I’ve had LifePo4 batteries for my domestic bank for years. It changed the way I sail. I now use a deep freezer and a fridge. I simply switch the kettle on for a cuppa as we sail. The tv and microwave all run off the batteries too. For charging I use solar panels and a big alternator. The system has safeguard’s and redundancy built in and so far it has all worked perfectly. Lead acid is something I would never use these days.
Thanks for the feedback. We are getting lots of good info and we have the time to consider all the responses as upgrades / replacements are still some way in our future. Thanks for getting in touch. 👍
We have had LiFePO4 batteries for years and they ARE a life changer for us. We run any electric appliance from them - except our massive electric cooker / oven. That one we can only run on shore power and genny. But a single ring induction cooker, a kettle, a toaster etc. is not a problem. It‘s a big upfront investment and you‘ll have to make a few changes to the system, e.g. to protect the alternator from burning through when charging the lithiums. We still believe that over the lifetime of the lithiums they are cheaper than traditional lead acid or AGMs with a huge upgrade in boat life quality.
At the moment we are following the well established engineering principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". So far everything continues to work as it should.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Hi The suggested connection scheme while being perfectly ok & will possibly improve balancing. 13:22 but I looked at some web pages & noticed some odd stuff which didn't make sense about extra special balancing connection schemes for parallel LA batteries of 4 or more batteries. No, the schemes do make sense for 4 batteries & above but the balance improvements are even less than would be obtained with the simpler balancing connection scheme. Going into it a bit further it seems that not only do the parallel batteries naturally balance during charge, discharge & while resting simply by their individual change in voltage but during ageing over the longer term they naturally balance as well so that their usage rate & ageing evens out as well. In theory it is my contention that the parallel batteries will have the same lifespan within *_about ~0.271% +/- 0.062% approximately of course._* 🙂 (that's without a special connection scheme & with reasonably adequate size interconnection cables.) I'll be doing some tests & looking for practical real evidence online. With parallel batteries I might be tempted to have a separate charging module for each battery & diode combiners between the batteries & the load.
I’ve got a tiny boat with a fairly basic electrical system. The whole lot was running on 1x 110ah lead acid. I moved to lifepo4 because the depth of discharge is 90% The rated Ah is the same as the usable Ah i.e. 100Ah is more like 110Ah. It’s also 40% lighter. It’s basically twice the battery for half the weight in my application. 2000+ cycles. Lifebatteries seem to offer a 10yr warranty. I appreciate it’s not for everyone but this worked for me.
You go, girls! Just discovered your channel and it’s delightful. I have a copy of that boating electrical book as I agree, it gets to the point quickly and good for most boat electrics. ❤
Welcome aboard! It is a good book and we just converted the non-metric measurements and wrote the metric equivalents into the margins. It's not a perfect book but we can manage 😄 Glad you are enjoying the channel and thanks for commenting and letting us know 👍
I wish all boats were as simple as yours. The Oyster 56 I crewed on had a 12V, a 24V, a 48V and a 230V system. Then it can get pretty complicated. Great video like always.
Great to get advice from full time live aboards without the plavaver of huge expenditure of electricity via induction hobs, washing machine, water maker etc.
While I certainly understand your sentiment, we also have a Bavaria 36c and have gone the LifePo4 route (1,800Ah self build). I totally agree it is an expensive setup to install with large solar array, wind generator, high output alternator, 5Kw inverter etc. required to take full advantage but it does allow you to have all the comforts of a land lubber totally off grid. Its "Horses for courses" I guess - as once you consider running electric cookers, freezers etc., let alone water makers, dive compressors off grid, lead acids just wont cut the mustard. I personally also thing LifePo4 battery's are far safer on a boat than gas for cooking. As you rightly pointed out Lithium Ion are different and are more dangerous than the LifePo4's used on boats. Most new Lifepo4 batteries have a 3,000+ hour cycle life which on a boat could be 20+ years and prices are coming down. If down south to Dun Laoghaire again I would be happy to show you the installation. 900 watt kettles are available which will ensure your coffee and toast are ready together 🤗.
I love the 900W kettle idea 👍 We are not worried about land lubber comforts. Once we get coffee and a bit of chocolate all is right with the world. 😄 Nothing wrong with lithium, it is just in our case we cannot make the numbers work. If our circumstances change then maybe the cost/benefits will too. If you see us around in either Dun Laoghaire or elsewhere, please do give us a shout!
Hi Electrican here , I'm always mindful of power draw , you can get 600w toasters and kettles, although they take a little longer to toast and boil, I've even got a small air fryer which is 1000w. I very neat Idea on the market now are the solar generators , which can be charged from 12vdc, Solar or mains 240v. I use ecoflow myself but there are many many makes. Not cheap by anymeans but gives you a very easy solution to having 240vac offshore or at anchorage. and will save of Gas use for boiling water etc.
We are looking at extending the system somewhat and adding a 12V immersion for excess power from the solar panels to heat water onboard. That in itself would be great. We do have a small inverter aboard (actually we have two of them) and almost everything else on the boat already runs at 12V. Low power toasters could be great. I will have to look into thatone. Thanks for the tip 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass I don't have a yacht but do have a fancy camper, I've found the 12vdc immersion heater next to usless and takes ages to heat water, BUT certainly tons of options out there Good luck and like your down to earth channel. I think Ecoflow are gearing now toward the boat market, there is a video on youtube from them somewhere
From our point of view, everything at sea takes hours. Situation normal 😄😄 Thanks for the feedback and we are glad you are enjoying the channel. Maybe one day you will get a boat! Campervan on water ....
We have taken a slightly different route. Out came the 35 yr old gas cooker which was going rusty and the gas cylinders. Add 600w of solar and some lifePO4 and we are now cooking on induction and a Remoska. Do we cook much, oh yes its all home made including cakes 🙂 At sea the toastie maker at 750w is brilliant when its a bit rough and you want something quick and easy. Of course neither approach is right or wrong and I wouldn't dream of trying to sell the ideas to anyone who is happy continuing with gas. We are all different.
Like your new kettle Gaynor! Many camping type shops have low wattage 800 or 1000W kettles however quality is normally pretty poor; we've gone through three in last two years! As for 16A feeder posts, we came across 10A sockets in Scotland, found several 6A sockets and even one marina in Norway had 4A sockets ... 4A sockets! Still looking pretty breezy in Northern Ireland. Keep those hatches closed and that new kettle hot :-) Thanks for the video.
We may just have to buy another cheapie Tesco special. 1500W and lasted 3 years... 😄 The weather is indeed windy. If it was not for the separate microphones that segment of me standing by the solar panels would have been unusuable 😄😄
I got a really decent 800w auto lift-off kettle from Amazon about £20. V compact, cylindrical fits galley well, minimum footprint. Used everyday 2 yrs, as also FT live aboard, out on wild coast Finistère, Brittany Must add, I replaced my 6 yo hefty 400Ah Deep Cycle house bank with single 200Ah lifepo4 lithium, good brand, SOK, 7yr warranty, 8000 cycle, just under £1k, paired with v impressive RENOGY DC -DC charger, that's coordinating solar or alternator, and balancing charge, priorities, for both house and engine battery banks, was about £300. Now... Truly autonomous, was able to heat boat for 2 months, November, December, power Eberspacher, when most extreme storm ever recorded here, just within sight of Ushant, or Ouessant, smashed pontoons, tore big Passarelle away from shore, so, no electricity, cables ripped away ... no access, lotta Zodiac tender trips. Have 400w solar, and because no worries about discharge below 50%, only needed to run engine handful of times. Game changer ... and, now adding 2nd lithium, to give reserve, and better use the surplus solar, as often topped up before midday, and could then give potential back up, for engine starting, without risk tripping BMS high-discharge limit. Strongly recommend keeping conventional battery for engine, better suited, even small one, in case need to re-boot lithium BMS lockout. Of course, means can easily power my old Victron 1500w inverter too, for power tools, etc. I was slow to go down lithium path... but, I spend 6 months summer on hook, occasionally a buoy, and was always a stress, nursing lead-acid, one eye on volts, monitor. .. regular SG measurement every cell, and ... Acid, hydrogen ... Lost one, with COVID lockdown, electrolyte evaporation when unable to get on board for several months. Don't need any regular access for lithium, as it's Bluetooth BMS... Lighter, smaller, so, freed up some prime space, giving better engine access. I'm totally convert now, and, you'll know, lithium phosphate, no significant hazard, compared to other lithium chemistries, and, lead-acid. So far, BMS only recorded 4 full cycles... After 2 yrs well used. Price has significantly dropped now, btw.
@@Neptuneboy1959 - thanks for all that great info 👍Like you, our solar has the batteries topped up early and we just go from there. As soon as they are on float we use all the excess energy. Our next upgrade might be fitting a split 240V/12V immersion in the calorifier so that some of the daily excess can heat water. Even just warm water would be nicer than cold. BTW - well done on surviving that big storm. I think many of us got more practice doing that in 2023 than we ever wanted...
That is great info - thanks for telling us. Our next "upgrade" is likely to be more minor. Since, like you, our batteries are topped up early in the day, we need a use for all that excess electricity and we are looking at replacing our immersion with a dual 240V / 12V element. Even just warm water would be a big improvement over cold water ... BTW - well done on surviving the big storm. I think many of us got more practice at that in 2023 than we ever wanted.
Oh goodness, ladies, you have started a hare running with that episode! I had no idea that some sailors felt so strongly about batteries! I will stick the kettle on my gas stove and have a nice cup of tea with a biscuit whilst i wonder what the sea state for our trip to Dartmouth will be tomorrow and how much trouble i will have getting off the pontoon without hitting anything. I think the Lithium warriors need to refocus on sailing!! All the best from Salcombe. James
It certainly has raised a few hackles in some quarters 😄 Perhaps the heated blood will keep them warm without the need for other heating methods... Enjoy your sail tomorrow. I hope you get some nice weather for it (and enjoy your cuppa 👍)
Great overview on AC. Yes I agree, it’s all about your setup for recharging the batteries and solar is a pretty good way to stay topped up. I like redundancy so my fridges are on a second house bank that can share the solar or be isolated. For us on this side of the pond, the boat covers are coming off and launch is not far away! 🇨🇦
Jolly good review. I have an almost identical setup to yours and operating philosophy same. I don’t live aboard but when passaging I am totally self sufficient in my electron needs. I only use shore power to run a small dehumidifier. I recently bought an induction plate and use it mainly to boil water dockside, which goes into a thermos and provides a days hot water for drinks etc when at sea. I have a separate bank to run a refrigerator and again comes off a separate solar panel. That system runs forever even as you find on cloudy days. Cheers, SV Dreamtime
Not having all the electric guff aboard is a great relief. We insulated the fridge to reduce its usage and pack it as full as we can. We will likely just replace the batteries in the next year or so simply because 5 or 6 years should be plenty old enough for a battery.
Over a year ago I upgraded my coffee setup, ideal when not at sea. A 1zpresso k-ultra hand grinder (adjustable settings from very fine Espresso to very coarse French Press). Takes under 30 seconds to grind enough for one mug. Infinitely better than the cheap small hand grinder I had before. Timemore nano scales so that I can be precise in the beans to water ratio. Still using my Aeropress. Testing with my regular TankCoffee Glory of Africa beans. Slight trickery to extend James Hoffman's recipe from 200g to 300g of water for a full mug. Less than 4 mins in total to make. Absolutely delicious! For Jane we are practising foaming milk using the microwave to heat it in a small cafetiere, pumping the plunger quickly gets a pretty good foam. Practice will improve it. (There are small automatic electric milk heat and froth devices which don't use many amps). For offshore I'm going to use an electric coffee filter that fills an insulated flask. I'll put it on the gimbled stove. This way no hot water to juggle with.
I really like the idea of frothing using the small cafetiere, but I am also impressed with your dedication to the art of coffee making. I am also not surprised that Mr Hoffman gets a mention in your comment as so dedicated a coffee buff as yourself surely had to be aware of the Greatest Barista ever 😄
Just done a quick Google and I cannot see the point of it. It appears to be a battery or transformer. We already have batteries aboard. I'm obviously missing something here.... or am I?
@SailingYachtSaltyLass I also have a g Huge battery bank, but the ecoflow is a new that outperforms them. Anyway we can choose the Ac imput charge rate and there for we have to unplug other loads to do something like making tea.. We have moved to an induction cook top which we use for majority of our coffee making and making eggs for breakfast plus a toaster. This saves huge on propane consumption It provides 2600 peak watts and 1200.plus Amp hrs.. Just an amazing piece of kit. And has high solar and ac recharge rates.
Interesting piece of kit 👍 To save on propane (butane in our case) we just bought a thermal cooker. Sometimes we can be such cheapies 😄😄 It looks very bulky. Does it fit in a locker? Does it need ventilation?
You could toss a double outlet in and use a switch so only one electrical port is on at a time. This way you don't need to plug/unplug all the time and you'll not be able to run both all the same.
We have 420 Ah of LiFePo and solar, and use induction cooking and electric to heat water. Rarely use our propane. We also hand grind coffee but really using an electric coffee grinder uses very little electric. Toast is better in a frying pan, not a toaster. Turn your inverter off whenever not in use, just proper ground fault outlets will defeat an inverter's attempts to sleep.
Your life experience is not our life experience. Toast in a pan is rubbish compared to toast in a toaster. We have tried all the variations (unless there is a special frying pan we should be using???) 😄 Our inverter is almost never switched on. It's main purpose is to charge the drone battery when out at sea and, very occasionally, a second laptop.
What brand is the Galvionic isolator ? We have one wired into the boat but I liked yours being inline with the cable. You should rewired the socket by the way. We have 600ah of lithium and I’m not sure what we would do with out it. Great informative video !!
The isolator is this one www.amazon.co.uk/Galvanic-Isolator-Installation-Suitable-Materials/dp/B0CFVSRR9C As for the socket rewire, as we said in another reply - it is a real pain in the a#*s to get to, is a North European socket and we almost never use it for anything. So we left it alone...
A waterboiler wants to boil water, therefore there is NO restriction on powerussage, ea a waterboiler eats as much electricity as it can pull. I love that you put 2 lines on the visor, so you can heat 1 or 2 cups, this will be much more efficient.
Well spotted 👍 I forgot to mention that in the video. The lower line is for two tea mugs of water, the upper line for two coffee mugs. We are highly organised around here.... 😄
Thanx for this video. It was great as always. I would like to upgrade to lithium batteries, but they are too expensive and needs other chargers too. I agree with you that it is much better to upgrade the solar panels and continue with the old batteries. I guess I will upgrade to at least to 100w 24v panels and mppt regulator next year. At the moment I have 50w 12v panel and a single battery from 2016. It is enough for short day trips or weekend during the summer.
No, not directly. The fire issues are more prevalent with Lithium Ion batteries (think phones, tablets, etc). House batteries are Lithium Iron Phosphate and is a more stable type of battery. However, Lithium batteries are prone to handling larger current loads than lead/acid so there is a danger if cabling is not uprated to suitable levels capable of handling those currents safely.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Thanks for this. The following has nothing to do with sailing but you since you are smart people, I thought I would ask. The guy that services my caravan was telling another customer who wanted an upgrade to lithium that he didn't think the technology was there yet for caravans. Would vibrations be the issue or that people might not appreciate the cost of rewiring and upgrading solar panels along with cost of the batteries?
@@maxcaravan7584 Hi Max, sorry but that's not right, lithium iron phosphate batteries are definitely suited to caravans, they just need to be secure just like on a bouncy boat. Goodluck 🇦🇺👍
@maxcaravan - perhaps your caravan service guy is confusing the two types of lithium batteries. Trust me, if they are safe on a boat I would expect them to be more than suitable for a caravan. Just make sure that the charging circuits can handle the maximum load from the panels and the MPPT controller because with Lithium, they will draw maximum current down from the charging circuit for a prolonged period. Lead Acid batteries never do that and the charging currents tail off as the battery charges.
Great video, keep them coming! I have a question that you may have answered in another video? I noticed that you use coffee beans, so I suspect you make some nice coffee on your yacht. Can you please do a video on making a good cup of coffee? (Cappuccino, latte, etc). I am on a pontoon with no electricity just a calor gas hob, so I would look forward to hearing how you manage to make your coffee.
Yikes! Now there's a question 😮 TBH it is not something we ever gave any thought to. We just grind it up and use a little cafetiere. I will see if we can do something. We can approximate a cappuchino sort of coffee but the effort requires a special occasion 😄
I'm fussy about coffee. The 1zePresso k-ultra is great for a wide variety of types of coffee. Good grind and fast. My suggestion is to use a kettle and an aeropress when moored. But I don't think that's safe at sea. For milk the challenge is heating it. The ways with least mess use electricity. Probably you will need to heat in a pan and use a wand to froth it. We got the powerful Nanofoamer with USB rechargeable battery, lasts ages and is massively more effective than the ones with AA batteries. Note a thermometer is essential to avoid burning the milk.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass the USB Nanofoamer is like chalk and cheese. Much more powerful, creates good foam. See sponsored video by Lance Hendrick (latte art champion).
You got it right :-) Note: Your AC ground protection gives you protection up to around 1,7 V (don't arrest me on that number, but I am very close). The only gismo to give full protection is an AC/AC transformer. Then you are in your own electrical world. As a security decission, we do not carry gas on board. And, in my part of the world, it seems to be an increasing issue. But we (by 'we', I mean my wife) took that decission back in 2000. Then I had allready built approved gas lockers. I built the whole boat, by the way. And, due to diet issues, we need a freezer. So now we have a cooler, a freezer, micro wave, induction oven, and so on. And, in our part of the world, it rains, it snows, it's dark in the winter, and solar panels are great. But not under 2 inches of snow. Our lead acid batteries lasts for 10+ years. And they can start our diesel motor, and run our thruster that takes 7,5 kW. All well. And we bought 20 years ago a second hand gen.set, made in 1987. Last year we installed 400 Ah Lithium. For us, underlining for us, it's a game changer. The batteries weigh 'nothing', can be installed upside down, and charges at 50 A+ until they are 100 %. Then the charging stops (separate 220 V AC charger). So, under sail, sv Hulda consumes between 10- and 15 Ah. The gen.set can on demand supply 6 kW contineously. Main gen.set fuse is 32 A, don't need that. But I have equipment that needs 16 A fuses. After 8 hrs. we run the gen.set for an hour, and the batteries are 100 %, eggs are fried and the coffee is hot. Warm water in the tap. On the dowside, a litre og diesel or two.
I guess we store a lot of energy in gas bottles. We have always had gas to cook with, even when living on land so we are used to it and we are always very careful handling and using it. As a matter of fact, we have just had our gas safety inspection (passed!!) so we are pleased with that. Just like all boats are different, I guess all power systems are different too. At least you have one that works well for you and that is really what matters, but it is great to get feedback from people whose opinions we trust rather than the random noise that infests a lot of the internet. Thank you! 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Yes, instead of arguing over different approaches, accept and find if there are elements of value that can be adopted. We don't even have a gas lighter on board. Stoped smoking Wendesday before Christmas 1985. Yes, gas contains a lot of energy. Less than 1 kg will blow a mid sized boat clear of the water. Domestic gas was abandoned decades ago in Scandinavia. Now we in Norway just produce and sell it to EU, UK and Ireland :-) At a good price. Though not influencing on my pension.
Your slightly sexist lesson about sockets is absolutely bang on. 😌 In a previous life in the military I've plugged in to a vehicle radio supply socket which had been wired with the terminals back to front. The current was only 24V but the bang and the sparks accompanied by the cloud of escaping pixies was something to behold. Grabbing hold of 240V will definitely curl your hair. 🤕 Incidentally your 'upside down socket' has neutral and live wrong - not neutral and earth!
That wee flashy plug thing has the faults all noted on the back. Gaynor needs to read more carefully. As for the sexist socket - I had no idea she was going to say that - I was just holding the camera, filming it, editing it into the video, etc. So I plead total innocence 😄
If you got a bang then the short time fault current depends on the supply impedance which is very low & the current may have been in the region of more than 50,000 amps. If the upstream over current fault protection device operated properly then the fault current would have been limited in duration to less than a few milliseconds. Current is not measured in volts, it depends on the load resistance or impedance normally & can also depend on the supply impedance in the event of a load fault short circuit situation.
That is true for some DC/DC converters but not all. Given the weight of the unit in the video I suspect that it is just a buck-booster. I know they oscillate as the inductor and capacitors do their thing but there is no heavy, inefficient iron core in there...
£1200 for the arch, is great 🙂We had 360ah of lead and could run fridge safely for 3/4 days without the arch. On the new boat we want to run induction hob and the boat has two fridges. Arch will be a must but I am hoping the new deep discharge lead batteries will work for us. Space will be another issue of course. Your dc to dc inverter runs laptops and stuff?
The small DC/DC unit gaynor was holding is specifically for the laptops. The blue inverter can also power a laptop through the normal AC charger that comes with the laptop. But we also have USB chargers that plug in to the 12V systems and they can charge anything that has a USB charging port.
We only use electric kettle or fan heating in a marina. Mind you now we have eberspracher it won’t be used much anymore.😊. I have a small inverter but it lives in the press more than is used. I had bought a new inline galvanic isolator but don’t use it anymore. It seemed to affect our battery charge. John always hated it. We’re thinking of solar panels off the lifeline/ cockpit steel at some time in the future just to keep us topped up . Our friends are planning on putting solar on their westerly Falcon this year so they can be offshore longer. Are you thinking of something like Mads solar set up for doubling their space or like Cadoha they have special solar panels they winch up the mast at anchor .
If we expanded the panels, we would likely look for larger panels and modify the existing arch to take them. We though Mads's crazy "tilt in all directions and slide out" arch was way over complicated. We would be more likely to get foldable panels that could be set out at anchor and plugged in if required.
It’s personal choice though - like everything in life, on land, or on water. You are making the case for compromise, whereas others may choose to spend more money to live more comfortably. Everyone has the right to do what they think is right for them.
Totally agree with your decision to stick with what you got, for me the sums dont add up. The beauty of keeping with Lead acid / AGM or Gel batteries are firstly they are a lot cheaper and easy to come by if you suddenly need a replacement. Interestingly my insurance company asked if we have Lithium batteries as they have had several fire claims from boats with Lithium batteries ( probable because they hadn't installed appropriate wiring
Electrical wiring by owners is probably one of the biggest issues on a boat. Some of the nightmares we have seen on this boat and others would make anyone wonder if owners should be allowed to install high amperage cabling.
Really informative and interesting, Bev what brand are ur solar panels please? Thanks Lasses, hope ur all well, oh and are u coming into summer over there? So ur battery set up is in parallel. I'm with u on the metric Gaynor, were the same down under😲😜🐧🐘
The panels were from a company called "Bimble Solar" who are a UK based company. I'm sure there are manufacturer's labels under the panels but I will need to look at them. As for summer - it is definitely coming because the rain is warmer!
It's a pity you just got a new one, but here in Austria most kettles are around 2000W but you get them way down to below 1000W for even less than 10€. Of course you have to wait longer, that's probably why they don't sell in tee nations. Regarding lithium Iron batteries I don't share your concerns and I'm wondering don't you have like a fridge or Laptops for video editing to charge? You could replace your two batteries with one lithium battery. Depending on your solar charger it could even work with those?
We do have a fridge, but not a freezer. We have laptops for video editing and we do that using the power from the panels. The batteries are topped up by early morning and the panels are powering nothing after that so we use the DC/DC charger and plug the laptop into the boat's 12V circuit. The costs for lithium we calculated was for an equivalent capacity to what we have now (allowing for the bigger depth of discharge). There were much cheaper Chinese batteries but I have a distrust of really cheap stuff - you can only drive the price down so much before you cut back on something important. OTOH no one likes being gouged on price so we looked at manufacturers with a good reputation. It's a compromise. It always will be and there is no totally right or wrong answer. What we have works and is affordable. Perhaps things will change in the future? We will know when we get there... 😉
Hi. I do agree with you. If you swap to LiFePo batteries you should also upgrade other components of your 12VDC system. Bavaria's is not a bad brand as the German standard of electrics are fairly good. I would fit a device to protect the alternator from overheating i.e external controller or a DC/DC charger. The original diode battery charge separator should also be replaced by an Argo-FET or similar. If you have an old battery charger, it may have to be replaced to suit LiFePo batteries. Wire gauges also have to be increased due to possibly higher currents in your system. In my case, a cost of £ 2500, just for bits'n bobs. If you are skilled in electrics (like I am) and do the swap your selves, it can be acceptable in terms of money spent over years. If you have to pay professionals to do the job, it is not! I still run lead-acid batteries and spend my money on other upgrades instead. Apparently not a single part for boats cost less than £ 100 :) That being said, I will go for LiFePo one day, just for the benefits.... not for saving money. Fair winds, sail safe! From Norway.
That is more or less why we are holding back at this point. Our shore-power charger would need changing too. I think Bavaria has a charge relay but it is an area of the boat that I have not gone into too deeply as everything is working normally and even I know that the first rule of engineering is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
You two are adorable. Apparently UK prices are high. I can get a single 260ah lithium battery for under $700, and it will last me 10-15 years. Much cheaper. I guess bottom line is, go with the setup you are most comfortable with.
At that sort of price, we would be ripping out the lead/acids... probably... 😄 We also need to think about all the other upgrades needed for our charging infrastructure, but the prices you are quoting are about 2/3rds the price they are here.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass location is everything. And of course, specially marine graded equipment is always more expansive. To get used to lithium, I recommend a solar generator with a portable solar panel. You could use that independently from your house system and just run computers, cameras and such things from. One thing to remember is that if you are at the forefront of innovation everything is more expensive. Naturally younger people are more willing to invest in potential failures while older people might think going with proven tech is going to serve them better. Both groupés are right. But prices are also coming down. LiTime has cheap high duality batteries. But it’s based on US distributors. find your sweet spot and stick to it.
We are looking into portable solar panels for a future project so thank you are giving us some ideas. It's a long way off at the minute but we are in no rush.
Thanks for the A/C D/C lesson … having converted the house batteries to 48v lithium and 48v alternator onboard my boat - I am not sure I agree with with you 12.5 year comparison between LED acid and lithium … prices for lithium has come down very considerably and taking into account that you can discharge down to 10% vs 50% for led acid - the like for like capacity you need for lithium is less (or using the same space - you can significantly increase your capacity) Solar will unfortunately never get even close to the output from an externally regulated high power alternator (I live in Dubai and if solar would be efficient it would be here) …. With 15kwh lithium capacity I can run the air conditioning onboard overnight off the batteries (we do not worry about heating here ;-) … fair wind and full power ladies
Wow! That rewire sounds like a major project! The 12½ year thing was just giving the Lithium the 2.5x factor that our lead/acid batteries have. According to the blurb sheet our batteries had a 2 year guarantee and here we are 5 years later and they are still going strong. Since the lithiums come with a 5 year guarantee I just multiplied that by the same factor. It is not a hard and fast rule but I needed some way to make a comparison of very different products. BTW - I think perhaps you do worry about heating in Dubai, it just happens to be backwards compared to us 😄😄 We are trying to keep the heat in, you are trying to stop it getting in. Thanks for watching and for commenting 👍
There are lithium batteries available for much less than you mentioned. I recently bought a 12.8 Volt, 280Ah LifePO4 battery from Eco Worthy for £539 to replace a couple of old 6 Volt 225Ah lead acid golf cart batteries in a small solar setup. The difference is night and day. Lithium is so much more advanced in so many ways including cost when the number of cycles and usable depth of cycle is taken into account. Obviously with your panels and current usage you have no reason to change your existing lead acid at this stage as you have demonstrated.
If we were starting from scratch and replacing everything in a new build or a project boat, then we may well have gone down the lithium route, but that is not were we are. Nonetheless, I'm really glad that it has been a viable upgrade for you.👍
All this talk about Lithium and Leadacid batteries but no talk about Gel batteries . Any particular reason? They are safer than lead acid, require no maintenance and can discharge up to 75% without damage.
We are aware of the increasing age of our existing batteries (five years) but those batteries are still performing very well, so we looked into various upgrades. People told us that lithiums had become a lot cheaper so we looked into it and, yes, they have fallen in price but in this place it is still going to cost a lot to upgrade and we only need batteries that can last overnight. In the morning, the solar charges them back up. At this stage it looks a lot simpler, quicker and cheaper just to drop in another pair of lead/acids. We like the idea of Gel but we precluded them simply on cost. It just seems to be lead/acid at double the price. Our lead/acid batteries are the sealed variety. We have done no maintenance on them in 5 years
Get a vango induction hob. It's only 800W on high and you only need setting 3 to boil a kettle or even fry an egg. That's only about 460W. Electric kettles are over powered. They are inefficient, purely to give you hot water as fast as possible.
I think you need to recheck your arithmetic on the LiFePO4 batteries. They are MUCH less expensive than lead-acid batteries in the long run - hands down. You can expect 4000-6000 cycles from the LiFePO4 batteries and still have 80% of their original capacity. Assuming only 4000 cycles, you would get over ten years of service and the batteries would still have 80% of their original capacity. So, a 100 amp-hour LiFePO4 battery would still have 80 amp-hours of capacity after ten years of regular use, cycling them down to 20% every day. Additionally, the LiFePO4 batteries are non-toxic and can be stored safely inside your living quarters in any position; whereas, the lead-acid batteries are toxic and require special care - and, expense - for disposal. And, flooded lead-acid batteries off-gas hydrogen (flammable) and are very corrosive to any and all metal in the vicinity, as well as require regular maintenance (checking the specific gravity and topping off the cells with distilled water). They also should be vented and not placed inside your living quarters. Lead-acid batteries (all varieties) can easily be damaged by over discharging them. You should never discharge them below 50% and if you do you WILL damage them and reduce their cycle life, resulting in you having to replace them sooner, rather than later. In fairness, LiFePO4 batteries also suffer degradation if discharged too deeply - but, they have automatic Battery Management Systems built into them that disconnect the loads before they are too deeply discharged. Many of the BMS in LiFePO4 batteries are programmable and often have Bluetooth connectivity and an app to allow you to set the charge and discharge levels to maximize cycle life depending on your usage patterns. Those same apps can give you real time information regarding the State of Health (SOH) of the batteries, as well as their State of Charge (SOC). And, some even keep count of how many charge-discharge cycles have taken place since being put into service. Meanwhile, LiFePO4 batteries have plunged in price and represent about 70% savings in weight. Finally, the market speaks for itself. LiFePO4 batteries are steadily displacing lead-acid batteries in the vast majority of applications. There are real reasons for this - in addition to the ones I already listed, above. I suggest you do additional research for yourself. You need not take my word on any of this.
Ladies, I beg to differ.... I have gone over to 3 x 100Ah LiFePO4 for my main bank and these have an expected lifespan in excess of 4,000 cycles/ 10 years, costing less than £1000 and enabling me to go totally off-grid at anchor for several days without any form of charging. I too have a Bosch L5013 Lead Acid starter battery, and I agree that they are fairly bomb-proof and long-lived, but that is because they are not repeatedly deep-cycled day-in and day-out (which would indeed trash them within 500 cycles / 2 years). So, £1,000 for 500 cycles, or £1,000 for 4,000 cycles - it's your choice. Solar is unreliable due to the inevitable shadows cast by masts, sails and rigging - and in my case, as I have a ketch, I cannot permanently mount panels on an arch; instead I have 3 x nominally 130w folding panels and, in Winter, in the Med, I am lucky if I can pull 15 Amps out of them even on whatever happens to be the sunny side of the boat. This current is not going to challenge even a modest MPPT controller, and it is simply incorrect to say that "Lithium drinks Amps" - an Amp hour is an Amp hour, and if you run your batteries down (whatever batteries down) by 150Ah, you are going to need (in my case) at least 10 hours to charge them back up. In contrast the alternator on the engine kicks out 70A, so on a passage its a no-brainer - not "free energy", but not a hassle either. In addition you cannot draw a sustained load of more than about 20 Amps from a Lead Acid battery should you wish to do more than just keep the lights on or winch the anchor up. (My life-changing luxury is a £212 electric toilet from Force 4 chandlery - absolutely marvellous piece of kit - but anything more than a laptop or a sewing machine and you are stretching what is achievable with a standard battery). I have therefore also gone Lithium for my Inverter bank - I have an entirely separate 400Ah black plastic brick (which cost me £1200) in the aft cabin powering a 3000w 240v Victronic inverter, and this allows me to boil my (1000w) kettle, use my (700w) air fryer or cook on my (500w) hotplate. I can also use an 80w Lidl electric blanket, which is a real game-changer. Of course, even 400Ah has its limits, but, again, when under way using the motor I can easily recharge both banks within a day, or wait until I get to a marina and plug in the mains charger overnight. NB I would seriously recommend installing an Isolation Transformer on the 240v shorepower side of things (rather than a Galvanic Isolator) for all sorts of reasons. Everyone's setup - and indeed everyone's lifestyles and requirements - are different, but with the greatest respect, now that "drop in" LiFePO4 batteries are available which look, feel and are cabled in pretty much the same as a conventional Lead Acid unit, IMHO not only does the arithmetic work, but there are also very practical benefits in terms of overall capacity, power output (you cant draw 100A to boil a kettle from a 12v Lead Acid battery) and convenience. On a closing note, the key is to budget: how many Amps do you have going out during a typical day, how are you going to get those Amps back in, and how much of a buffer do you need between the two? My background consumption at anchor is around 1.5 amps, whereas on a night passage, all lit up like a Christmas tree and with the fridge, radar, autopilot, chartplotter, AIS and what have you on I burn about 15 amps. Before the sun comes up (or I run the motor) that needs a 200Ah reserve, hence my 300Ah House bank. Your wattage may differ.............
The reason our panels are located where they are is because they are almost completely shade free. They are 300W panels and we regularly see 260W coming in. Like you we can spend days at anchor and it is usually running out of food, water or coffee that drives us into port. From your description you have a lot more "gadgets" than us but we really lack the room to store all that stuff so we simplify by not having it. And if we do not have it, we do not need to power it. So far, in the 4 years we have had the solar on the back of the boat, we have never had a power crisis. I am sure we will have one some day because sooner or later everything goes "Whirr...clunk!" and stops working 😮 but so far, so good. Thanks for watching and commenting. We really appreciate the feedback.
Once you get over your fear of lithium you will become a believer. Lithium will save you 10% in electricity EVERY DAY. The lithium charges faster and more efficiently. Cost is no longer a factor. And you won't need help when it comes time to lift those antiquated flooded lead acid.
We are not afraid of it (one of us is an electrical engineer). In this place, at this time,m we cannot make the costs work out. We could buy the cheapest ones on planet from somewhere but our life experience in general is "buy mega-cheap, buy twice" but the quality is usually cr@ppy
The electrics are not isolated by a galvanic isolator, only the earth is isolated and only against voltages below about 1v. It is only to protect earthed metalwork in the water. You must have an RCD for protection. It’s the lads on the boat that determine the amps, not the size of the plug. Correct fusing is the important thing. Why not correct the wiring? If you had hybrid lithium you would get an extra 16% power from your panels minimum due to the extra efficiency of the charge cycle. You also get more because you don’t have the absorb cycle where the solar tapers off. You need 1/2 the capacity in lithium as you can use all the power without any risk to battery life. Lithium will last well over 5000 cycles when shallow charging. With your use a £400 100Ah LiFePO4 would be fine. Going hybrid with a small lead acid means you don’t have to update any of your charging sources as they can remain on lithium. All that is needed is to set up the lithium BMS with hybrid settings. Having lithium will also mean that you can use heavier loads fr longer without worry and without the battery voltage sagging to a pint the inverter cuts out. I type as someone who converted some years back after being a lead head for many decades and the difference is remarkable to which so many boaters can attest. The mistake with going lithium is to look at companies such as Victron where it will certainly cost a lot as their main interest is in selling you stuff and to keep selling you stuff whether you want / need it or not. Yes there is a place for it for those with fat wallets and for those who feel they get some social boost from having it but those who do research tend to get much better value systems that are easier to set up and to understand.
A bit of sloppy wording in our case. There is an RCD on the boat's AC panel and we have (inadverently) tested it 😉 We are getting great feedback from this video (including your feedback) and so we have a lot to consider. The L/A batteries are still going strong at this point so we have time to consider everything. Thanks for watching and commenting 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass my lead acids were, and still are, going strong. This is why I went hybrid as it effectively gave them a second / longer life and now they are mainly a redundant system that also means I don’t have to use lithium charging profiles, there is no cut off problem with the alternator and I’m not going to get a sudden lights out moment as the BMS decides I have used enough. Lead acids are now over 7 years old and I’ve just cooked dinner and had a shower using the lithium without thought. And have used 71Ah
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass They actually don’t run very different voltages and the lithium voltage sits completely within the lead acid voltage range. One uses the programmable lithium BMS to set a low voltage cutoff at 12v which is 10% on the lithium and 50% on the lead acid. The BMS is set to cut off at 14vat which voltage it is at around 99% charged with the sort of charge rates that are common on boats. Once cut off the charge sources then proceed to take the lead acid up to absorb voltage of 14.4 as usual using the normal charge sources on their lead acid profile. Because the normal working voltage of lithium is around 13.2-13.3v this is a low float for lead acid so they are kept where they want to be: ie full but at that voltage they take almost no current so very little parasitic draw. One aims to charge the bank once the voltage reaches 12.8v which is full for lead acid and 20% for lithium but, at that point, you still have a full set of lead acid that you can use while you use the lithium charge between 20% and 10%. I run a Facebook group “12 volt boating group” where a lot of time is spent on this, explaining and giving settings and examples etc.
Yes - your name did ring some bells. I wondered where I had come across it. For the moment this is not an issue for us but it eventually will be (no battery lasts forever) and it makes sense to get info early so decisions are made in a sensible and timely way. We will not be going cruising this year so power requirements are a minor consideration at this point (plenty of AC available) but you may see us in your group when the time comes. Thanks for the updates 👍 and I hope you did not get too wound up watching our video (I think some commenters nearly had a fit 😄 but rude comments never make it in here)
Another nice vblog. Thank you both. Thing about lithium batteries is that the majority of them are made with material produced by child slave labour. This information is being supressed and/or greenwashed by the manufacturers. The good news is that things are changing (albeit slowly). There is better technology coming through anyway. So, good decision.
Thank you. Another consideration is that lead/acid batteries are very efficiently recycled back into new lead/acid batteries whereas lithium seems to be more of a "throwaway" technology.
Oh boy. First you diss batteries in parallel, then you promote it. The bare minimum is a battery isolator switch. Better is separate chargers charging into separate batteries running separate loads. Most people can't predict or control which battery has a higher standby voltage. Battery differences are much worse than you can figure and they are a total disaster for some people. Another scheme is use six volt golf cart batteries and no batteries in parallel. Wire them in series and there is no fight between them.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Germany lost half their PKW 4 tanks in WW2 to batteries in parallel. They couldn't start in the morning, then couldn't turn their turrets. A local trucker got fired for rewiring a company truck in parallel. Every morning, his wife came and jumpstarted the truck with her car. It took over a half an hour.
Your assumptions on battery life are wrong. Lithium will last 15 to 20 years at least. In addition, you comparison of battery costs needs to be adjusted for the usable capacity that a lithium battery has. You don't need the same Ah capacity as lead if you go lithium for comparison purposes.
I have heard a lot of people telling me about the 20 year life and very few can come up with a concrete example of a LifePo4 really lasting 20 years. There are also plenty of examples of LifePo4 batteries getting a BMS fault and frying £x,xxx worth of batteries. I also have plenty of people telling me that my 5 year old lead/acid batteries will last 2 years if I am lucky. There are a lot of agendas and misinformation out there, but the information on price is solid.
@SailingYachtSaltyLass I ams orry but you have little knowledge of the subject you are dismissing. Rod Collins, part author of the ABYC standard for lithium has had a lithium battery in his boat for 15 years. He recently capacity tested it and it still has its full capacity. Individual lithium cells costs are about half of what they were 12 months ago. We recently built a 280Ah battery using grade A cells and a jk BMS with 2A active balancer for $600. That is equivalent to about 500Ah of lead domestic battery. It will out live the lead battery many times over. My own batteries are 12 months old now. We are liveaboard. 920w of solar, electric cooking, watermaker and immersion heater all run from lithium and solar. Same propane bottle since last summer, only used for the oven. Everybody who converts says what a game changer it is. No need to keep the lithium charged like lead. Its just as happy at 20% charged as 80%.
When researching LiFePO4 for the boat I came to the conclusion it was the lowest cost over the life cycle of the installation. Having worked in an industry where lithium batteries which were automatically tested was the norm, I was confident in the batteries. The BMS is the most likely point of failure and so I went for Roamer batteries which have serviceable BMS and cells. We were out for 5 months last year and our batteries went through 8 charge cycles with the lifetime projected to be 5000 charge cycles. I don’t expect to be changing them ever
@@SailingYachtSaltyLassthe thing about your phone battery is that it’s a mass produced item built to a cost. It’s also lithium ion and not lithium iron phosphate. Probably, more importantly most phone batteries are fully charged to 100% and then left in a charger and the discharged very low. Whereas on a boat that’s not likely to happen for a few reasons. Such as you size your bank to suit your needs. You tend to be present during charging and so can switch off charging at say 80 to 90%. The BMS eliminates the danger of harm by discharging too much. The good thing about lead acid when you liveaboard all year is you can charge them at any temperature. With LiFePO4 you need to buy the heated versions which makes them more expensive and is another point of failure. So I can see why Lead acid suits you living up here in the frozen north We are removing our gas this year so our electrical demand will be much higher so the rate of charge with lithium is a big bonus, particularly as we don’t have or want a solar arch. Last week in the storm I saw the wind turbine putting 30amps plus into the batteries.
I’ve had LifePo4 batteries for my domestic bank for years. It changed the way I sail. I now use a deep freezer and a fridge. I simply switch the kettle on for a cuppa as we sail. The tv and microwave all run off the batteries too. For charging I use solar panels and a big alternator. The system has safeguard’s and redundancy built in and so far it has all worked perfectly. Lead acid is something I would never use these days.
Thanks for the feedback. We are getting lots of good info and we have the time to consider all the responses as upgrades / replacements are still some way in our future. Thanks for getting in touch. 👍
We have had LiFePO4 batteries for years and they ARE a life changer for us. We run any electric appliance from them - except our massive electric cooker / oven. That one we can only run on shore power and genny. But a single ring induction cooker, a kettle, a toaster etc. is not a problem. It‘s a big upfront investment and you‘ll have to make a few changes to the system, e.g. to protect the alternator from burning through when charging the lithiums. We still believe that over the lifetime of the lithiums they are cheaper than traditional lead acid or AGMs with a huge upgrade in boat life quality.
At the moment we are following the well established engineering principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". So far everything continues to work as it should.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass makes sense!
Why not fix the wiring on the socket which needs the plug put in upside down ?
Because it is a real pain in the a#*s to get to, is a North European socket and we almost never use it for anything.
Yet another informative, practical video your smashing it ladies.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks Roy.
Easy, boil the kettle, fill the teapot. Whilst the tea is brewing, make the toast and when you are ready to eat the toast, the tea will be ready. 😄
Good coffee is an art!
@davidswheatley-talesfromth1796 - That is more or less exactly how we do it 😄
@pioneer6722 - we agree 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass
Hi
The suggested connection scheme while being perfectly ok & will possibly improve balancing.
13:22 but I looked at some web pages & noticed some odd stuff which didn't make sense about extra special balancing connection schemes for parallel LA batteries of 4 or more batteries. No, the schemes do make sense for 4 batteries & above but the balance improvements are even less than would be obtained with the simpler balancing connection scheme.
Going into it a bit further it seems that not only do the parallel batteries naturally balance during charge, discharge & while resting simply by their individual change in voltage but during ageing over the longer term they naturally balance as well so that their usage rate & ageing evens out as well.
In theory it is my contention that the parallel batteries will have the same lifespan within *_about ~0.271% +/- 0.062% approximately of course._* 🙂
(that's without a special connection scheme & with reasonably adequate size interconnection cables.)
I'll be doing some tests & looking for practical real evidence online.
With parallel batteries I might be tempted to have a separate charging module for each battery & diode combiners between the batteries & the load.
I’ve got a tiny boat with a fairly basic electrical system. The whole lot was running on 1x 110ah lead acid. I moved to lifepo4 because the depth of discharge is 90% The rated Ah is the same as the usable Ah i.e. 100Ah is more like 110Ah. It’s also 40% lighter. It’s basically twice the battery for half the weight in my application. 2000+ cycles.
Lifebatteries seem to offer a 10yr warranty.
I appreciate it’s not for everyone but this worked for me.
That is great to hear. We are not saying that everyone should avoid them, just why Lithiums are not right for us at this stage.
You go, girls! Just discovered your channel and it’s delightful. I have a copy of that boating electrical book as I agree, it gets to the point quickly and good for most boat electrics. ❤
Welcome aboard! It is a good book and we just converted the non-metric measurements and wrote the metric equivalents into the margins. It's not a perfect book but we can manage 😄
Glad you are enjoying the channel and thanks for commenting and letting us know 👍
Nice video ladies. Thanks for the shout out. Sail Safe Guys, Ant & Cid.
Our pleasure!
I wish all boats were as simple as yours.
The Oyster 56 I crewed on had a 12V, a 24V, a 48V and a 230V system. Then it can get pretty complicated.
Great video like always.
We are like simple. It matches our mindsets... 😮
Great to get advice from full time live aboards without the plavaver of huge expenditure of electricity via induction hobs, washing machine, water maker etc.
GLad it was helpful. As every boat is different, perhaps the solutions for Wavedancer will be different from our solutions
While I certainly understand your sentiment, we also have a Bavaria 36c and have gone the LifePo4 route (1,800Ah self build). I totally agree it is an expensive setup to install with large solar array, wind generator, high output alternator, 5Kw inverter etc. required to take full advantage but it does allow you to have all the comforts of a land lubber totally off grid. Its "Horses for courses" I guess - as once you consider running electric cookers, freezers etc., let alone water makers, dive compressors off grid, lead acids just wont cut the mustard. I personally also thing LifePo4 battery's are far safer on a boat than gas for cooking. As you rightly pointed out Lithium Ion are different and are more dangerous than the LifePo4's used on boats. Most new Lifepo4 batteries have a 3,000+ hour cycle life which on a boat could be 20+ years and prices are coming down. If down south to Dun Laoghaire again I would be happy to show you the installation. 900 watt kettles are available which will ensure your coffee and toast are ready together 🤗.
I love the 900W kettle idea 👍 We are not worried about land lubber comforts. Once we get coffee and a bit of chocolate all is right with the world. 😄 Nothing wrong with lithium, it is just in our case we cannot make the numbers work. If our circumstances change then maybe the cost/benefits will too.
If you see us around in either Dun Laoghaire or elsewhere, please do give us a shout!
Hi Electrican here , I'm always mindful of power draw , you can get 600w toasters and kettles, although they take a little longer to toast and boil, I've even got a small air fryer which is 1000w. I very neat Idea on the market now are the solar generators , which can be charged from 12vdc, Solar or mains 240v. I use ecoflow myself but there are many many makes. Not cheap by anymeans but gives you a very easy solution to having 240vac offshore or at anchorage. and will save of Gas use for boiling water etc.
We are looking at extending the system somewhat and adding a 12V immersion for excess power from the solar panels to heat water onboard. That in itself would be great. We do have a small inverter aboard (actually we have two of them) and almost everything else on the boat already runs at 12V.
Low power toasters could be great. I will have to look into thatone. Thanks for the tip 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass I don't have a yacht but do have a fancy camper, I've found the 12vdc immersion heater next to usless and takes ages to heat water, BUT certainly tons of options out there Good luck and like your down to earth channel. I think Ecoflow are gearing now toward the boat market, there is a video on youtube from them somewhere
From our point of view, everything at sea takes hours. Situation normal 😄😄 Thanks for the feedback and we are glad you are enjoying the channel. Maybe one day you will get a boat! Campervan on water ....
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Spent 30 years mercahant Navy and Merchant Marine and missing the sea
@@SteveJones-gz4vd - I can understand that. Even after a short break we feel the need to get out there.
We have taken a slightly different route. Out came the 35 yr old gas cooker which was going rusty and the gas cylinders. Add 600w of solar and some lifePO4 and we are now cooking on induction and a Remoska. Do we cook much, oh yes its all home made including cakes 🙂 At sea the toastie maker at 750w is brilliant when its a bit rough and you want something quick and easy.
Of course neither approach is right or wrong and I wouldn't dream of trying to sell the ideas to anyone who is happy continuing with gas. We are all different.
Exactly correct! I like gas. I hate cooking on electric, but I know many people who have exactly the opposite perspective 😄
Like your new kettle Gaynor! Many camping type shops have low wattage 800 or 1000W kettles however quality is normally pretty poor; we've gone through three in last two years!
As for 16A feeder posts, we came across 10A sockets in Scotland, found several 6A sockets and even one marina in Norway had 4A sockets ... 4A sockets!
Still looking pretty breezy in Northern Ireland. Keep those hatches closed and that new kettle hot :-) Thanks for the video.
We may just have to buy another cheapie Tesco special. 1500W and lasted 3 years... 😄 The weather is indeed windy. If it was not for the separate microphones that segment of me standing by the solar panels would have been unusuable 😄😄
I got a really decent 800w auto lift-off kettle from Amazon about £20. V compact, cylindrical fits galley well, minimum footprint. Used everyday 2 yrs, as also FT live aboard, out on wild coast Finistère, Brittany
Must add, I replaced my 6 yo hefty 400Ah Deep Cycle house bank with single 200Ah lifepo4 lithium, good brand, SOK, 7yr warranty, 8000 cycle, just under £1k, paired with v impressive RENOGY DC -DC charger, that's coordinating solar or alternator, and balancing charge, priorities, for both house and engine battery banks, was about £300. Now... Truly autonomous, was able to heat boat for 2 months, November, December, power Eberspacher, when most extreme storm ever recorded here, just within sight of Ushant, or Ouessant, smashed pontoons, tore big Passarelle away from shore, so, no electricity, cables ripped away ... no access, lotta Zodiac tender trips. Have 400w solar, and because no worries about discharge below 50%, only needed to run engine handful of times. Game changer ... and, now adding 2nd lithium, to give reserve, and better use the surplus solar, as often topped up before midday, and could then give potential back up, for engine starting, without risk tripping BMS high-discharge limit. Strongly recommend keeping conventional battery for engine, better suited, even small one, in case need to re-boot lithium BMS lockout. Of course, means can easily power my old Victron 1500w inverter too, for power tools, etc.
I was slow to go down lithium path... but, I spend 6 months summer on hook, occasionally a buoy, and was always a stress, nursing lead-acid, one eye on volts, monitor. .. regular SG measurement every cell, and ... Acid, hydrogen ... Lost one, with COVID lockdown, electrolyte evaporation when unable to get on board for several months. Don't need any regular access for lithium, as it's Bluetooth BMS... Lighter, smaller, so, freed up some prime space, giving better engine access.
I'm totally convert now, and, you'll know, lithium phosphate, no significant hazard, compared to other lithium chemistries, and, lead-acid. So far, BMS only recorded 4 full cycles... After 2 yrs well used.
Price has significantly dropped now, btw.
@@Neptuneboy1959 - thanks for all that great info 👍Like you, our solar has the batteries topped up early and we just go from there. As soon as they are on float we use all the excess energy. Our next upgrade might be fitting a split 240V/12V immersion in the calorifier so that some of the daily excess can heat water. Even just warm water would be nicer than cold.
BTW - well done on surviving that big storm. I think many of us got more practice doing that in 2023 than we ever wanted...
That is great info - thanks for telling us. Our next "upgrade" is likely to be more minor. Since, like you, our batteries are topped up early in the day, we need a use for all that excess electricity and we are looking at replacing our immersion with a dual 240V / 12V element. Even just warm water would be a big improvement over cold water ...
BTW - well done on surviving the big storm. I think many of us got more practice at that in 2023 than we ever wanted.
Oh goodness, ladies, you have started a hare running with that episode! I had no idea that some sailors felt so strongly about batteries! I will stick the kettle on my gas stove and have a nice cup of tea with a biscuit whilst i wonder what the sea state for our trip to Dartmouth will be tomorrow and how much trouble i will have getting off the pontoon without hitting anything. I think the Lithium warriors need to refocus on sailing!! All the best from Salcombe. James
It certainly has raised a few hackles in some quarters 😄 Perhaps the heated blood will keep them warm without the need for other heating methods... Enjoy your sail tomorrow. I hope you get some nice weather for it (and enjoy your cuppa 👍)
Great overview on AC. Yes I agree, it’s all about your setup for recharging the batteries and solar is a pretty good way to stay topped up. I like redundancy so my fridges are on a second house bank that can share the solar or be isolated. For us on this side of the pond, the boat covers are coming off and launch is not far away! 🇨🇦
A few people seem to run a separate battery for the fridge. We may look into that. Great to here that you can get the boat moving again 👍
I gave up the electric kettle for a gas stove top kettle. Works great! Guess I can't complain about only having 30amp shore power anymore.
I guess not!
At 4:35 seconds, those testers are colloquially known as a 'Martindale Tester'. 🙂
Could be. I think we know them as "Can buy in Screwfix" 😄 It was given to us by another yottie who is an electrician.
Jolly good review. I have an almost identical setup to yours and operating philosophy same. I don’t live aboard but when passaging I am totally self sufficient in my electron needs. I only use shore power to run a small dehumidifier. I recently bought an induction plate and use it mainly to boil water dockside, which goes into a thermos and provides a days hot water for drinks etc when at sea. I have a separate bank to run a refrigerator and again comes off a separate solar panel. That system runs forever even as you find on cloudy days. Cheers, SV Dreamtime
Not having all the electric guff aboard is a great relief. We insulated the fridge to reduce its usage and pack it as full as we can. We will likely just replace the batteries in the next year or so simply because 5 or 6 years should be plenty old enough for a battery.
Mmm like the separate fridge battery idea.
@@WavedancerWesterlyfulmar - it has its attractions for sure...
We do as well. Interesting for sure..
surely even with Lithium you would still need the arch and Solar to charge them ?
If anything, you might need a BIGGER arch. Lithiums drink charge in a way lead/acids do not!
You might need a BIGGER arch. Lithiums drink charge in a way Lead/Acids do not...
Over a year ago I upgraded my coffee setup, ideal when not at sea.
A 1zpresso k-ultra hand grinder (adjustable settings from very fine Espresso to very coarse French Press). Takes under 30 seconds to grind enough for one mug. Infinitely better than the cheap small hand grinder I had before.
Timemore nano scales so that I can be precise in the beans to water ratio.
Still using my Aeropress.
Testing with my regular TankCoffee Glory of Africa beans.
Slight trickery to extend James Hoffman's recipe from 200g to 300g of water for a full mug.
Less than 4 mins in total to make.
Absolutely delicious!
For Jane we are practising foaming milk using the microwave to heat it in a small cafetiere, pumping the plunger quickly gets a pretty good foam. Practice will improve it.
(There are small automatic electric milk heat and froth devices which don't use many amps).
For offshore I'm going to use an electric coffee filter that fills an insulated flask. I'll put it on the gimbled stove. This way no hot water to juggle with.
I really like the idea of frothing using the small cafetiere, but I am also impressed with your dedication to the art of coffee making. I am also not surprised that Mr Hoffman gets a mention in your comment as so dedicated a coffee buff as yourself surely had to be aware of the Greatest Barista ever 😄
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass we are now converted to the USB Nanofoamer, faster, better quality foam than the small cafetier and much easier to clean.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass James needs to get serious about making great coffee while sailing 🤣🤣🤣🤣
We use an Ecoflo Delta as an interface for power
Just done a quick Google and I cannot see the point of it. It appears to be a battery or transformer. We already have batteries aboard. I'm obviously missing something here.... or am I?
@SailingYachtSaltyLass
I also have a g
Huge battery bank, but the ecoflow is a new that outperforms them. Anyway we can choose the Ac imput charge rate and there for we have to unplug other loads to do something like making tea..
We have moved to an induction cook top which we use for majority of our coffee making and making eggs for breakfast plus a toaster.
This saves huge on propane consumption
It provides 2600 peak watts and 1200.plus Amp hrs..
Just an amazing piece of kit.
And has high solar and ac recharge rates.
Interesting piece of kit 👍 To save on propane (butane in our case) we just bought a thermal cooker. Sometimes we can be such cheapies 😄😄 It looks very bulky. Does it fit in a locker? Does it need ventilation?
You could toss a double outlet in and use a switch so only one electrical port is on at a time. This way you don't need to plug/unplug all the time and you'll not be able to run both all the same.
We like to keep things simple. Pulling a plug out is not really that bothersome 😉
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass I'm an engineer, now you get it? 🤣Lovely video, thanks!
Those pesky engineers! Always fiddling with things 😄😄😄 Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for commenting 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass you know us well my friend!
Where are you guys currently anyway? I'm in the Philippines.
Northern Ireland so a bit chillier than your current location
We have 420 Ah of LiFePo and solar, and use induction cooking and electric to heat water.
Rarely use our propane.
We also hand grind coffee but really using an electric coffee grinder uses very little electric.
Toast is better in a frying pan, not a toaster.
Turn your inverter off whenever not in use, just proper ground fault outlets will defeat an inverter's attempts to sleep.
Your life experience is not our life experience. Toast in a pan is rubbish compared to toast in a toaster. We have tried all the variations (unless there is a special frying pan we should be using???) 😄
Our inverter is almost never switched on. It's main purpose is to charge the drone battery when out at sea and, very occasionally, a second laptop.
What brand is the Galvionic isolator ? We have one wired into the boat but I liked yours being inline with the cable. You should rewired the socket by the way. We have 600ah of lithium and I’m not sure what we would do with out it. Great informative video !!
The isolator is this one www.amazon.co.uk/Galvanic-Isolator-Installation-Suitable-Materials/dp/B0CFVSRR9C
As for the socket rewire, as we said in another reply - it is a real pain in the a#*s to get to, is a North European socket and we almost never use it for anything. So we left it alone...
A waterboiler wants to boil water, therefore there is NO restriction on powerussage, ea a waterboiler eats as much electricity as it can pull.
I love that you put 2 lines on the visor, so you can heat 1 or 2 cups, this will be much more efficient.
Well spotted 👍 I forgot to mention that in the video. The lower line is for two tea mugs of water, the upper line for two coffee mugs. We are highly organised around here.... 😄
Thanx for this video. It was great as always. I would like to upgrade to lithium batteries, but they are too expensive and needs other chargers too. I agree with you that it is much better to upgrade the solar panels and continue with the old batteries. I guess I will upgrade to at least to 100w 24v panels and mppt regulator next year. At the moment I have 50w 12v panel and a single battery from 2016. It is enough for short day trips or weekend during the summer.
The trick is having enough power to be comfortable. There seems little point in having way, way more than we need.
Excellent info. Does the does the possibility of fire, influence your decision in relation to lithium batteries?
No, not directly. The fire issues are more prevalent with Lithium Ion batteries (think phones, tablets, etc). House batteries are Lithium Iron Phosphate and is a more stable type of battery. However, Lithium batteries are prone to handling larger current loads than lead/acid so there is a danger if cabling is not uprated to suitable levels capable of handling those currents safely.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Thanks for this. The following has nothing to do with sailing but you since you are smart people, I thought I would ask. The guy that services my caravan was telling another customer who wanted an upgrade to lithium that he didn't think the technology was there yet for caravans. Would vibrations be the issue or that people might not appreciate the cost of rewiring and upgrading solar panels along with cost of the batteries?
@@maxcaravan7584 Hi Max, sorry but that's not right, lithium iron phosphate batteries are definitely suited to caravans, they just need to be secure just like on a bouncy boat. Goodluck 🇦🇺👍
@maxcaravan - perhaps your caravan service guy is confusing the two types of lithium batteries. Trust me, if they are safe on a boat I would expect them to be more than suitable for a caravan. Just make sure that the charging circuits can handle the maximum load from the panels and the MPPT controller because with Lithium, they will draw maximum current down from the charging circuit for a prolonged period. Lead Acid batteries never do that and the charging currents tail off as the battery charges.
@@seawench555 Thank you
Great video, keep them coming!
I have a question that you may have answered in another video?
I noticed that you use coffee beans, so I suspect you make some nice coffee on your yacht. Can you please do a video on making a good cup of coffee? (Cappuccino, latte, etc).
I am on a pontoon with no electricity just a calor gas hob, so I would look forward to hearing how you manage to make your coffee.
Yikes! Now there's a question 😮 TBH it is not something we ever gave any thought to. We just grind it up and use a little cafetiere. I will see if we can do something. We can approximate a cappuchino sort of coffee but the effort requires a special occasion 😄
I'm fussy about coffee.
The 1zePresso k-ultra is great for a wide variety of types of coffee. Good grind and fast.
My suggestion is to use a kettle and an aeropress when moored. But I don't think that's safe at sea.
For milk the challenge is heating it. The ways with least mess use electricity. Probably you will need to heat in a pan and use a wand to froth it. We got the powerful Nanofoamer with USB rechargeable battery, lasts ages and is massively more effective than the ones with AA batteries. Note a thermometer is essential to avoid burning the milk.
We do have a little electric AA frother which is on its last legs...
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass the USB Nanofoamer is like chalk and cheese. Much more powerful, creates good foam. See sponsored video by Lance Hendrick (latte art champion).
We will do - thanks for the tip 👍
You got it right :-) Note: Your AC ground protection gives you protection up to around 1,7 V (don't arrest me on that number, but I am very close). The only gismo to give full protection is an AC/AC transformer. Then you are in your own electrical world. As a security decission, we do not carry gas on board. And, in my part of the world, it seems to be an increasing issue. But we (by 'we', I mean my wife) took that decission back in 2000. Then I had allready built approved gas lockers. I built the whole boat, by the way. And, due to diet issues, we need a freezer. So now we have a cooler, a freezer, micro wave, induction oven, and so on. And, in our part of the world, it rains, it snows, it's dark in the winter, and solar panels are great. But not under 2 inches of snow. Our lead acid batteries lasts for 10+ years. And they can start our diesel motor, and run our thruster that takes 7,5 kW. All well. And we bought 20 years ago a second hand gen.set, made in 1987. Last year we installed 400 Ah Lithium. For us, underlining for us, it's a game changer. The batteries weigh 'nothing', can be installed upside down, and charges at 50 A+ until they are 100 %. Then the charging stops (separate 220 V AC charger). So, under sail, sv Hulda consumes between 10- and 15 Ah. The gen.set can on demand supply 6 kW contineously. Main gen.set fuse is 32 A, don't need that. But I have equipment that needs 16 A fuses. After 8 hrs. we run the gen.set for an hour, and the batteries are 100 %, eggs are fried and the coffee is hot. Warm water in the tap. On the dowside, a litre og diesel or two.
I guess we store a lot of energy in gas bottles. We have always had gas to cook with, even when living on land so we are used to it and we are always very careful handling and using it. As a matter of fact, we have just had our gas safety inspection (passed!!) so we are pleased with that.
Just like all boats are different, I guess all power systems are different too. At least you have one that works well for you and that is really what matters, but it is great to get feedback from people whose opinions we trust rather than the random noise that infests a lot of the internet.
Thank you! 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Yes, instead of arguing over different approaches, accept and find if there are elements of value that can be adopted. We don't even have a gas lighter on board. Stoped smoking Wendesday before Christmas 1985. Yes, gas contains a lot of energy. Less than 1 kg will blow a mid sized boat clear of the water. Domestic gas was abandoned decades ago in Scandinavia. Now we in Norway just produce and sell it to EU, UK and Ireland :-) At a good price. Though not influencing on my pension.
Your slightly sexist lesson about sockets is absolutely bang on. 😌 In a previous life in the military I've plugged in to a vehicle radio supply socket which had been wired with the terminals back to front. The current was only 24V but the bang and the sparks accompanied by the cloud of escaping pixies was something to behold. Grabbing hold of 240V will definitely curl your hair. 🤕
Incidentally your 'upside down socket' has neutral and live wrong - not neutral and earth!
That wee flashy plug thing has the faults all noted on the back. Gaynor needs to read more carefully. As for the sexist socket - I had no idea she was going to say that - I was just holding the camera, filming it, editing it into the video, etc. So I plead total innocence 😄
If you got a bang then the short time fault current depends on the supply impedance which is very low & the current may have been in the region of more than 50,000 amps. If the upstream over current fault protection device operated properly then the fault current would have been limited in duration to less than a few milliseconds. Current is not measured in volts, it depends on the load resistance or impedance normally & can also depend on the supply impedance in the event of a load fault short circuit situation.
Funnily enough, in actual fact a dc to dc converter has to convert 12v dc to AC before it steps it up to 18volt and then converts it back to dc. 😊
That is true for some DC/DC converters but not all. Given the weight of the unit in the video I suspect that it is just a buck-booster. I know they oscillate as the inductor and capacitors do their thing but there is no heavy, inefficient iron core in there...
£1200 for the arch, is great 🙂We had 360ah of lead and could run fridge safely for 3/4 days without the arch. On the new boat we want to run induction hob and the boat has two fridges. Arch will be a must but I am hoping the new deep discharge lead batteries will work for us. Space will be another issue of course. Your dc to dc inverter runs laptops and stuff?
The small DC/DC unit gaynor was holding is specifically for the laptops. The blue inverter can also power a laptop through the normal AC charger that comes with the laptop. But we also have USB chargers that plug in to the 12V systems and they can charge anything that has a USB charging port.
We only use electric kettle or fan heating in a marina. Mind you now we have eberspracher it won’t be used much anymore.😊. I have a small inverter but it lives in the press more than is used. I had bought a new inline galvanic isolator but don’t use it anymore. It seemed to affect our battery charge. John always hated it.
We’re thinking of solar panels off the lifeline/ cockpit steel at some time in the future just to keep us topped up . Our friends are planning on putting solar on their westerly Falcon this year so they can be offshore longer.
Are you thinking of something like Mads solar set up for doubling their space or like Cadoha they have special solar panels they winch up the mast at anchor .
If we expanded the panels, we would likely look for larger panels and modify the existing arch to take them. We though Mads's crazy "tilt in all directions and slide out" arch was way over complicated. We would be more likely to get foldable panels that could be set out at anchor and plugged in if required.
Smart solution: get a kettle with less draw.
The older kettle was the solution 😉 It was just done 😄
You can only use about 45% of lead acid battery capacity, where as lithium you can cycle much deeper. Factor that in and your calculations might work.
We did factor that in, comparing 360Ah of lead/acid with about 270Ah of Lithium.
It’s personal choice though - like everything in life, on land, or on water. You are making the case for compromise, whereas others may choose to spend more money to live more comfortably. Everyone has the right to do what they think is right for them.
Exactly correct! We were saying that _we_ cannot justify the spend for our setup, not that they should be banned or removed from other boats.
Totally agree with your decision to stick with what you got, for me the sums dont add up. The beauty of keeping with Lead acid / AGM or Gel batteries are firstly they are a lot cheaper and easy to come by if you suddenly need a replacement. Interestingly my insurance company asked if we have Lithium batteries as they have had several fire claims from boats with Lithium batteries ( probable because they hadn't installed appropriate wiring
Electrical wiring by owners is probably one of the biggest issues on a boat. Some of the nightmares we have seen on this boat and others would make anyone wonder if owners should be allowed to install high amperage cabling.
Really informative and interesting, Bev what brand are ur solar panels please? Thanks Lasses, hope ur all well, oh and are u coming into summer over there? So ur battery set up is in parallel. I'm with u on the metric Gaynor, were the same down under😲😜🐧🐘
The panels were from a company called "Bimble Solar" who are a UK based company. I'm sure there are manufacturer's labels under the panels but I will need to look at them. As for summer - it is definitely coming because the rain is warmer!
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass 🤣😍😗
It's a pity you just got a new one, but here in Austria most kettles are around 2000W but you get them way down to below 1000W for even less than 10€. Of course you have to wait longer, that's probably why they don't sell in tee nations.
Regarding lithium Iron batteries I don't share your concerns and I'm wondering don't you have like a fridge or Laptops for video editing to charge? You could replace your two batteries with one lithium battery. Depending on your solar charger it could even work with those?
We do have a fridge, but not a freezer. We have laptops for video editing and we do that using the power from the panels. The batteries are topped up by early morning and the panels are powering nothing after that so we use the DC/DC charger and plug the laptop into the boat's 12V circuit.
The costs for lithium we calculated was for an equivalent capacity to what we have now (allowing for the bigger depth of discharge). There were much cheaper Chinese batteries but I have a distrust of really cheap stuff - you can only drive the price down so much before you cut back on something important. OTOH no one likes being gouged on price so we looked at manufacturers with a good reputation.
It's a compromise. It always will be and there is no totally right or wrong answer. What we have works and is affordable. Perhaps things will change in the future? We will know when we get there... 😉
Hi.
I do agree with you. If you swap to LiFePo batteries you should also upgrade other components of your 12VDC system. Bavaria's is not a bad brand as the German standard of electrics are fairly good. I would fit a device to protect the alternator from overheating i.e external controller or a DC/DC charger. The original diode battery charge separator should also be replaced by an Argo-FET or similar. If you have an old battery charger, it may have to be replaced to suit LiFePo batteries. Wire gauges also have to be increased due to possibly higher currents in your system. In my case, a cost of £ 2500, just for bits'n bobs.
If you are skilled in electrics (like I am) and do the swap your selves, it can be acceptable in terms of money spent over years. If you have to pay professionals to do the job, it is not!
I still run lead-acid batteries and spend my money on other upgrades instead. Apparently not a single part for boats cost less than £ 100 :)
That being said, I will go for LiFePo one day, just for the benefits.... not for saving money.
Fair winds, sail safe! From Norway.
That is more or less why we are holding back at this point. Our shore-power charger would need changing too. I think Bavaria has a charge relay but it is an area of the boat that I have not gone into too deeply as everything is working normally and even I know that the first rule of engineering is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
You two are adorable.
Apparently UK prices are high.
I can get a single 260ah lithium battery for under $700, and it will last me 10-15 years. Much cheaper.
I guess bottom line is, go with the setup you are most comfortable with.
At that sort of price, we would be ripping out the lead/acids... probably... 😄 We also need to think about all the other upgrades needed for our charging infrastructure, but the prices you are quoting are about 2/3rds the price they are here.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass location is everything. And of course, specially marine graded equipment is always more expansive.
To get used to lithium, I recommend a solar generator with a portable solar panel. You could use that independently from your house system and just run computers, cameras and such things from.
One thing to remember is that if you are at the forefront of innovation everything is more expensive.
Naturally younger people are more willing to invest in potential failures while older people might think going with proven tech is going to serve them better. Both groupés are right.
But prices are also coming down. LiTime has cheap high duality batteries. But it’s based on US distributors. find your sweet spot and stick to it.
We are looking into portable solar panels for a future project so thank you are giving us some ideas. It's a long way off at the minute but we are in no rush.
Thanks for the A/C D/C lesson … having converted the house batteries to 48v lithium and 48v alternator onboard my boat - I am not sure I agree with with you 12.5 year comparison between LED acid and lithium … prices for lithium has come down very considerably and taking into account that you can discharge down to 10% vs 50% for led acid - the like for like capacity you need for lithium is less (or using the same space - you can significantly increase your capacity)
Solar will unfortunately never get even close to the output from an externally regulated high power alternator (I live in Dubai and if solar would be efficient it would be here) …. With 15kwh lithium capacity I can run the air conditioning onboard overnight off the batteries (we do not worry about heating here ;-) … fair wind and full power ladies
Wow! That rewire sounds like a major project!
The 12½ year thing was just giving the Lithium the 2.5x factor that our lead/acid batteries have. According to the blurb sheet our batteries had a 2 year guarantee and here we are 5 years later and they are still going strong. Since the lithiums come with a 5 year guarantee I just multiplied that by the same factor. It is not a hard and fast rule but I needed some way to make a comparison of very different products.
BTW - I think perhaps you do worry about heating in Dubai, it just happens to be backwards compared to us 😄😄 We are trying to keep the heat in, you are trying to stop it getting in.
Thanks for watching and for commenting 👍
I wonder aloud if every boat fire is going to be blamed on Lithium just like every electric car crash is automatically blamed on it being electric?
As you will see in other comments in this section, we point out that Li ion is the fire risk, not LifePo4
There are lithium batteries available for much less than you mentioned. I recently bought a 12.8 Volt, 280Ah LifePO4 battery from Eco Worthy for £539 to replace a couple of old 6 Volt 225Ah lead acid golf cart batteries in a small solar setup. The difference is night and day. Lithium is so much more advanced in so many ways including cost when the number of cycles and usable depth of cycle is taken into account.
Obviously with your panels and current usage you have no reason to change your existing lead acid at this stage as you have demonstrated.
If we were starting from scratch and replacing everything in a new build or a project boat, then we may well have gone down the lithium route, but that is not were we are. Nonetheless, I'm really glad that it has been a viable upgrade for you.👍
All this talk about Lithium and Leadacid batteries but no talk about Gel batteries . Any particular reason? They are safer than lead acid, require no maintenance and can discharge up to 75% without damage.
We are aware of the increasing age of our existing batteries (five years) but those batteries are still performing very well, so we looked into various upgrades. People told us that lithiums had become a lot cheaper so we looked into it and, yes, they have fallen in price but in this place it is still going to cost a lot to upgrade and we only need batteries that can last overnight. In the morning, the solar charges them back up.
At this stage it looks a lot simpler, quicker and cheaper just to drop in another pair of lead/acids. We like the idea of Gel but we precluded them simply on cost. It just seems to be lead/acid at double the price.
Our lead/acid batteries are the sealed variety. We have done no maintenance on them in 5 years
Get a vango induction hob. It's only 800W on high and you only need setting 3 to boil a kettle or even fry an egg. That's only about 460W. Electric kettles are over powered. They are inefficient, purely to give you hot water as fast as possible.
Never heard of Vango but I can look it up. Thanks for the tip 👍
I’m reversing my male and female connections immediately
That's what we like to hear...
I think you need to recheck your arithmetic on the LiFePO4 batteries. They are MUCH less expensive than lead-acid batteries in the long run - hands down. You can expect 4000-6000 cycles from the LiFePO4 batteries and still have 80% of their original capacity. Assuming only 4000 cycles, you would get over ten years of service and the batteries would still have 80% of their original capacity. So, a 100 amp-hour LiFePO4 battery would still have 80 amp-hours of capacity after ten years of regular use, cycling them down to 20% every day.
Additionally, the LiFePO4 batteries are non-toxic and can be stored safely inside your living quarters in any position; whereas, the lead-acid batteries are toxic and require special care - and, expense - for disposal. And, flooded lead-acid batteries off-gas hydrogen (flammable) and are very corrosive to any and all metal in the vicinity, as well as require regular maintenance (checking the specific gravity and topping off the cells with distilled water). They also should be vented and not placed inside your living quarters.
Lead-acid batteries (all varieties) can easily be damaged by over discharging them. You should never discharge them below 50% and if you do you WILL damage them and reduce their cycle life, resulting in you having to replace them sooner, rather than later. In fairness, LiFePO4 batteries also suffer degradation if discharged too deeply - but, they have automatic Battery Management Systems built into them that disconnect the loads before they are too deeply discharged. Many of the BMS in LiFePO4 batteries are programmable and often have Bluetooth connectivity and an app to allow you to set the charge and discharge levels to maximize cycle life depending on your usage patterns. Those same apps can give you real time information regarding the State of Health (SOH) of the batteries, as well as their State of Charge (SOC). And, some even keep count of how many charge-discharge cycles have taken place since being put into service.
Meanwhile, LiFePO4 batteries have plunged in price and represent about 70% savings in weight.
Finally, the market speaks for itself. LiFePO4 batteries are steadily displacing lead-acid batteries in the vast majority of applications. There are real reasons for this - in addition to the ones I already listed, above. I suggest you do additional research for yourself. You need not take my word on any of this.
Price also varies by location. It is clear that we could get them a lot cheaper if we were elsewhere.
Ladies, I beg to differ....
I have gone over to 3 x 100Ah LiFePO4 for my main bank and these have an expected lifespan in excess of 4,000 cycles/ 10 years, costing less than £1000 and enabling me to go totally off-grid at anchor for several days without any form of charging. I too have a Bosch L5013 Lead Acid starter battery, and I agree that they are fairly bomb-proof and long-lived, but that is because they are not repeatedly deep-cycled day-in and day-out (which would indeed trash them within 500 cycles / 2 years). So, £1,000 for 500 cycles, or £1,000 for 4,000 cycles - it's your choice.
Solar is unreliable due to the inevitable shadows cast by masts, sails and rigging - and in my case, as I have a ketch, I cannot permanently mount panels on an arch; instead I have 3 x nominally 130w folding panels and, in Winter, in the Med, I am lucky if I can pull 15 Amps out of them even on whatever happens to be the sunny side of the boat. This current is not going to challenge even a modest MPPT controller, and it is simply incorrect to say that "Lithium drinks Amps" - an Amp hour is an Amp hour, and if you run your batteries down (whatever batteries down) by 150Ah, you are going to need (in my case) at least 10 hours to charge them back up. In contrast the alternator on the engine kicks out 70A, so on a passage its a no-brainer - not "free energy", but not a hassle either.
In addition you cannot draw a sustained load of more than about 20 Amps from a Lead Acid battery should you wish to do more than just keep the lights on or winch the anchor up. (My life-changing luxury is a £212 electric toilet from Force 4 chandlery - absolutely marvellous piece of kit - but anything more than a laptop or a sewing machine and you are stretching what is achievable with a standard battery).
I have therefore also gone Lithium for my Inverter bank - I have an entirely separate 400Ah black plastic brick (which cost me £1200) in the aft cabin powering a 3000w 240v Victronic inverter, and this allows me to boil my (1000w) kettle, use my (700w) air fryer or cook on my (500w) hotplate. I can also use an 80w Lidl electric blanket, which is a real game-changer. Of course, even 400Ah has its limits, but, again, when under way using the motor I can easily recharge both banks within a day, or wait until I get to a marina and plug in the mains charger overnight.
NB I would seriously recommend installing an Isolation Transformer on the 240v shorepower side of things (rather than a Galvanic Isolator) for all sorts of reasons.
Everyone's setup - and indeed everyone's lifestyles and requirements - are different, but with the greatest respect, now that "drop in" LiFePO4 batteries are available which look, feel and are cabled in pretty much the same as a conventional Lead Acid unit, IMHO not only does the arithmetic work, but there are also very practical benefits in terms of overall capacity, power output (you cant draw 100A to boil a kettle from a 12v Lead Acid battery) and convenience.
On a closing note, the key is to budget: how many Amps do you have going out during a typical day, how are you going to get those Amps back in, and how much of a buffer do you need between the two? My background consumption at anchor is around 1.5 amps, whereas on a night passage, all lit up like a Christmas tree and with the fridge, radar, autopilot, chartplotter, AIS and what have you on I burn about 15 amps. Before the sun comes up (or I run the motor) that needs a 200Ah reserve, hence my 300Ah House bank. Your wattage may differ.............
The reason our panels are located where they are is because they are almost completely shade free. They are 300W panels and we regularly see 260W coming in. Like you we can spend days at anchor and it is usually running out of food, water or coffee that drives us into port.
From your description you have a lot more "gadgets" than us but we really lack the room to store all that stuff so we simplify by not having it. And if we do not have it, we do not need to power it.
So far, in the 4 years we have had the solar on the back of the boat, we have never had a power crisis. I am sure we will have one some day because sooner or later everything goes "Whirr...clunk!" and stops working 😮 but so far, so good.
Thanks for watching and commenting. We really appreciate the feedback.
Once you get over your fear of lithium you will become a believer.
Lithium will save you 10% in electricity EVERY DAY. The lithium charges faster and more efficiently.
Cost is no longer a factor.
And you won't need help when it comes time to lift those antiquated flooded lead acid.
We are not afraid of it (one of us is an electrical engineer). In this place, at this time,m we cannot make the costs work out. We could buy the cheapest ones on planet from somewhere but our life experience in general is "buy mega-cheap, buy twice" but the quality is usually cr@ppy
The electrics are not isolated by a galvanic isolator, only the earth is isolated and only against voltages below about 1v. It is only to protect earthed metalwork in the water. You must have an RCD for protection. It’s the lads on the boat that determine the amps, not the size of the plug. Correct fusing is the important thing. Why not correct the wiring? If you had hybrid lithium you would get an extra 16% power from your panels minimum due to the extra efficiency of the charge cycle. You also get more because you don’t have the absorb cycle where the solar tapers off. You need 1/2 the capacity in lithium as you can use all the power without any risk to battery life. Lithium will last well over 5000 cycles when shallow charging. With your use a £400 100Ah LiFePO4 would be fine. Going hybrid with a small lead acid means you don’t have to update any of your charging sources as they can remain on lithium. All that is needed is to set up the lithium BMS with hybrid settings. Having lithium will also mean that you can use heavier loads fr longer without worry and without the battery voltage sagging to a pint the inverter cuts out. I type as someone who converted some years back after being a lead head for many decades and the difference is remarkable to which so many boaters can attest. The mistake with going lithium is to look at companies such as Victron where it will certainly cost a lot as their main interest is in selling you stuff and to keep selling you stuff whether you want / need it or not. Yes there is a place for it for those with fat wallets and for those who feel they get some social boost from having it but those who do research tend to get much better value systems that are easier to set up and to understand.
A bit of sloppy wording in our case. There is an RCD on the boat's AC panel and we have (inadverently) tested it 😉
We are getting great feedback from this video (including your feedback) and so we have a lot to consider. The L/A batteries are still going strong at this point so we have time to consider everything.
Thanks for watching and commenting 👍
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass my lead acids were, and still are, going strong. This is why I went hybrid as it effectively gave them a second / longer life and now they are mainly a redundant system that also means I don’t have to use lithium charging profiles, there is no cut off problem with the alternator and I’m not going to get a sudden lights out moment as the BMS decides I have used enough. Lead acids are now over 7 years old and I’ve just cooked dinner and had a shower using the lithium without thought. And have used 71Ah
That sounds like a great method. How did you get the L/A and lithiums in the same charging cycles when they run such different voltages?
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass They actually don’t run very different voltages and the lithium voltage sits completely within the lead acid voltage range. One uses the programmable lithium BMS to set a low voltage cutoff at 12v which is 10% on the lithium and 50% on the lead acid. The BMS is set to cut off at 14vat which voltage it is at around 99% charged with the sort of charge rates that are common on boats. Once cut off the charge sources then proceed to take the lead acid up to absorb voltage of 14.4 as usual using the normal charge sources on their lead acid profile. Because the normal working voltage of lithium is around 13.2-13.3v this is a low float for lead acid so they are kept where they want to be: ie full but at that voltage they take almost no current so very little parasitic draw. One aims to charge the bank once the voltage reaches 12.8v which is full for lead acid and 20% for lithium but, at that point, you still have a full set of lead acid that you can use while you use the lithium charge between 20% and 10%. I run a Facebook group “12 volt boating group” where a lot of time is spent on this, explaining and giving settings and examples etc.
Yes - your name did ring some bells. I wondered where I had come across it. For the moment this is not an issue for us but it eventually will be (no battery lasts forever) and it makes sense to get info early so decisions are made in a sensible and timely way.
We will not be going cruising this year so power requirements are a minor consideration at this point (plenty of AC available) but you may see us in your group when the time comes. Thanks for the updates 👍 and I hope you did not get too wound up watching our video (I think some commenters nearly had a fit 😄 but rude comments never make it in here)
Another nice vblog. Thank you both. Thing about lithium batteries is that the majority of them are made with material produced by child slave labour. This information is being supressed and/or greenwashed by the manufacturers. The good news is that things are changing (albeit slowly). There is better technology coming through anyway. So, good decision.
Thank you. Another consideration is that lead/acid batteries are very efficiently recycled back into new lead/acid batteries whereas lithium seems to be more of a "throwaway" technology.
Lifepo4 batteries don’t contain any Cobalt these days and yes, they are recycled just like lead acid.
Don't bury your head in the sand
We don't.
Oh boy. First you diss batteries in parallel, then you promote it. The bare minimum is a battery isolator switch. Better is separate chargers charging into separate batteries running separate loads. Most people can't predict or control which battery has a higher standby voltage. Battery differences are much worse than you can figure and they are a total disaster for some people. Another scheme is use six volt golf cart batteries and no batteries in parallel. Wire them in series and there is no fight between them.
There is nothing wrong with wiring batteries in parallel, but there is more than one way to do so.
@@SailingYachtSaltyLass Germany lost half their PKW 4 tanks in WW2 to batteries in parallel. They couldn't start in the morning, then couldn't turn their turrets. A local trucker got fired for rewiring a company truck in parallel. Every morning, his wife came and jumpstarted the truck with her car. It took over a half an hour.
Lucky for us we are not driving a tank 😉 but it is a great anecdote. I like it 👍
I guess if you are English you must have toast!
The toast eater is actually Irish...
Your assumptions on battery life are wrong. Lithium will last 15 to 20 years at least. In addition, you comparison of battery costs needs to be adjusted for the usable capacity that a lithium battery has. You don't need the same Ah capacity as lead if you go lithium for comparison purposes.
I have heard a lot of people telling me about the 20 year life and very few can come up with a concrete example of a LifePo4 really lasting 20 years. There are also plenty of examples of LifePo4 batteries getting a BMS fault and frying £x,xxx worth of batteries. I also have plenty of people telling me that my 5 year old lead/acid batteries will last 2 years if I am lucky.
There are a lot of agendas and misinformation out there, but the information on price is solid.
@SailingYachtSaltyLass I ams orry but you have little knowledge of the subject you are dismissing. Rod Collins, part author of the ABYC standard for lithium has had a lithium battery in his boat for 15 years. He recently capacity tested it and it still has its full capacity. Individual lithium cells costs are about half of what they were 12 months ago. We recently built a 280Ah battery using grade A cells and a jk BMS with 2A active balancer for $600. That is equivalent to about 500Ah of lead domestic battery. It will out live the lead battery many times over. My own batteries are 12 months old now. We are liveaboard. 920w of solar, electric cooking, watermaker and immersion heater all run from lithium and solar. Same propane bottle since last summer, only used for the oven. Everybody who converts says what a game changer it is. No need to keep the lithium charged like lead. Its just as happy at 20% charged as 80%.
When researching LiFePO4 for the boat I came to the conclusion it was the lowest cost over the life cycle of the installation. Having worked in an industry where lithium batteries which were automatically tested was the norm, I was confident in the batteries. The BMS is the most likely point of failure and so I went for Roamer batteries which have serviceable BMS and cells. We were out for 5 months last year and our batteries went through 8 charge cycles with the lifetime projected to be 5000 charge cycles. I don’t expect to be changing them ever
@@SVAscent - Batteries that last (nearly??) forever would be wonderful. I wish my mobile phone's battery was that good 😄😄😄
@@SailingYachtSaltyLassthe thing about your phone battery is that it’s a mass produced item built to a cost. It’s also lithium ion and not lithium iron phosphate. Probably, more importantly most phone batteries are fully charged to 100% and then left in a charger and the discharged very low. Whereas on a boat that’s not likely to happen for a few reasons. Such as you size your bank to suit your needs. You tend to be present during charging and so can switch off charging at say 80 to 90%. The BMS eliminates the danger of harm by discharging too much.
The good thing about lead acid when you liveaboard all year is you can charge them at any temperature. With LiFePO4 you need to buy the heated versions which makes them more expensive and is another point of failure. So I can see why Lead acid suits you living up here in the frozen north
We are removing our gas this year so our electrical demand will be much higher so the rate of charge with lithium is a big bonus, particularly as we don’t have or want a solar arch. Last week in the storm I saw the wind turbine putting 30amps plus into the batteries.