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so without going too deep into this but I want I always emphasize with electrical there is no room for bravado or macgyverism and you perfection is the only sort of like being an accountant good enough is never good enough as an accountant it's a precise business being an electrician is the same thing so it's essential that every connection you do has to be perfect if it isn't perfect you have to redo it doing 90 percent of your boat perfectly is irrelevant the 10 percent or is enough to make the connection potentially be a source of heat and a fire so with that it's really essential to do it right and that's what Gareth is gonna try to demonstrate today and we're gonna be showing you with all the tools that we brought so obviously you're gonna be choosing a lot of different sizes of panels and you've got a lot of choice all of solar panels being rigid or flexible are gonna have what are called mc4 connectors mc4 connectors are connectors and we'll show that that can be done and undone that provide a really good seal to be outside because at the end of the day think about a solar panel on your boat is gonna have some sort of connection to interconnect the solar panel to the cabling or the solar wiring those cabling have to be done outside so it's gonna be out in the elements for instance on my boat I've had my solar array install for five and a half years and I have solar connections that are out in the elements 365 days a year and right now they're probably practically underwater with the amount of water in water we're getting and they're out there and they've got to be able to never corrode or so you've got to have a really good seal and gareth is gonna be showing that so when you're thinking about doing a solar installation on your boat there's gonna be what are all the different things you're gonna be looking at you're gonna be looking at obviously having a solar panel or many solar panels the terminals at the solar panel are gonna be mc4 connectors and we're going to be demonstrating that you absolutely need to have what's called an outdoor rated cable even though it's only a gauge 10 cable the shield or the mother shield but the god I'm just capping here the the jacket of the wire is actually double sized on a marine cable so if you look at a marine wire for solar you're gonna look at the cable and you're gonna think it looks like a gauge eight wire but in reality the jacket is almost double the size inside is only a gauge 10 and why that's relevant or is that when you start installing on an MC 4 connector they're assuming that the wire going into that connector is gonna be a solar wire if it's a normal gauge 10 wire you'll never be able to make a good seal so it's guaranteed water will get in so the only way to guarantee a good seal with using an MC 4 is to absolutely use a solar wire going in that because that is double jacketed cable and you'll see we've got solar cabling down here you'll see the difference it's a much thicker jacket around the wire the other thing too is obviously your solar panels are on the outside you're gonna have to find some sort of way to go inside the boat and going inside the boat is gonna have to be done some sort of way how are you gonna do that you might put a cable clamp you might there's different blue seas and different companies do these cable systems where there's absolutely no what you can even mount them on a deck and it's a rubber that you drill a hole through and as you screw it down it tightens down so no water because you've got to make sure obviously and especially in this climate it's gonna rain and if you've got a cable that you just put Sikaflex to stop the water from coming in that's not gonna work so you need to have a really good idea and when we do installations on it on all our boat the boats that we deal with we always make sure there's a drip loop so as the water kind of like gets on the cable and goes down we make sure that the water goes back hits the bow goes back inside we never run a cable directly from a Bimini straight into a cable clamp because what's gonna happen is gonna become always constantly being hit with rainwater that's gonna kind of a dear to the cable as it goes down and then you're just gonna be constantly having water pushing trying to get in a drip loop is a really good idea inside the boat then you can change via terminal block easily to gauge 10 wire marine right which is gonna be less money smaller and you can do that inside on a terminal block but on the outside of the boat and because the connection is going to an MC for connection you have to have solar wire that is gauge 10 the NIC thing that you're gonna have and I'm going to show you that a little bit later than a few slide is what's called the controller there's two types of controllers there's what's called PWM controllers or MPPT controllers we strongly advise that you use what's called an MPPT controller MPPT controllers are about nineteen eight percent in efficient efficient ie you lose about two percent at PWM is about 21 percent inefficient so you're gonna lose if you buy a hundred watt solar array and you have a PWM controller you bought it off eBay and it's much cheaper than MPPT and you think you scored a deal sorta like go to McDonald's I think why would I ever buy more than a four dollar meal I'm so smart well you're not getting a full meal you're getting a four dollar meal right so there's reasons why you want to pay more and your hundred watt solar array is suddenly gonna give you only ever maximum of maybe seventy nine ones so you're just discarding twenty watts off your solar rate because you chose at PWM controller so it's essential and I've got a lot of boat owners that have an existing array have an existing PWM and if they want to increase their capacity for solar array the first thing to do is just change the controller you get suddenly a 25 percent gain of your solar you go from 80 to 100 almost instantly by just changing the controller and the last bit and this is absolutely critical is that when any times you do a connection to a battery you have to have a fuse connection at the battery so you're controlling I'll show or diagram your controller is going to be connected to the battery and also connect it to the solar panels there has to be a fuse at the start of the circuit and the start of the circuit is the battery not the solar panel a solar panel will never output more than it's meant to a battery has m1 can well so if you remember there's different choices like in our business we've got about six different lines of solar panels you know there's a rigid and there's flexible and there's all choices and within flexible if you look at doing a and I'm not a canvas person but there's ways of mounting a solar panel on two different sorts of canvas you can mount them with zippers velcro grommets snaps some owners simply use the grommets and they'll use a bungee they don't want anything permanent they're not really committed they take it on take it off some powerboat owners or even sell boats that have heart talks are gonna use actually a self-adhesive backing in the back of the panel they'll actually glue them on so I've done that on sea Ray's Tierra's grainy whites and on sale boaters that actually have a hard at the mini or a hard Dodger you know the I think it start to go you know that a hard Dodger some owners it's very thin shell they'll actually glue their solar panels with self-adhesive peel and stick backing right onto the the Dodger when it comes to wiring your solar panels you're gonna have a choice obviously if you have a single solar panel it's pretty easy it's a single solar panel to controller two batteries but you might on your boat have two pounds three pounds four panels assuming you don't have shading right imagine you're putting it on top of your Bimini on your powerboat and there is no radar mass higher and it's always gonna evenly see the Sun you could wire your panels either in series or in parallel but I would prefer to see series because in series at least the advantages the amperage stays the same all the way to the controller you're just gonna have a higher voltage so if you've got four panels are outputting twenty volts each and you put them in series the voltage sort of like to golf cards in series go six volts plus six volts equals twelve volts well you're gonna have 20 volts 20 volts 20 volts 20 volts you'll have 80 volts going on the cable and the amperage is gonna stay the same once it gets to the controller the controller is going to modify the high voltage bring it down to what the battery needs which may be 13 volts and then suddenly the amperage is gonna be calculated so remember P equals VI so if you bring the voltage down by 10 the average is gonna go up by 10 right so there's inverse correlation between current and voltage I emphasize series because it's a way to offset voltage drop on a boat especially with DC Circuit's the big issue that we have is the further something is from the battery the more you're gonna lose of power and so if you can harness all that energy and the energy that's at the solar panel and bring it instantly to the batteries without losing 5 or 10% because the voltage drop why would you do that and voltage drop is offset by higher voltages so the higher the voltage the better it is this is another little schematic of what a typical solar panel install looks like you see in this instance on the left side there's a positive a negative cable going to positive and negative cable going to positive and there's only two cables coming back so that's the other advantage of doing in this installation you actually have only two wires going to the bimini to the dogger wherever you're bringing it and those two cables are gonna actually bring three solar panels down so it's one way to do that and then you'll see as well there's going to be two connections going to the controller and then two connections going to the batteries it's essential in this diagram they did not put the fuse at the right place the fuse is gonna need to be right at the battery so it can be anywhere in the circuit a fuse is always located at the source of most power if two batteries are connected in parallel over a long distance you actually need a fuse at both ends but in distance because the solar panels are only rated at whatever they're rated 100 watt panel will never give you 500 watts it can never fail and give you more all right it's only gonna fail in failure it's not gonna fail to give you more the battery has way more power than 100 so this cable might be only able to handle 30 amps but if you have a dead short it could actually there's no resistance on a wire per se it could maybe want to run a thousand apps on that wire so it's essential to have a fuse at the beginning of this circuit located at the battery and also do not be tempted to ever bring the MPPT controller wiring to a switch or a panel and put it on a breaker all charging sources on a boat have to be directly connected to the battery all you never want to be able to disconnect a load or charging circuit and have other loads connected to it there's a lot of reason I probably takes me ten minutes explain but the end result is all Chargers on your boat alternator battery charger methanol fuel cell whatever it is Solar controller wind turbine all of those go to a place called the untwist positive distribution or directly to the battery if you don't have a lot of circuits so that no matter what you turn the switch on or off the solar panel is still connected to the battery the next thing is I'm showing you a little bit of diagram and you'll see that cable you can buy MC for cables connected directly onto the jacket and the large outdoor rated solar wiring it's all black which is nice because it makes it neater honestly white cabling on your boat or bad or yellow it's not necessarily what you want to see on the outside then what you have is you've got mc4 connectors and I've got some on the table and that's what character is gonna be demonstrating demonstrating how to actually install that connector onto a solar cable and here you've got and and this is key luckily the solar panels don't have two male connections or two female connections it's a male and a female meaning once you've actually ride the right polarity as you remove on and off the panel you'll never have to worry about mix matching those connectors male will only ever go on female and female ever go on man so it's kind of foolproof right and so it makes it easy for removing or reinstalling the panel you have two polarities of cables that are going directly out of the panel and when you connect on to the controller you're gonna have also opposite polarity so you can never mix and match because you would not want to mix positive to negative or negative to positive that would blow up the panel and that's happened to some of our owners that actually didn't themselves and they're inverted the polarity installing it and the panel was damaged and they had to buy another pen I talked about this a little bit earlier there's a significant difference between a pwm controller an MPPT controller an MPPT controller is sort of like a smart battery charger and why that's important is because the Sun is going to output more at noon than in the morning and your batteries might be full by one o'clock the controller actually knows what the battery voltage is and it knows what it's been doing over time sort of like a battery charger and it's constantly adjusting the voltage to optimally charge that battery because the Sun might be outputting way more voltage than the battery needs at any given time like on my boat I have six controllers on my boat and my batteries in the summer might be charged with the battery charger and each of the controllers has to say wait stop I don't need to do anything the batteries are full and even though it's noon and the sun is shining that's gonna say you know what we don't need to convert solar power to battery power let's open the circuit and we're not gonna harness the Sun energy right now so it's constantly adjusting the output to the battery depending on what the battery needs here's an example of a controller seventy-five fifteen the other thing when you buy a controller remember that not all controllers are the same there are really four things you're gonna look for when you buy a controller one is going to be what's my battery bank size that voltage do I have a 24 volt boat 12 Volvo 32 volt boat 48 volt boat it's possible you're going to decide a controller that's matched to your battery bank nominal voltage then you're gonna have to say depending on the size of array that I have what is the maximum amperage that I will have coming not from the solar panels but after it leaves the controller for the batteries am I gonna get 10 ABS 15 amps 20 amps 100 amps you're gonna have to buy a controller that is going to be able to convert whatever voltage and amperage is coming from the panels to the amperage and voltage that your batteries need so for instance in this picture here the 75 is voltage meaning it can take an array up to 75 volts so let's say 3 I don't know a hundred and 25 watt panels and the maximum amperage is 15 so it could handle high voltage but it's not going to be able 3 125 watt panels would be exceeding the 15 amp rating so you would need a larger controller there's a controller that does 100 watts in 30 amps so you need to make sure that when you purchase your controller you purchase a controller that is exactly matched to the array that you're putting on your vote and this is an important takeaway because many boat owners come to us and say and I always know why they're doing it but they're they've been misled they say Jeff I only want one controller on my boat I'm like okay great and it sounds like it would make sense why buy two things if you only need one but the reality is the controller that does double the amperage right let's say if 75 15 + or 130 130 controller is not the same price as the 75 50 it's double the price because it does double the amount of average so it's not like you can buy the largest controller on earth or the same price that you can buy the smallest controller on earth a controller is priced on the average and the voltage that goes to it so there is not a lot of savings for a boat owner to say I'm gonna wire 10 solar panels or five solar panels into a controller you're not buying just one controller versus five you're buying a controller that is sized for five panels and therefore it's gonna be a lot more expensive than only one controller and why that's important because then you have to wonder well maybe if I have four solar panels maybe I can put two on port two on starboard and have redundancy and have two controllers and two controllers is probably going to be just slightly more money than one large controller and then you have your port panels and your starboard panels that if you lose a controller you'd only lose half of your array not the whole array and then the last takeaway is that you've got to ask yourself what type of battery bank capacity do you have on your boat is your battery bank flooded lead-acid is it gel lit acid is it AGM LED acid is it lithium is it Firefly is it custom and so there are controllers like the one that I'm going to show you here the 75 15 where you can actually go in there and set the parameters to do whatever profile of battery chemistry you want and if you have $100 inexpensive battery it doesn't really maybe matter to you but if you bought a battery bank for $1,000 or $2,000 or $500 you might be better suited with having a controller that is perfectly specify the specifications for that controller are meant to handle the exact betting battery chemistry that you have on your boat so for instance we're selling a lot of Firefly batteries these days some owners are buying controllers you can go into that controller and via USB you can go in there and say I want to create a custom profile and I create a custom profile for the Firefly battery so I will charge that battery exactly the once though the way it wants to be charged and why that's important is because over time remember your solar panel is going to be charging that battery everyday and if you have something that is either chronically under charging a battery or chronically overcharging a battery even by a little bit you do that every day for the whole year you could either under charge and shorten the battery life if you overcharge you're gonna dramatically shorten your battery life and so it's a way to make sure that your batteries you have the maximum life of your batteries by having the right charged voltages here's another controller that's one of the controllers I have on my boat it's very compact it's about maybe 10 centimeters long by 5 centimeters high by 2 centimeters wide so these controllers are not these massive battery chargers that we have on our boat or inverters these are tiny little devices the other one that I was showing you is that the m75 15 is about this big so on my boat because I wanted to harness all the energy from the Sun and I wanted to make sure that I got everything I installed one controller per panel and on my boat I have a sailboat and I have all these various shading situations that could happen because of the boom the radar pole the back stays there's all of his different things that shave my paddle differently I decided that whatever happened so one panel that might be shaded my other panel is going to be perfectly optimized to its controller and so it allows me to harness more energy from the Sun and this is what it actually looks on my boat I've got four controllers you can barely see the one at the bottom four controllers going to a fuse block and then the fuse block going to the battery so as gareth is gonna start prepping himself right now i'm just gonna open the floor while he just gets ready does any of you have any questions or anything about what i've talked about before we start looking at the demo yeah I passed the MC for cable ground before and plugs you can have a look at them now instead of just showing how they connect and disconnect it's very simple crimp them strip the cable back and crimp the connections on so best to use a sharp knife and obviously when you're using a sharp knife be careful that you keep your fingers clear of it this actually is that you can you can feed the cable right through so obviously you don't want to strip it back that full distance you just want to get enough to get under the crimping part which is this first sort of quarter inch on solid bit here and then same for the male in there it's this one here you can feed the cable up more but you just it only has to really get under the connection there and when you're doing this try not to like some people may use side cutters and go like that but then you end up damaging right around that base where you've cut and the strands if you happen to catch them they can snap off really easy it can create a Hotpoint and soul where it's not so bad but just yeah in any crimping situation try to use a knife and keep away from the cause as such so it goes there sit that in and then it's a bit easier with these ons here they don't quite fit into the crimper so just normally push them in a little bit with by hand give it get that ready and then slider them so the sheathing goes right to the edge of where the crimps going to happen come down check the connection nice and tight give it a time to make sure they were all color coded but this is yeah this is specific for these crimps so this tool yeah I don't know what it cost but it's an actual MC for like crimper so you can't use one of the standard color crimpers and then these connectors there's a little rubber grommet inside if you take that apart so when you tighten this down it clamps down and that creates the waterproofing from any ingress coming in that way so you can leave that on when you're pushing this in I'll push it in and then you can hear a tiny click that's when it's directly and a few only put it in halfway and tighten this up that's possible in the connection when you put them together that it's not the other ends not going to connect properly and you'll have a bad connection so don't know if you can it's not really a clique it's more of you can just feel it release and get caught in there and then tighten that up so it's very watertight get a tug and yeah so that's basically its yeah it's more the feeling of when you push it in and pull it before you tighten this up because then you you'll know if you can pull it back out then it hasn't gone completely and yeah that's I'll do the other one with solar panels as well how the positive and negative plugs are sitting on them a lot of people think it's convenient to plug them in to carry it if you've been go and put that solar panel and a son that's shorted so yeah definitely don't do that when you take if you do take them off just store them don't plug the ins into each other because you didn't need to get a new solar panel yeah just slide it in so that's hard up see how these flare out a little bit that won't fit in the crimping tool so just pinch that down again can be a little bit finicky when you first start doing these of trying to use only two hands to get it to sit in there properly and everything cut it down good crimp again if you crimping up here you've obviously got it in the wrong part of the crimper and then that'll prevent it from clipping and clicking improperly into the connector so make sure you've only crimped down on the the securing part of the the pin there and so the other end don't crimp two of the same ones on if you because you won't be able to plug your panel in so same deal just put that on and that Cook beer yes so now I won't I won't be able to pull that out so yeah with those pins go see on these pins you can see all those little jagged but see that's what clicks in and prevents it from being overly pulled out again so the pin will be you can cut it out and yeah basically start again with a new pen connector there and put it back in yeah no not if you've pushed it right and then yeah so when you have your panel up on the dodger you just plug it in and when you disconnect that so as I said don't when you have a solar panel don't when you go to store it don't plug them into each other because if you bring it back out into the sunlight you'll just need a new panel yeah so the best way to disconnect a solar panel is cover it with a towel or something so it's not doesn't have any load trying to charge and yeah like turning it no but yeah you'd cover it before plugging it back in as well because you don't want yeah be fine as long as no one plugs a man - yeah and then when you're coming down the railing of your bum knee or your dodger we use this cable sock just to make it look nice rather than having exposed cables and it just goes around and tucks in and I see if you get a heat gun on there they'll actually fight ease it up a little bit as well not the ins in it you can make it look a little bit nicer to just aesthetically or you can fold fold end in there and put a cable tie around it and yeah yeah featuring go there be a little heat shrink on top it's more for aesthetic purposes just so that people the cabling or wiring on a boat yeah so yes that's pretty much it for the solar crimping and cabling on there I'll show you just some of the other crimps for your fusing and whatnot for inside the boat or if you're doing any yeah anything anywhere on the boat basically we always use the heat shrink connectors just to help against corrosion and yeah sort of extend the life of your connections so stripping I can do it fairly well and no I'm not damaging the cables by going like this but someone that hasn't done it before if I push them too tight pull out you'll get some of the cause coming off see the little strands and that's obviously affecting the cable and you're degrading the rating of it that it's meant to carry yes so there's many different types of strippers but this is the one we have here today so it's 14 gauge cable so just put it in the 14 gauge thing crimp down and that there won't damage any of the cause and side and you can get at the correct distance that you need to put inside the crimp gun and anything with the connectors yellow is 10 and 12 gauge blue is 14 and 16 gauge and readers 18 to 22 gauge so you don't want to be putting 14 gauge cable into a 12 10 connector because the connections not going to be as it's designed for so I stripped out a little bit long there that I'll just cut it down so just a butt splice connector here wrap the strands around just so there's no strays so when you're pushing it in they don't sort of flare up and not get inside the actual tunnel of the connector there and then these crimpers are color coded so Red's for that the small 18 to 22 blue is 14 and they correspond with with the crimps and yellow is 10 to 12 so do the 14 to 16 crimp it down this phone here is a single crimp you can also get another version of these crimpers that has double crimp which is ideal because then you have two points of connection give it a tug to make sure it's all connected correctly and then there's no point buying a heat shrink connector if you don't knock it down I've gone on to numerous boats where people have them but they don't have a gas torch or maybe too scared not knowing if there's diapers or something around do this evenly because otherwise you can scorch the cable and damage the actual sheathing and it would it'll go black and that's deteriorated the cable surface goes into oil or get some kind of grease on it over time that may possibly affect the cable so now that's gonna pass that around might still be a little bit hot just like anything there's no end you know III know I wouldn't say it's an overkill but you're certainly gonna buy that at multiples what you charge for a nylon connector so I'm an one point you got to ask yourself it's diminishing returns all right I think this is probably a good start and you do be in a big wet location forever that's too short of a wire it should be much longer that's because it's been cut and cut I mean the bilge pump wiring is generally about at least this long and you got to get it as high as humanly possible and you're right it's essential with a bilge pump essential to use an absolutely heat shrink connection and perfectly because having 12 volts going into your bilge with some metals are going to be underwater you can have 12 volts going to ground it is pretty much your whole boat is grounded and so you can have then a circuit in your boat and your bilge so yeah a bilge pump wiring absolutely has to be sealed and cannot be laying in the bilge with open connectors Nigel Calder has stories of that bilge pump float switch failing and causing a keel to drop the boat's got all chewed up so you cannot have a circuit in your boat in the bills in the water because I mean a lot of those water it's gonna be underwater metals or they're pretty much all grounded so it's very very serious to have bilge wiring that is not sealed not properly heat shrunk so that there's no more moisture or water that can get into that to complete the circuit so if with the hatred connectors it also matters exactly what crimpy using these ones here basically a universal so I could use it on the 12 10 I can use it on the 16 18 and I can use it on the red 18 to 22 but when I crimp down with this it actually penetrates through the heat shrink so the middle is exposed there so if it does get in that situation if it's for a bilge pump you've used the eastern connector but because it's the middle has actually basically made it null and void having heat shrink on it you knows I'll just have a straight middle criminal here so yeah make sure you don't use the wrong tool for the when I have on my boat that's an FTC crimper ratcheted clipper that's made for heat shrink insulation yes it will never break some of the crimpers there's such rough edges that may actually pierce and actually caused the heat shrink to actually be sliced open so this ratchet crimper is designed by ftz who also make a lot of heat shrink connectors and it actually is kind of like they'll notice the edges are you know they're kind of round and smooth right they're not jagged straight edges and so it allows the crimp to be done without actually severing the heat shrink insulation yeah which those crimp is that type of crimpers do because here normally these are cheaper as well the the type obviously because it's not designed specifically for it people think I don't want to spend $30 on a crimper I'll get a $10 here so yeah these crimp is here it's got the color gauges there again for the different size so this is the 10-12 crimp it down it off I clearly haven't used these thoughts yes some of the barrels are shorter and it varies from manufacturer manufacturer it's hard to do a double crank on those because sometimes the barrel slopes and it slides so it's really it's it's even true yeah so even though the price of some of these crimpers can be up to $100 depending how many crimps you need to do on your boat that would pay to get a bit of a good pair cuz if you you want to spend $20 and get up here like this yeah not really doing yourself any favors by trying to crimp patron connectors with something that's going to damage them over time this is one I have a my own boat and it is tricky to use but over time you get used to it and then it never never breaks the seal on your each ring so these this anchor one is designed for the specific angkor lugs as well these are if teased it but yeah you can get pretty much identical lugs evasive angkor and they're designed for exactly that purpose coming now the lugs on those but thank you yeah thanks alright enjoy the rest of the show thanks Karen that's right
Electrical
Electrical