Re: [electricboats] Draft Schematic-Please give input

“Anyone considering going all electric propulsion in the salty ocean environment is being naive. The IC and computer components will corrode unless sealed circuit board tech, like in military, automotive ECUs and even in residential clothes dryers is used. That makes repair maintenance difficult....unless spare sealed circuit boards can be easily swapped  out.”

Interesting position, and not difficult to agree with the reasoning.  I’m sorry to hear that your installation has led to many component failures over time due to environmental factors.

But in practice, I have not found this to be a problem.  I converted my boat in 2009 to ABYC specs, and she has been in the water every day since, excepting haul outs for bottom maintenance.  Many of my components are EV (land based) spec’ed items, like my Elcon charger, and the only failure that I have had so far was a main contactor that I mounted upside down, in the “catch water” position, because it made the wiring easier for me at the time.  After the failure, I read the manufacturer’s specs and they clearly stated to not do what I did.  The new contactor is installed in the correct orientation.  Funny thing is that the water that did the damage was fresh water runoff from rain, salt water was not a factor.  Overall, there is minor surface rust on some ferrous components, but nothing that has affected performance or function.  

Speaking of performance, I am running a pack of 16 LiFePO4 prismatic cells with no BMS other than autonomous “mini-BMS” modules on each cell that do minor top balancing, and have had no noticeable cell drift in 12 years.  I store the cells at 100% state of charge for months at a time, and the pack still tests out to more than the original 160ah cell spec, but capacity is down about 5% from the initial installation testing.

Much of what I read here sounds like people are over-thinking their designs and solving theoretical problems that may not be as much of an issue as they sound like they could be.

Back to the original comment, after 12 years, the ocean environment has had no significant affect on my electric drive systems.  I’l let you know if any problems crop up in the next decade or so...

Eric
1964 Cheoy Lee Bermuda 30, Serenity - 5.5kW drive, 8kWh LiFePO4 traction bank
Marina del Rey, CA

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