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hi everyone jeff cote here with boatingtechtalk.com we've got a question from jason jason has a magnum inverter charger the me 2012 20 or the first part 2000 is the watts 12 is the voltage so it's a 2000 watt 12 volt inverter charger and i would like to use a magnum battery monitor or a standalone battery monitor so what's your choice so the good news is magnum actually makes a device called the bmk bravo mic kilo and it's a plug-in and it actually plugs into the inverter itself now remember your inverter should be close to your batteries right it should be because you can't the voltage drop is too much it can't handle that much current over a long cabling so generally batteries and inverter are really close good the bmk is a little device a little black box and what it does it actually has a few inputs one of which is voltage of the battery at the battery which is important and that's what you need for a battery monitor you want to be able to measure battery voltage not at the inverter but battery voltage at the battery bank so that's one thing and the other thing it comes with is a shunt and a shunt is good to measure both current going in the battery bank and current going out of the battery bank right so that's another good thing and the good news is that magnum uh makes a remote control i think it's called the rc50 or they even have the arc so r is romeo charlie 50. and it's a remote panel and on there there's one of the buttons at the bottom that calls that says meters and if you press the meter button button and you have a bm bmk so bravo my kilo you'll suddenly have your remote panel for your inverter charger also be a battery monitor sort of portal um it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of other battery monitors like the victron or the blue seas one i'm not saying that it's got all that but most of us honestly with battery monitors are looking for realistically three pieces of information uh what's the battery voltage which is good but that's not a battery monitor that's just battery voltage it happens to be a good piece of information for troubleshooting what is battery voltage second what are the amps going in and out of the battery bank super important and then lastly what is basically the amp hours or battery percentage so what is my battery capacity so those are really the three sort of variables that most of us use for a battery monitor there's way more but the bmk gives you all three of that so i'd say 95 plus percent of the time when we're installing a magnum inverter charger will be also installed on the mk yes of course some owners want more information and you know we're all different but in the general sense most of us are going to be quite happy with the vmk and it makes installation a breeze because remember you don't have to mount a new monitor somewhere because it's already part of your inverter charger rc50 remote and you don't have to run a cable which is great so it makes the whole installation of a battery monitor pretty low in terms of headaches or time so that's why we're a big proponent of the bmk from magnum so definitely good question and i would stick with the bmk if i've got magnum on my boat unless of course you love tons of information and you feel like geeking out and in that case you might consider a specific separate battery monitor that's going to give you more information great question jason thanks for asking thank you for watching this pys video if you've got further questions please ask it below or contact us on our contact form on our website and don't forget to subscribe thanks again for watching English (auto-generated) Videolytics