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hi everyone and welcome to doc talk with

myself jeff cote

today i have the honor of chatting uh

with a gentleman who had an incredible

impact on my life

when i bought my first sailboat in 2006

april fool's day by the way

i suffered uh catastrophic electrical

failure after electrical failure

and through my journey of redeeming my

boat

and staying committed to voting the

experience taught me

the importance of doing things right and

this is how i got to know nigel calder

through his books which we're going to

talk a little bit later

welcome nigel to the podcast

nigel was born and raised in england uh

where he began sailing dingies

at the age of 13 he was a rebuilding

motorcycles and triggering all things

mechanical

after college he met his wife terry and

then they set sail on his brother's

28-foot boat

where they were almost run over by

freighter after that incident they

stayed inland

and built a couple of 70-foot steel hall

narrow boats to run the english canals

would love to do that one day

then they moved to louisiana in the

united states and he started his career

working on oral rigs

naturally the work was quite dangerous

and he learned a deep respect for doing

things the right way

nigel and his wife set sail around the

world with their two small children

and prem quarters there was a change of

plans after

18 months now they take shorter cruises

mostly in the north sea

and extensively in the caribbean

as for boats uh nigel has had quite a

few boats

started off with a 20 39 foot ingrid

cutter

a pacific sea craft worked on those by

the way quite lovely boats

followed by a mallow 45 built in sweden

and this was replaced by the same boat

but with experimental electrical and

propulsion systems which we're going to

talk about

it was used by the european union hybrid

marine project

of which nigel was a technical director

for his extensive testing

in hydro hybrid propulsion system nigel

is a member of the american boat yacht

council

and he's also a member of their

electrical project technical committee

by the way for some of you haven't known

nigel has written eight books

and is most well known which i've given

to all my technicians

over the years is the boat owner's

mechanical electrical manual

which is uh known in our circles as the

bible

and marine diesel engines maintenance

troubleshooting and repair

uh i've owned both votes and there's a

lot of highlighting in bookbooks

again welcome and nigel to our podcast

and thanks for being here today with us

thank you jeff i i use the boat owner's

manual myself

i can't remember all that stuff and i

have one once done a job on my own boat

and pulled the book out and read not to

do what i just did so

yeah more these days than ever actually

that's good that's really good so

um maybe let's start a little bit at the

beginning um

at what point did you know that you were

gonna be able to carve out

um you know this voting life for

yourself

how did you sort of why is this sort of

fascination with voting and voting

systems in particular

oh it goes back to the 1960s actually

when they had the first round the world

race

single-handed round the world race the

one that term

robin knox johnson won and in sue haley

you know like a 32-foot

double-ended boat yeah and it was

headline news in england

for weeks and so a whole load of us on

our teams then would

sit at school dreaming about singing

around the world so i guess that's when

i got the bug

and uh so i always wanted to build a

boat

and do that and i didn't get the

opportunity and

until i started working on the oil rigs

because the pay was really good this is

you know the late 70s early 80s

and it provided the income to to build

the ingrid

we bought the hull uh but it had no

ballasts no deck

one bulkhead to stop the sights caving

in and that was it so

we uh we melted down battery posts

to cost the ballast seven thousand seven

hundred pounds of lead

we uh we but we basically we did

everything

on that boat built it ourselves and in

the course of doing that

um i installed all the systems and and

although i'm pretty capable

i don't i didn't know the first thing

about electricity

and not a whole lot more about mechanics

and uh

there was no decent information

available to help

so we kind of struggled through it and i

ended up having to rebuild most of those

systems because i didn't get much of it

right

and uh when i figured out if i needed to

know that stuff other people did as well

you know this was the heyday of

homebuilt boats so there was actually a

market

for that information so and that's what

prompted me

to uh to write the books and at the time

uh

the life on the rigs was either insanely

busy

or else there was a lot of down time so

i had a fair bit of time out there when

i could write

so i did much of the initial writing my

diesel engine book was the first one

and i put on the rigs during the quiet

periods

and then the uh the road owners manuals

followed that one after we uh

after i quit and we went segment

yeah it's funny you know my journey or

even with my own boat

i think i'm at iteration five on my

electrical

my counting at 36 meaning you know i've

had literally

later with it now i'm i'm i'm basically

version five of the electrical

and uh you look back and you're like oh

my god did i learn so much on this one

or okay

i get it you know it's it's

like like a lot of things in life um

it's harder than it seems

i think and that's that's the challenge

with marine electrical especially 12 or

24 volts because you're assuming

you can't get hurt what could possibly

go wrong

and that's probably the predisposition

for many of us

to get into these you know situations

that

sometimes you know it's you need that

information to come from somewhere else

you know and that's a great thing with

forums nowadays and you know books is

one way

and youtube or whatever it is or talking

on the doctor

but it's the getting to that closer to

that end point

that is reliable and safe

yes for that first edition of the boat

owners manual

i uh i went to a bunch of boat shows

where i could talk to the gurus of the

day um

rick proctor dave smead bill montgomery

of belmont

and all those early early leaders in the

field um

and with the uh smart regulators high

output alternators

the early generation of inverters uh i

never could afford to stay in a hotel so

i'd rather rent a car and sleep in the

car

and go to various boat shows to collect

information

and then uh published the first edition

of the photo

manual and i immediately got a bunch of

naughty letters from the american voting

yacht council abyc

because there was stuff in that book

that violated the abyc standards

so i started going to their meetings and

um

i very rapidly went to the second

edition i cleaned it up from a standards

perspective

and that was you know 30 something years

ago now so i've been

going to the abyc meetings ever since

and i i've probably learned more

in in those we used to have two meetings

a year two days of

at each time i probably learned more in

those meetings than any other single

source of information i

have had over the years well i would it

would be sort of the aggregation of all

that knowledge for all those people in

the room right it's it's sort of

all the pain that we've learned through

the years and you're you're just going

dump it you know like put it on the

table you know what are the things

you're worrying about what are the

things that got you in trouble

what are the things that you wish you

hadn't done what are the things you wish

you would have done differently

well because the focus has always been

on safety i mean that's what the abyc

does

rather than specific practicality

it's all those things that have caused

problems that were potentially dangerous

that crop up in the meetings

and then there's a discussion about how

to resolve those issues

when i first went there were maybe six

people in the room

uh and then uh for a decade or more now

we've had over 40

at every meeting we've had so it's grown

um

very rapidly in terms of participation

and they're mostly there are techs

in the room so

and uh they check their company

affiliation at the door

some issue comes up and before you know

it they're all focused on the issue

rather than thinking about where would

my company be on this issue

so it's a really uh it's a great

organization

um that's really focused on safety and

there's almost

no um marketing or company pressure that

that shows up in any of those meetings

which is pretty remarkable

it's the right thing absolutely yeah

absolutely the right thing

i remember a few years ago i was doing a

presentation uh

in alberta and uh one of the attendees

and the host of the

it was actually you've done stuff for

them it's uh

blue water cruising association here in

the pacific northwest i know i've done a

couple of

uh seminars in the past yeah i've

attended them by the way we were there

melissa i dragged melissa to one of the

host sessions in 2011.

i was like oh my god nigel's in town we

have to all the whole office went

um and uh it was interesting because

this tech uh with a lot of

experience in the oil rigs

out in alberta was saying you know

about you know the difference between

sort of what the code is

and he was really emphasizing from a

practical standpoint that it's

you know it's the minimum you know the

bar yeah

and it's funny in our industry it seems

to be opposite it's sort of

almost a holy grail it's sort of this

thing that you'll never get to but you

know what if you were gonna do it

you know maybe try to get there but if

you don't then

you know it's okay and and he was like

no it's

it's i was like what a great perspective

you know it's it's not

your objective it's like no no you got

to have that covered as a men

and then go from it and i think that's

the i guess there's a lot of constraints

that

force us to maybe see it that way and i

think that one of the reasons it's hard

on all of us both from a time

perspective and money perspective

as voters to realize what it takes to do

it right

you know it's it's it's always it's

always harder than we've

all imagined well there's no one

place to learn this stuff in the marine

industry there's maybe two or three

schools

in the whole of the u.s that have

year-long courses

and outside of that the abyc runs

classes but abyc is focused on safety

it's not focused on practicality so

there are

things that we all should be doing like

putting drip loops in front of

connections on our wiring so if there's

any moisture it drips off

that's not a safety issue so it doesn't

work its way into the abyc

standards so that's why they are a

minimum they're basically designed

to make sure that the boat doesn't catch

fire we don't electrocute somebody on

the

ac side or we don't sink it from

catastrophic corrosion

but there's a whole ton of stuff we need

to do and know

that goes beyond the standards so it's

not in the standards because it's not

directly related to safety

yeah for example there's no requirement

to boot

positive connections in a dc system

other than at the battery

uh because it's assumed there's a fuse

in the system and if you short circuit

from a negative to a positive bus bar

you'll blow the fuse

so theoretically there's not a safety

issue but at that point the boat is dead

in the water

but you just blew the main battery fuels

so the obvious thing is we need to build

those connections

but it's not in the standards because

from a safety perspective

they consider having the fuse there is

adequate to protect the boat from a

catastrophic fire so there's a ton of

stuff like that

that um but over the years i've tried to

work into all of my

books and publications and um so

there's at least a one place where we

can go and grab all this stuff

and you're right i mean that journey to

perfection perfection is unattainable

uh and we all chase it for some of us do

the the challenge and it's the same

thing i see it even on my boat as well

is safety is one thing but very close to

safety's reliability

you know being having systems that stay

up and running

might affect safety right you you know

losing your electrical system at the

dock

is annoying a few things are at play but

you know the end of the day

it's you can tolerate it losing your

electrical system when you're underway

passage making or in a far away remote

anchorage

and you don't know where that fuse is

and you it's buried and you didn't put

it there

and you don't know where it is and that

fuse took out your whole electrical

system now you don't have your vhf's

anymore

you know you don't you don't have any

and that's exactly what it is it's that

fear that we're always worried about is

going okay well yeah safety is important

but also as voters it's it's hard enough

to own a boat you know if you lose

confidence in the boat over time

you know some people you know their

dreams are

crushed they end up not having the

stamina to take it and they're like you

know what

my life started enough as it is i i

can't i can't have hard at work

hard at home and hard on my vacations

and so then they go what they buy out

they're like you know what i you know

we're gonna get a cottage instead or

we're gonna just travel

you know maybe we'll go rv we'll just

take whatever complex city

i just can't take that level complexity

or you know

unknowns with a family or with a partner

or with family your friends and that's

also

another thing that we always worry about

is you know is how is the system going

to stay

up and operating without uh

basically losing people's confidence yes

well

and uh you know as you know we've done a

ton of cruising over the years

um months at a time and uh

i i would say the number one reason that

people give up on boating is because of

electrical system problems on their

boats and they just

get frustrated with chasing the problems

and they finally give up and do

something else

agreed and most of those problems are

they should not be happy

their insulation problems their their

design problems

they're built into the boat from day one

i have never done a really thorough

order electrical audit of a boat without

finding at least one circuit that didn't

have adequate overcome protection on it

oh yeah you know coming back to the

business of suddenly losing power

this is really germaine at the minute

with lithium-ion batteries

because you know every lithium-ion

battery has a battery management system

and if their battery minus management

system sees some condition

arising that threatens the battery it

disconnects the battery

well if that's your your navigation

battery and you're going through some

difficult reef entry

and all of a sudden all of your system

shut down because the battery decided

there was something going on it didn't

light

you're in serious trouble so one of the

things we've just written into a draft

abyc standard we've been working on this

damn thing for five years

um because this is this is uh difficult

and controversial but one of the things

we

wrote in there is that these bms's have

to provide an external message before

they disconnect

and that immediately gets rid of all of

those people advertising drop-in

lithium-ion batteries because they don't

have the ability to communicate

if they're going to disconnect uh so

many of those batteries that we're

currently fitting

into our boats but don't will not comply

with that

it's a technical information built in

rather than a standard but they won't

comply with that

when it comes out but this is the the

kind of issues that we really need to be

focused on as an industry because

uh these things happen people get into

trouble they get frustrated they go buy

a set of skis or something and give up

voting

i totally agree and you know i having

deal dealing with owners

for people some people's affliction to

voting is not just sort of this

you know in passing it's it's you know

for myself it was a dream

when i mean a dream it's

all-encompassing it's it's what i want

my the best times in my life i wanted to

be on the water

and to you know because the electrical

systems like you say

might not be reliable uh and to see

those people get out of boating

and to effectively change course on

a life goal a lot of them wait you know

work work work

and then they their talk about it it's

their dream and i'm meeting them every

day and it's like

40 years sending their kids to

university doing the work

you know working extra years to get the

you know cruising kitty up

you know delayed gratification delayed

gratification delayed gratification then

they buy the boat they get it ready

it's always more than anticipate and

then to have those electrical problems

actually stop them and at one point

maybe a voice of reason in the family

says you know what

this is this is just too hard this is

just too hard

we've got to get out so let's talk a

little bit about lithium because lithium

is definitely probably i would say

one of the hottest sort of topics in our

field right now especially within the

marine industry related to battery

systems

and you brought up a good point about

these concept of these drop-in

replacements

it comes out of course um people

want it to be easy right they want the

benefits of you know and i tell people

and correct

and chime in here but foreign

i think melissa has just put up a shot

of a uh lithionics

lithium ion battery with an external

bms and this is one of those batteries

that has a

very broad ability to communicate

outside the battery

um and which is that little middle cable

that you've got there's a communications

cable

um so uh but this means this battery

it's not really a battery it's an energy

storage system

because now we've got the capability to

integrate this battery

uh with all the charging devices on the

boat for example so that if the battery

sees a condition in which it's likely to

get overcharged

it can send out a message to shut down

the charging devices

if it sees a condition in which it's

getting close to

shutting down because of a lack of

charge you can send out a warning

message and maybe uh

turn on one of those charging devices

but so it's got that external

communication capability

the other thing that i want in my boat

with lithium ion which i don't have at

the moment i do have lithium-ion

batteries i won't discuss which brand

they are

um but the other thing i want with my

lithium-ion batteries

is a sticker on the battery that says

it's tested to ul 1973.

that's the most aggressive abuse testing

standard in the marketplace

in the marine marketplace at least and

it means so whatever i do stupid and i

do do stupid things like everybody else

plus i i push these these systems to

their published limits just to see what

happens i mean it's part of what i do

for a living

uh but with lithium-ion if you get it

wrong

it's likely to go up in smoke and you

lose the boat so

with that ul 1973 sticker on the battery

you can be pretty certain that there's

just about nothing stupid you can do

that's going to

cause that battery to catch firing

you're going to lose the phone so you

wouldn't use the boat

yeah that's what i want on my lithium

ion battery is that sticker on the side

of the battery

says it's ul 17 1973 tested

there's not many batteries have it

because the testing is very expensive

yeah i actually went to ul to see how

they do that

oh yeah oh yeah they do crazy stuff like

they put a battery

in a with a metal screen around it and

they put it in an oven and they heat it

up until it explodes

when you know which you can get pretty

much any lithium-ion battery to explode

and it has to have a battery case that's

strong enough to make sure there's no

projectiles that'll come through the

screen outside

you know stuff like this um they take

one cell in the battery and they totally

discharge it and then they fully charge

all the other cells

so the battery is totally unbalanced and

then

they put it on a full out charge rate to

see if they can drive that one cell into

thermal runaway

um which will in a lithium-ion battery

well again it'll start a fire in the

cell

so they do a lot of really really they

take the bms

and uh they introduce a fault to it

and it has to have a redundant

capability so it can handle a single

fault within the battery management

system

so and of course this all drives the

cost of the batteries up

and it makes them expensive but on the

other hand what's peace of mind was

yeah that's a challenge you know i see

it all the day and you know it's funny

people are buying you know some people

you know we're very few people are

putting lithium in a 10 000

value both you know you're seeing i see

but voters that are

buying you know catamarans for you know

half a million

you know 300 400 750 a million dollars

which sounds like an obscene amount

number but i mean that's

some books are costing that and that's

not on the top end that's you know

that's a 40 foot

45 foot 50 foot camera right and

and yet they've they've spent x on the

boat and then they're looking and i have

to have some orders and

it's it's almost like a misalignment in

values and they're like

i need to save as much money as humanly

possible on a battery bank

that will be either underneath my bed or

literally behind my head

yes i tell them i'm like why would you

why would you be a smoker

and have a flammable couch right you

know

i know it's less money to put flammable

material on the couch but why would you

want that and i think that's the problem

is people can't connect the dots

they they they're very um they just

don't want to go there because the price

is that's our job

you have to help them connect the dots

yeah yes

and of course if we do it right they'll

listen to us

yeah and that's what this you know it

goes back to uh

it's a little bit the spirit of this

conversation right is to

try to people have a hard time being

told what to do

in general that all of us certainly

myself but if you tell me why i should

do something

tell me the reasons you give me an

explanation and i'll come to

that conclusion then yeah i'm all in you

know and i think that's what it comes

down to it's not just telling them

voters what they should or shouldn't do

but educating them that's the reasons

why we should do something or the reason

we shouldn't

and then let most people will come to

the same conclusions not everyone

because it all we have different values

excuse me scratching my nose

i was planting a grass this morning

and i think i have a slightly allergic

reaction to that cross seed

oh that's hilarious i this is allergy

season right now i i could i could

sneeze at any given moment and it could

be uncontrollable for

like like 30 seconds same thing i i i

always get a little hay fever and so i

really stirred it up today i think

so what are your reasons for doing

lithium like what would you if you're

talking

what was your performance you know it's

the uh the energy density

there's there's on a volume or weight

basis

there's probably uh people say four

times as much

or energy density or a quarter of the

volume but actually by the time you put

the bms in and stuff like that

you're probably talking two to one but

then you know if we got that acid

batteries we normally

speaking we're using less than 50 of the

capacity at each cycle

with lithium we're probably using 70 if

we really push it 80

um so then you need less of them so by

the time you're done you probably are

talking

a quarter of the batteries for a similar

performance

so yeah and then if you have uh maybe

half as many batteries or even a similar

amount you've got way more performance

and in our case you know we developed

that integral system uh

alternator that puts out eight kilowatts

yeah i saw that

i need a battery bank that will absorb

eight kilowatts

of charging power and on our boat

because we don't have air conditioning

uh but we don't have you know fridge and

freezer and microwave and

all kinds of bits and pieces uh but

in uh on half an hour of engine run time

when we're pulling up the anchor to get

out of

an anchorage or we're leaving the dock

in the time it takes us to do that we

can put enough energy in that battery

bank

with that integral alternator to run the

boat for 24 hours

yeah that's the dream yeah yeah and you

know we've spent 40 years

stressing over the state of charge of

our batteries like everybody else

and i'm constantly checking the state of

a charge thinking maybe i better do a

bit of battery charging and anchor

these last few years because i've been

wanting to push the system

hard for test purposes i've been doing

stupid things like

boiling water and electric kettle at the

same time as i'm boiling it in the

microwave and then dumping hot water

down the sink so the hot water heater is

running

so that i can load the system up just

just to see what it'll do

at one point we had eight kilowatts of

electric heaters on the boat

when we were testing this was in ireland

the weather was miserable

but there were times when we still held

open every hatch and porthole on the

boat to let the heat out

because we had eight kilowatts of

electric heaters running just so i could

load the system up to see what it would

do so what size inverters do you have on

board right now yeah eight kilowatt

inverter

yeah how much eight kilowatts oh yeah

everything maxed out i wanted to see

what would break first

by the way you know what how big is your

boat is it 45 it's 40

well it's they call it a marlo 46 but

it's actually 48 feet

it's a you're the only one that has any

kilowatt inverter on board unless you

have air conditioning there's just

yeah i mean there's no way we can use

all the energy we can generate at the

moment

um but uh it's uh well that's

that's basically one of the things i do

is try to test things for destruction

to see what's going to break first

i'll get a hold of the manufacturer or

whatever and say you know this is what

happened and then

maybe they'll they'll uh fix it listen

we know yeah sometimes uh and if not we

at least we know where the boundaries

are

yeah and then we can go ahead and make

sure that we design systems that are

pretty bulletproof

there was one point with that testing

where i'm where i discovered a means to

create

something called a harmonic vibration

and i could break a belt in four minutes

you know these are

these are timing belts rip timing belts

off a car

that we were using because they're very

rugged and i could make this belt go

totally crazy and break a belt in four

minutes

so so then uh the uh the manufacturer

had to spend a ton of money fingering

and figuring out

how this was happening nobody else could

do it it was it was unique to our boat

and certain speeds and and resonant

features

and and they figured it out and got to a

point where i couldn't do it anymore

yeah that's that that's a i mean

breaking things to learn things is a

good way i mean we we don't

intentionally break things

uh our client base do that for us right

you know the thousands of voters that

we can help out and we learn from we

learn from our own mistakes other

people's mistakes

yeah you know as long as you're learning

from the mistakes then

tomorrow is a better day yeah yeah

so what's your charge rate going into

your lithium bank

uh right we've got it's a 48 volt bank

because otherwise the um the cables

would be huge

yeah so uh we're putting in what we

start out at

eight kilowatts so if we do the math

that's eight thousand divided by

fifty is uh 160 amps i think so it's a

lot

lower than we might be doing with a you

know high output alternator of 12 or 24

volts

yeah um but in terms of energy

you know it's twice as much as we can

get from pretty much any other

even the best of the higher output

alternators on the market

yeah you know the the aps ultimate is

that ocean planet energy cells

yeah those have terrific performance

characteristics at 12 and 24 volts

so what's the output at low rpm on those

alternators

what makes it like what does it make so

awesome well there's two things one is

the

the maximum output actually there's

three things the maximum output

which is typically speaking or these

alternators are radio when they're cold

yeah well when you run them hard within

five minutes

they're uh up to the case is probably up

to well over 100 degrees centigrade um

so then they they uh the output goes

down

so then efficiency becomes really

important and those aps alternators are

some of the more efficient ones on the

market

you know the typical automotive

alternator is maybe 50

efficient much of the time uh these aps

alternators around 70 percent some of

the belmonts are as well

um and then the other thing that's

critical

to all of us is that they ramp up their

output at low rpms

yeah well especially if we're battery

charging at anchor

uh because if you've got to run the

engine you know two and three thousand

rpm to get the alternator

to wide open to a full output you're not

going to do it

so what you thought was a 200 amp

alternator is really 100 amps

yeah um so that that is

is a really critical feature is getting

it to ramp up the output at low rpms

and we spent a ton of money with the

integral system

working on that and we got it to the

point where with the engine at a

thousand rpm we're getting five

kilowatts

out of the uh alternator that's just

amazing

yeah i mean there's nothing on the

market that comes close to it

so i can set an anchor i can run my

engine at 1200 rpm which is you know

not much above idle speed yeah and it's

also quite

quiet and uh and that thing's putting

out um seven kilowatts

and not only that that seven kilowatts

is enough of a load on the engine at

that low speed

to where i'm almost at the peak fuel

efficiency for the engine

so i'm actually getting even at anchor

generating like that i'm more efficient

than a standalone

yeah generator that's what you want it's

that sweet spot i saw that i did i saw

your video that

uh i think it was about last year or

maybe 18 months ago that you

yes yeah yeah you were wearing a lab

coat

you look like such a scientist right

we're we're about to start a video and

they they gave that to me and made me

wear it and i felt kind of stupid in it

but

you were such a scientist i'm like nigel

doesn't mean you could you could have

come in there and sweat

i was like no no it's nigel man he

doesn't need to pretend to be a

scientist

that's the one and only time i've ever

won a lab coat

i love it i love it i saw you on it i'm

like no no this guy doesn't need to wear

one

you can put one you can wear one but he

doesn't need one yeah you know we

we spent oh what my nose is stitching

again

we spent three million dollars of

of uh some big corporation in the u.s

funded that project

three million dollars developing that

wow yeah

yeah that was then and then we had other

money that we put in

so it was a pretty intense

uh development program this stuff is

paper it's really easy we know exactly

what we want to do

but uh but actually making it all work

and then building a controller that can

handle that kind of

power and then uh one of the tests i i

did

was to run the thing up to eight

kilowatts and open circuit the batteries

to see what would happen you know with

an option immediately smoke the

alternator you blow all the diodes

yeah that's what i heard our controller

reacted so fast

and it had such a decent dump capability

that shut the system down without any

damage

oh wow that quick yep

yeah that's what you want because

otherwise you're going to like that i

mean that alternative has got to be

but

you know i drew up a list of design

characteristics that i wanted to see in

the thing

i have no technical capability

whatsoever to

to make it happen but i know what we

want

because i've been doing this for long

enough and dealing with

the with the kit that we have and the

failings that they have so i know what i

want

uh it's a matter of finding the people

that can then take that and translate it

into a piece of kit that will do that

yeah and and that's what we were able to

do with that project

yeah so for for the audience listening

and i mean the challenge that we all

have as voters

not first of all not all of us have

generators so

you know a lot of sailboats don't have

generators of course catamarans are

having

generators more and more now but again

it depends on the size where you're

going to put the generator

you know i you know from a cost

perspective i could afford a generator

on my own boat

and i would do one but where am i to put

it there's just no place

you know i'm going to give up such a

huge amount of space and it's going to

be impossible with service

and so a lot of boaters are stuck with

basically one engine

and that's it and it's not a money thing

it's just there's no other place

and so i think the play is well what can

we do with alternators and

you know we've been asking more and more

of alternators well how can you know

it's

55 then 90 amps and 120 and

220 360 pardon

three six you know one of those aps 12

volt alternators i think is rated at 360

amps

yeah i believe it is and that's just a

regular small frame alternator

yeah unbelievable and then um uh one of

the 24 volt alternators is

is rated at 260 i think which is you

know

quite a bit more that's huge huge

i may be wrong on that i can't remember

off the top of my head and then of

course um

you need a pretty fancy controller yeah

this uh when you're pumping out that

much

current and now we've got these uh wake

speed

controllers which are

like uh the best of what we've had

historically on steroids

i mean that's oh yeah it's unbelievable

really impressive piece of kit but of

course

the problem with that is uh the the more

powerful these controllers get to be the

more

complex they are to program so you

really have to

have someone helping you i mean i can't

program one of those yet i haven't done

it

i know what it can do it's mental it's

it's it's

so one of the things we we've done at

ocean planet is to

create a little piece of kit that you

can plug into uh

one of those that will give you a whole

bunch of drop down menus

to simplify the programming because it

does get to be

pretty complex and if you screw up

programming then you're going to have

problems

yeah yeah i mean that's a trade-off

right

and we as voters i tell them same thing

with going back to lithium or anything

you know you can't have it both ways

you can't have all the benefits of

technology and have simplicity

you know you you're going to trade off

like complexity

for more benefit and that's why i tell

people with lithium i'm like

are do you need it or do you want it

yeah like are you do you need a computer

on top of your batteries what's the

reason why you need

that level and it might be but not

everyone

needs all that complexity because the

challenge is when it does break

then you either do it yourself or you

call it a technician sometimes the

technicians

aren't available uh in your area or

they're in your area but they're not

available for

eight weeks it's four weeks until they

can come on board and that's where

people get really frustrated

and then you know we uh we start pumping

out power levels we've never dreamed of

in the past

so then we need cables this big to

handle it

and then uh because we've got

lithium-ion batteries on the boat

they don't have that charge acceptance

curve that that acid batteries have so

so then the uh the charging device is

running flat out for maybe an hour or

two

and then we discover some tiny little

thing like we put an a

l fuse in there with uh which has got

stainless steel bolts to hold things

together

and one of the washers finds its way

between the cable lug

and the fuel you're done stainless steel

washer it acts like a little resistor

it gets hot enough to where it melts the

fuse even though there's no over current

situation

100 alternator and it blows the ultimate

time

testify did it uh one of my first jobs

uh i literally did it 100 i remember

literally the fuse holder

melted melted because that mountain it

was

a game changer i was like oh my god

and it's surprising how many of us

including myself

i mean tons of that those little washers

are actually not conductive well they

are but barely but they are only eight

percent the conductivity

yeah yeah and you see it all the time by

the way you see those washers in between

things

well you know you have the fuse holder

you have the fuse you have the cable

you blow the fuse you take the fuse out

because you slide it sideways and pull

it out yeah

the washer drops down yeah when you fuse

in and you don't notice you've now got a

washer between the fuse and the cable

and it's this kind of stuffs you know we

uh learn this stuff the hard way

uh and then there is no mechanism to

feed this knowledge out to the rest of

the industry yeah that's a

big problem we have uh i i have

a dozen photographs on file

of brand new boats with stainless steel

washers

in the circuit on these a l fuel

cylinders

all the time yep i'd say it's honestly

it's a

it's a simple mistake that even i could

do

again knowing it knowing what i know

knowing you know honestly it it

shouldn't

you know it the fuse holder effectively

is a bad design because

to have some no one is going to read a

manual to put in a fuse

i mean people don't even read a manual

put an inverter there's no way they're

going to read a fuse manual

and uh they just make the mistakes the

mistakes are

bound to happen absolutely bound to

happen yeah

yeah so i just want to finish up the

lithium so for you the lithium what i'm

hearing obviously energy density is a

big one

uh communication um and this is

definitely the holy grail

with different like not just sensing

voltage

or measuring current which is basically

voltage sensing is how

pretty much most charging is done right

now yeah uh

wake speed is actually using current as

a way to also

assess the situation which is great and

that's i think why so many of us are

fans of the product

but having a battery talk back

and say hey i need this i want that

here's where i am

that's i mean there's complexity there

for sure but there is a lot of benefit

there

but now let's talk a fallacy of lithium

ion

we all know they have a really high

cycle life their iron phosphate which is

most of the petros we see have some at

least 2 000

cycles if it's roughly so if you do the

math

and you you say i can get 70 out every

cycle and i got 2 000 cycles and then

you assume that you can do all of that

and then you look at the cost of the

battery as compared to lead acid and you

do the same analysis with lead acid

it turns out that in the long run

lithium ion is cheaper than lead acid

however the fallacy here is to assume

that you're going to get those 2 000

cycles

i have never met a boater yet to

cycle the battery two thousand times so

if you only cycle that battery say three

hundred times because you only use the

boat half dozen weekends of the year

um then uh it's way more expensive than

a lead acid battery for the energy that

you

you put in and out of that battery so we

have to

we have to acknowledge the the the

single strongest

talking point in terms of the cost

benefit of lithium ion is probably

not one that most boat owners can

actually use because we don't have the

capability

to exploit that height cycle life yeah

and

and that's where i get always concerned

when a product

is using some sort of the same thing

would be nigel to me is

the 3c thing you know a lot of people

are advertising like oh you know lithium

can charge at three times capacity

it's nonsense you look at the lithium

batches we have in the

marine marketplace and most of them

don't want to be charging more than 0.3

c

yeah exactly is substantially less than

an agm battery

and even where are you going to find

that charger i'm like okay 3c

okay that's great awesome perfect all

right good no problem

congratulations good all right now tell

me where you're gonna okay your battery

bank is

let's call it a 400 amp hour battery

bank at 12 volts that's four golf cart

batteries

that is not a big battery bank you know

400 amp hours is

a tiny battery bank for any boat above

30

feet i mean it's it's it's vanilla like

there's nothing to it

it's like it's just a sedan four doors

that's it it's basic

i'm like okay four hundred half hours do

three c of that twelve hundred apps okay

start looking online for a 1200 amp

charger

600 amp charger 300 amp charger

you know where are you going to find a

charger that is ever going to give you

the benefits

of that theoretical charge rating well

in any case we don't have that charge

rate

with the batteries we're using because

those are automotive batteries where

they're built for acceleration

and they're also built to handle massive

braking regenerative braking spikes

so in the boat wall we have energy

batteries that are designed to

accept and deliver energy much more

slowly

so most of the boat batteries

lithium-ion batteries we

have looking at 0.3 c not 3c one tenth

of that charge rate many of some of them

will go to 0.5 c

and a handful of them will go to one

scene in my own

boat because we've got that integral um

alternator that will put out eight

kilowatts and we had an eight kilowatt

a battery bank a kilowatt hour then i

wanted the one c range

and in terms of the available lithium

ion batteries in the boat world

that's pushing the boundaries of most of

those batteries many of them

they don't want to do that so whereas

actually you can pump 1c

and so any agm battery up to about 50

state of charge

so ironically there are agm batteries

which will accept

a higher charge rate than a lot of the

lithium-ion batteries we have

but of course they start to taper off

once they get to

60 state of charge and then it takes off

pretty rapidly

yeah so tell me what's your um with all

the advancement that we've seen in lead

acid

over the years certainly i mean you're

going from flooded lead acid then we

went to the seal that regulated egms or

gel

and now we've got these foam core agms

what's your thoughts i remember still

you had said in that presentation that

years ago

we were all attending like lead acid

batteries

aren't you know they don't die they're

murdered it's the expression

as you said and i've reused that nigel i

can't tell you how many times i've

reused that because

oh man is it true people just

just give it to the battery so tell me a

little bit about the state of the

batteries of lead acid batteries and

what's your take on you know for boaters

and cruisers out there that want to go

out

what's yeah tell me a little bit more

well the first thing is if you're not in

a hurry

to wait a year or two uh the the lead

industry is pumping

millions and millions of dollars into

research to improve agm batteries

um to make them competitive with lithium

ion and they actually

now have the capability of the argonne

national lab in the usa one of these

federally funded labs

where they can they can watch

what's going on inside a battery at

fundamental levels of physics and

chemistry while the battery is in

operation

so all um development in the past has

been empirical you change

something the electrolyte or the blade

and then you test it and see what

happens

but now they can see in real time what's

going on inside the battery and

we've known forever that even

when we 100 discharge a battery we're

actually only using

50 percent of the theoretical capability

of a lead acid battery

so we've never been able to figure out

how to unlock the other half

so if they come even close to doing that

then we're going to see a dramatic

improvement in the capability of

lead acid batteries and then the other

two things they they need

for the mild hybrid

automotive world mild hybrids are the

one that

when you stop at a traffic light the

engine shuts off and then

as soon as you hit the uh accelerator

pedal it cranks up again

so the battery is cycled thousands and

thousands

of times at a high level of charge but

then they also want to be able to

recover the braking energy

so they need to maintain the battery in

a partial state of charge

so that when you brake you can put that

energy into the battery

so you know as we know if you put a lead

acid battery in a partial state of

charge

it dies from sulfation yeah so they need

to cure the sulfation issue

they need to get a very high cycle life

and they need to get higher energy

density

and if they get even one of those things

i'd make it all on three of them

lead asset batteries are going to get a

lot better quite quickly

so we need to keep an eye on that and at

the moment by far the best

lead acid technology for our purposes is

the firefly battery with the carbon foam

plates

um for the simple reason that it's an

agm battery so it has

the normal agm characteristics in terms

of charge acceptance

and so on but you can operate it in a

partial state of charge

for weeks at a time and it doesn't

sulfate and it's the only lead acid

battery in the market that doesn't

sulfate

it acts like it's self-eating at every

cycle you see the capacity diminish a

little bit

but when you get the opportunity to do a

normal full charge again

those sulfates all go back into solution

and it goes back to 100

do you know why that's the case yeah

well i think i don't you know i know

physicists but um the negative plate is

made from a sheet of foam literally

so it's got a tiny pore structure and

when they uh

make the batteries they create a vacuum

in the battery and they suck the paste

into that plate okay and then when you

leave a battery you a partially

discharged state

the the the paste turns to lead sulfate

and it's in a crystal form and

initially the crystals are very small

and they're easily recharged

but if you leave it like that they they

grow together into bigger crystals

so first of all they have less surface

area collectively

so it takes longer to recharge them and

secondly they become more resistant to

charging

so the battery slowly refuses to take

charge

and uh and then unless you crank the

voltage up

uh well above a normal charging voltage

you can't recover

those sulfated crystals the big ones so

then the next time you discharge it

leave it in a discharge state some more

of those happen

and you get a progressive loss of

capacity well i think the

poor structure in the phone is too small

to allow the crystals to grow to the

size

where you can't recover them with normal

charge rates i think it's as simple as

that

so you may be totally wrong yeah the

inventor is one of your guys

isn't the inventor of that battery uh he

lives here

down the road yeah 20 miles yeah he's

very neat

i i have six batteries on i mean i've

got firefly on my boat

um you know one of the challenges of

course is that minimum point two c

that they want as a charger which is

actually one point four

well now yeah ideally they want point

four minimum is point two

point four is almost impossible to give

in most not if you have uh one of these

super high powered alternators i mean

that's another reason for

you know putting all these pieces

together as a package yeah oh

absolutely absolutely yeah that's

i mean the luckily thing is at least the

power motors that have generates you

know what we end up doing is stacking

multiple uh inverter chargers you know

or adding multiple chargers you know the

most i've done ever is

350 amps at 24 volts so basically 700

amps of charging at 12.

and it wasn't about an 80 80 footer

and uh on 12 of those firefly l15s

um so 900 amp hours at 12 at 24 volts

and we were able to off the generator i

mean the generous massive it was like i

don't know

30 kilowatt or something else yeah yep

um and they could they could literally

run in

in concurrently three of one inverter

charger and two of those chargers

and it was a little bit the dream that

you had talked about

about you know having even a large boat

like that an 80 footer which is

basically bigger than a house uh

literally being able to recharge their

batteries in a couple hours

yeah and in a couple hours doing an hour

a night an hour in the in the morning

and at a reasonable times they're

literally running the rest of the boat

the other 22 hours and the boat is

running off batteries yep and knowing

those two arrows they could

you know maybe run the washing machine

or cook yeah water maker

whatever yeah yeah yeah we uh we took

some of those

um firefly batteries and um

i i would run them for a month at a time

in a partial state of charge i would

cycle them

between 10 and 20 percent say to charge

and 60

um and the minute the charge acceptance

rate dropped below

uh 0.3 c rate i shut them down

so that was my cut-off threshold and

over the month i did this every day

um you could see the the whole

battery would walk down a little just

like it was sulfated

at the end of the month i would stick it

back on on an extended child cycle of

14.4 volts you know your normal

um charge cycle uh and it would go back

to 100

state of charge and then i do it again

for the next month so i did that for

three or four months at a time four

months that year i think and then i took

the batteries

and i discharged them down to 35 percent

state of charge and i let them sit for

eight months

so and now i put them back on a normal

charge cycle they came back to 100 state

of charge

and then the next year i get a whole

bunch of pretty aggressive and

brutal treatment on them i didn't break

a single one of those batteries

temperature sensors i see them taped on

the top of the battery every time they

i

if you bolt them to the post that's one

thing and they should be bolted to the

negative post because that's the one

that gets the most heat

but uh positive post is okay but if

they're not bolted to the post

they've got to be at least halfway down

the side of the battery because

otherwise

they're not working because there's an

air pocket in the top of the battery

that acts as an insulator

and i see it over and over again on

brand new boats they've all attached

sensors in the wrong place yeah it's

you know it's funny we we do the same

thing we do a service called an

electrical audit and this is where we

get a lot of our knowledge to be honest

you know going on people's boats the the

amount your my imagination is incapable

of dreaming the things that i've seen on

books

and the good news is you know

collectively we're learning a lot

you know unfortunately some of us are

paying the price and others are learning

from those mistakes

i had a i had a boat owner you know they

they swapped out again on temperature

sensors they swapped out the inverter

for a different one

they reused the old temp sensor because

they had a phone jack on it the old one

was a phone jack

the new one need a phone jack but the

the

i guess the scale was completely off in

terms of what the resistor was expecting

to be reading

and uh they literally killed their

battery bank

because their temperature sensor told

them that they were on thermal runaway

and their battery charger was basically

practically not charging

and they lost their battery bank and

that battery bank was

probably about five six

thousand dollars for a temperature

sensor that had not been switched

yeah that's painful i've got some uh

photographs of some

a big agm bank you know these are 700

each

uh where they're all melted down

because the temperature sensor was on

the top and they did go on

and they did go in the thermal run away

and the temperature sensor didn't know

there was anything going on

i've seen i've seen temperature sensors

not even installed in the battery

i've seen them installed they're more

like ambient temperature sensors

yep i've seen them installed i saw a

boat that had thermal runaway

it was installed actually on a the

negative distribution

huh oh so talking about ambient

temperatures

here's another one that i think is going

to get us into trouble

um you know we've been talking about

high output alternators and we've been

talking about lithium-ion batteries

where you put those two together and

those alternators are running really

hard for

extended periods of time and even if

they're 70 efficient

the case temperature on the alternator

is going to be well above 100c

uh typically speaking we'll set a

temperature center of maybe 110c

and maybe as 120 on the uh integral

system will actually go to 200c

uh and i ran it to 200c to see what

would happen

but what happened was it it has sent

enough heat to the rotor

to where it destroyed the belts

but anyway so we're well above c on the

case

and then uh you know you've got fans

typically you've got one of d10 blowing

out the middle but they may maybe

sucking and blowing out the ends but

somewhere we've got all of that hot air

coming out of the alternator

and if we have a fire suppression system

in the engine compartment and it has a

temperature sensor

that temperature sensor trigger is

triggered at 79 c

if that temperature sensor is in the

path for the air

coming off that alternator you'll

trigger the fire suppression system

okay and we're going to see more and

more of that happening because we're

going to

the heat off of these are powerful

alternators is going to heat up these

small engine compartments

and then we're going to trigger the fire

suppression system and if it's a dry

powder system

it will destroy the engine yeah because

the air intake

yep if so so the other thing we need to

do first of all we need to move those

sensors

to where they're not anywhere near to

the alternator and secondly

we need to make sure that the boat

owners are using

uh gas cylinders and not dry powder

and typically they like the dry powder

because it's a bit cheaper

but it's so wow a lot more expensive if

it destroys the engine

that that would be at that honestly you

get out of boating after there's not

that many people are stand boating after

that

no well i actually i was on a brand new

um

boat in in england came down the river

from the boat yard

fresh out of the yard lithium batteries

uh high alberto snater uh triggered the

temperature sensor

on the way down the river from the boat

from the boat vehicle

and destroyed the engine uh so then they

immediately had to hold it back out put

a new engine in it

that's a bad day i told them what i

thought was the problem and they said no

that's not possible it could

no way it could do that so i'm hoping

they moved that temperature sensor or by

now they may have done it again