T-Pain Is On A Boat: Re: [Electric Boats] Regen Success

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Re: [Electric Boats] Regen Success

Ben:

Sometimes trying to make something do too many things can be a problem. Especially on a boat. I think anything that charges the battery should have it's own regulator. On my boat the solar panels go through their own charge controller. The wind turbine has it's own charging control electronics and of course my battery chargers also have their own charging electronics. All are set for my AGM battery bank. My house bank has it's own solar panels and charger too which are set for Gel batteries. If any one of them fail they can be removed from the system and the other charging sources remain to continue working. Probably the only thing that is not regulated is the regen current but, as we know on most of our boats it is so low and the conditions to get it to work don't happen every sail. But, it still needs to be watched as precaution. Though the solution is simple just increase the load a little either by adding more propulsion or using a 48 volt to 12 volt converter to feed the house bank. That should prevent any over charging of the bank. Though I doubt most of us with EP will not have that problem too often.:)

Capt. Mike

http://biankablog.blogspot.com

--- On Thu, 10/13/11, Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net> wrote:

From: Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net>
Subject: Re: [Electric Boats] Regen Success
To: electricboats@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, October 13, 2011, 12:58 PM

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:04:28AM -0700, Femm wrote:
>
>
> There are two way to charge your house bank off the generator the first and
> most costly is a duel output alternator, the nice thing about this setup is
> each bank has its own voltage regulator, so you can tweak it to get the proper
> voltage at the battery/s being charged. The other is one of these http://
> www.westmarine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=17248&
> catalogId=10001&langId=-1&storeId=11151&storeNum=10109&subdeptNum=10544&
> classNum=10337 or this one http://www.westmarine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/
> ProductDisplay?productId=93176&catalogId=10001&langId=-1&storeId=11151&storeNum
> =10109&subdeptNum=10544&classNum=10337

Just as a side note, people generally appreciate shortcut URL to things
like that - reassembling them from multiple lines is a pain.
http://url.ie , for example, gives you a bookmarklet that you add to
your browser and simply click when you're on a page whose URL you want
to shorten. Here are the above two URLs, shortened:

http://url.ie/dbml
http://url.ie/dbmm

For the units themselves - I don't have any experience with the second
one, but I am completely unimpressed with the first one. It came with my
current boat, and created some serious problems initially: since the
house battery was run _way_ down (below 10.8v is their "lockout" spec),
the ACR would *never* connect it to the circuit - and thus, never charge
it. As a result, I had no juice for lights, etc. even after two days of
running the engine (I had to move the boat a couple of hundred miles
shortly after buying it.)

I had a good long tail-chase while under way - good thing it was out in
the open ocean, so I could spare the time. Had to trace out the entire
charging system and discover that this thing was installed (and then
figure out what it was) before I could get any charge into the house
bank. It also turned out that there's no easy way to manually bypass
this switch: I had to crowbar the two big terminals until the house bank
was charged up enough to make it work properly.

At this point, I've read the specs carefully, and both of the above
behaviors seem to be the way that it's actually designed to operate.
That's quite unlike most of the BlueSea products that I'm familiar with;
in my experience, they put a lot of good skull sweat into what they
make. They just seem to have done a very bad job with this one.

I think I'm going to yank out the one that I have - perhaps take it
apart for the high-amp relay in it - and set up a 13v zener diode that
will drive the relay via a transistor, as well as a switch that'll
bypass the zener and trip it manually. No muss, no fuss, no greasy
aftertaste. I can't imagine why they did anything more complicated than
that.

--
Ben Okopnik
-=-=-=-=-=-