to be higher on the water because of all the things i talked about and yet it's the opposite it's crazy and that's my pepe it's like why settle take on more risk in an environment where it's already riskier to begin with and that's why you know i'm a big harper on everything has to be fused like why would you not do that and i hope that my explanations resonate to voters so that they can take the time to go on their boat and see was my previous owner you know a high risk taker because maybe i'm not and what risks they take on my boat that now i own that i now bought from them and am i willing to have their risk tolerance and neil i say this all the time to boat owners i say when you buy a boat you're not buying a boat you're buying a previous owner's sort of level of care your level of everything it's not the boat that you buy because you can buy a boat from a manufacturer that's different but once it's left that factories by multiple owners you're buying that how much have they been loved taken care of what was their risk tolerance do you align in terms of your prioritization for maintenance some people never touch something until it breaks that's their philosophy if they break don't touch them well we know on boats yes that could be an adage some other of us go okay well there's maintenance cycles you know you've got to change your pencil zinc on your heat exchanger you don't wait for your heat exchanger to sort of corrode and have all you basically your coolant mixing with your hot water you know from the ocean you're not gonna wait for that so there's a lot of preventative things that we can do and these owners are some of them don't care it's not that they can't afford it they just don't can't be bothered so fusing is one of these things that you want to make sure that if your previous owner didn't care maybe you do have it have again or you know have a look it is fascinating to say after watching i literally after watching some of your videos i started going around going yeah where's the fuses looking again ours is 20 year it's a 22 000 you know it's just 28 21 years old now um and and clearly you know the the technology back in 2000 is certainly different to where we are in in 2021 we've updated the navigation equipment and all that kind of stuff so again it is it really is so fascinating to look back and to do that preventative maintenance now and to look at it for a different pane of glass to say you know exactly as you said you know why do we need diffusing and you know it's like why hasn't it been put in there why wasn't it you know someone just go oh yeah we'll just whack the searchlight in whack this radio in whack this whatever in um and just you know tap it into any kind of 12-volt circuit they can find and get their hands on versus actually that's what they're doing probably that's that's the piggybacking on somewhere and and the challenge with that is and i was saying this i say this all the time i say you know what we're doing there is we're sabotaging our own dreams you know having an unreliable is or a boat that you know things it's not all fires are catastrophic but i've seen you know owners that have had boat fires where you know it didn't take the whole boat down but it takes them out of boating yeah you know it's over you know and now that part of them you know some of us wanted to vote forever it's not something we just kind of happen to do it's sort of like oh you know i'm going to wear brown shoes or black shoes i don't know i'll just try it some of us it's something we've really wanted to do and if your boat or a boat does that to you and crushes your dream like that and you get out i you know i say to people that's sad you know that's really sad to have people lose their dreams because we're taking stupid shortcuts for really no benefit um it's yeah it's unfortunate it's i don't want to end on a on a dreary note um it's fascinating again we could talk about this this kind of stuff for ages um for people who want to learn more about this we kind of piqued their appetite and they want to learn more where's the best place that they can go and hear morgan where can we see more content from you where how can they get in touch with you how can they ask you questions on on your show where's the best place and way to get in contact with you guys yeah so this whole sharing of knowledge you can google on youtube search on the bar for pacific dot systems we've got courses some courses are 12 hours we've got a bunch of 12-hour courses virtual presentations lots ask pys so that's one format is certainly looking through the videos that we have on youtube the other thing too is we invite people to go to our website we're at over probably 1100 web pages wow we don't really sell stuff on the website it's not at all a website for selling it's more again sharing of information um so we have all the articles that we've published in magazines we write we used to write all these columns for monthly magazines so they're all there and they're available so you can find all that sort of geeking out i call and you know that before you do educate so all that there is there on our websites and then further than that is then people like you were saying in the beginning some people are going to see all this they're going to say great great great but i need help um and can you help us you know and that's where we do that's the fastest growing part of our business is the consultation and design we probably did over 400 of those consultation design engagements last year where we're actually building not necessarily the electrical but we're actually creating a plan to build so boat builders do-it-yourselfers and these boat owners are everywhere around the world across the united states asia the middle east england europe spain italy whatever any country it doesn't matter where the votes are we're supporting them saying okay well maybe you want to have a conversation pros and cons of what you want to do because that's already hard how do you make a choice of where you're going to go and then it's like well how do i actually go about executing that so we offer those sort of consultation and design services to boat owners but that's really after you you know and it's not for everyone i'd say 99.9 of the people that are going to read our content are going to listen to it they're like oh great you know i'm i'm good i'm going to go but there is a segment of that those boat owners are like i'd like to have you in my corner can you come and help me and support me as i go through this journey and figure out what's right for my boat and for my budget and help me make sense of all my choices and then give me a plan that i can either pass on to an electrician locally so they're not just sort of doing and i can also inspect and make sure that they're doing it according to a strategy and it's funny i really i tell people all the time i'm like have you ever seen how often is there greatness without a plan you know haphazard happens of course we have examples but most things in life you know homes buildings anything all these were planned they were put on paper they were thought about first and then you execute and as a boat owner i invite all of us to educate first plan and then do and not step that them skip that most important step of actually planning or thinking about what you're gonna do before we do it that's awesome jeff thank you ever so much for for getting up early and joining us on the show no problem being the the expert i definitely want to get you back there's a whole bunch of other topics again we've i think we've just scratched the surface with this session here um thank you all for for watching and and joining us on the show we'd love to hear your comments and your feedbacks you know who would you like to get us to get on what topics would you like us to cover on these sessions a lot of us are in lockdown certainly here in the uk we can't actually go boating so this is as close as we can get to at least talk about the the hobby that we love so again please reach out and let us know hit the subscribe and ring that bell notification head over to pacific yacht systems as well look at some of their great content that great video and i'll catch you on the next one stay safe how was that perfect you like it awesome hope
We serve the Lower Mainland
and Southern Vancouver Island.