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[Music] [Music] you so we've been talking about batteries we talked about chargers we talked about inverters converter chargers and we also brought about alternators so now what we're gonna talk about is an external regulate we're not going to spend crazy amount of time but I do want to bring up the concept of an external regulator external regulators are devices that convert an alternator to be smart ultimately it's it's it's putting a brain on an alternator internal regulars that we talked about a little bit earlier are overly cautious and they're not gonna give you as high an output of this charge rate external regulars to give you an example are stock item on a tiara boat why would tiara put stock all external regulars on their alternators actually tiaras have a lot in common with sailboats they're going and they're not running their engines for a lot of a long time you've got a tiara and you're cruising at 25 knots 30 knots you're not gonna be doing two three hours a day I mean you're gonna be going around in crew violin I mean 90 nautical miles is you got 60 nautical miles between Sydney and Nanaimo not even 45 maybe I mean you're not gonna be running your tiara Nanaimo Sydney Sydney to Vancouver Vancouver back to Nanaimo you're running that boat for maybe 30 minutes maybe an hour maybe an hour and a half maybe well you know that's why they have a tiara yeah but the point is that even power boats will have external regulators and I also see a lot of motors when we design projects for other boaters we're saying well how about putting an extra regulator on your trawler if you don't have an and your you need to create power not only to offload the loads that are running on your boat when you're underway but to really make a lot of gains because some boaters are maybe running their boats for 3-4 hours a day as they're going up north and within that 3-4 hours as they're going gonna last every day of running the boat or five hours they want to do everything they can to bring their batteries back up so that they can run their boat overnight for one day or two and then go on again so that purpose of an external regulator is to make your alternator better really so it's a little crazy I know I was trying oh my god how am I gonna put them in but whoever came up with this device must have been so proud of themselves because it is a perfect device in terms of what it does it's sort of the dream it will miraculously offset and it turns your alternator in this incredibly sophisticated device it's gonna offset voltage drop which is a really big deal voltage drop is a really big deal on some boats you could be losing twenty thirty percent because a lot of people have undersized wiring between their alternator and their batteries but generally you should be at least ten but they'll actually offset the ten or even more of the voltage drop which is kind of amazing they're gonna be temperature compensated for the batteries they're gonna actually tell you when the alter is getting too hot it's actually gonna be looking at an alternator temperature and alternators die because they get too hot because they're working so hard it's actually gonna pull back and it's gonna say you know what I know you want me to work out at 100 amps but right now the altar is too hot I'm going to pull back the output and I'm gonna let the alternator cool off so they're actually gonna change the nd or adjust the output of the alternator so you're basically got a device that converts alternate output and makes it smart right that's basically what it does you also you have a device that can actually be configured for the type of battery that you have so not only when you think about an internal regular it assumes that you have flooded lead-acid battery if thinks that your batteries are just vanilla there's just nothing special about them but when you have an external regulator you can actually dial in and say I want my charge profile to say bulk I want to stop at fourteen four fourteen six I want to have absorption timer to be so much and I want my flow voltage you can totally geek out with an external regular you have complete control so that's really good and the temp it's temperature compensated charging is also very important by the way these devices are not crazy expensive you know in Canadian dollars you're looking five $700 for these devices about in the range so it's not completely unacceptable and again for sale boaters really popular because ideally you want to sale motor out of an anchorage and maybe motor in Anchorage and for some boaters what I see is maybe a little running the alternator an hour out an hour in or half an hour out half an hour in and then within that one hour window of running their engine they'll do everything they need to recharge their batteries to stay in overnight so here's an example of a serpentine kid that comes with a high output alternator where you can actually convert an alternator that's made for the belt the belts are really I mean I know we have them all on our boats most of us but they're not a great way of transmitting the rotational energy of the engine to the alternator and so just this week alone I did three projects where we actually converted alternators to serpentine belts so it's a very popular item for boaters that don't have a generator and want to have more done from their alternator yeah serpentine kit Canadian is about eight hundred seven hundred depending but it's it's it's not bad at all so here's an example of a retrofit and these the company that does it is actually Canadian it's electro max they have a Fleming over three hundred kits already all yaddam our engines universal you talk I mean they have 300 conversion kits that are actually created pretty much for every engine that is out there and so you actually simply bolt them back on like you don't have it's not complicated it's do yourself like we're doing a Catalina 50 where I think it took about a couple hours to put the kid on like it's not too time-consuming some of them are more involved than others but it can be pretty straightforward electro max out of Toronto they're great oh this is the dream yeah question is the the service civility or the maintenance of the v-belt if you don't have a spare v belt on your boat you are simply not aware of how quickly your V belt will fail so if you have a V belt on your boat that is moving your alternator and your water pump you must must black-and-white carry a spare with you okay first of all there there are all different widths all different lengths you're not going to go into the middle of nowhere and give a specification of what you need and expect them to have them like in a big city no problem in Coover Victoria and an IMO all those places sure but as soon as you're going up don't think you're gonna go to for example an island and desolation sound and go oh yeah you've got that V Bell for me because I'm looking for so and so like it's not gonna happen so carry v-belt spares or spare v-belts now with a serpentine you're basically it's never gonna go like um never to the point that we recommend a spare because I'm always thinking safety factor but you'll never use it the the amount of energy transfer on a serpentine belt you look at the surface area because that's what it is right here is way more than a V belt multiples up so they just don't slip and the slippage is what's causes wear right it's that glazing effect I'm not a mechanic but you know voter right we can all relate and they talk about the belt being shiny right that shiny belt is a belt that has been glazed and that's slippage that slippage as we know heats never good for anything and to begin with an alternator lives in a very inhospitable place so more heat is worse right so we better for serviceability and also we talked about that too like if you're gonna change and this is incredibly important okay this is another kind of huge takeaway rule number one nothing is easy perfect let's always go back to rule number one if you change your alternator to an external regulator if you had a fifty-five amp alternator a 120 amp alternator you never got 120 amp out of that alternator ever and the Builder of your engine knew that so for example a stock 55 an alternator is generally daisy chained to the starter solenoid police post with a 10 amp 10 gauge wire rated for only 30 amps so think about it the manufacturer used a 30 amp wire gauge 10 between the alternator and the starter post that's it tiny 10 10 gauge is smaller than a pencil now you're taking that 55 amp and you decide to make an external regulator on it it's gonna give you more than it ever did that wire is most likely now under sized and remember that slide we were showing about old vs. new on the alternators guess why we go to new a lot well if I'm gonna change the wire between the starter post and the alternator I might as well just run a new wire to the battery that I want to connect and that's sort of the genesis to doing it right like if you're gonna start the journey and I see this on my boat all the time I'm like oh I'm doing this oh well while I'm doing that I might as well do this oh wow I'm doing that and the project starts with like eight hours and I'm like 40 hours in and I'm like long now I can't not do it that would be one of the low-hanging fruit is if you're gonna reach Ange the wire which is probably undersized to begin with on your alternator you might as well run it to where it should go it might be on you in your case to your engine battery or you might go to your house battery there's pros and cons and there's it's a dilemma you have to make a decision but make sure you don't assume that the alternator wiring is sufficiently sized to handle any sized alternator you're gonna throw on that engine I've seen the wires burnt like I'm talking like a cigarette like like that the literally the jacket of the wires melted back not like one inch but four or five inches that's how hot the wire got that the jacket actually got cinched back so very important that when you change your alternator or you make your alternator better by putting an external regulator you also think oh my god I should look at the wiring can the wiring handle all this new power other thing funny fact if your alternator has a negative return lead which some of them do because there's a negative post on the alternator my previous owner thought that electricity was really more of a ground as a reference point and somehow electricity traveled just on the positive wire not joking and by the way, a desinger no joke decided that for him he thought that connectivity was gonna only happen on the red wire and all the negatives never had to be big because they were more like a common reference point so my alternator when I got my boat was in that 120 amp alternator had a great positive wire it was gauge he went all out one off perfect voltage drop was like negligible like it was like basically like the alternator was on top of the battery the return path was engaged 10 wire because in his mine the ground was a reference point he thought it was a chassis ground he thought it was somehow to keep everything common he didn't realize that when we talk about electricity we're talking about circuits circuit means goes one way it's got to come back so the path the return path has to be equal to the path going to the device very important well know who that engine was also know it's different because he actually the engine battery is connected two on one and the house was on another one he actually did a custom job it was an amazing yeah okay so basically that's a little bit of a recap any questions on serpentine not serpentine external regulators absolutely we do that all the time question was can we install or modify an existing alternator with an internal regulator and have that internal regulator on an existing alternator modified for an external regulator and the answer is yes what you do is about $50 you bring into an alternator shop maybe some will charge you 75 but here in the city is about 50 bucks and then what happens is they give you a wire and that wire that you connect is called the field wire the field wire is what drives the alternator and the output the field wire that drives that alternator is that blue wire right here that's basically like you actually putting your foot on the actuator on your car right you you that's what actually is driving the alternator to go full field there's a term or pull back when the batteries are sufficiently charged any other questions on external regulators yes go ahead in the back yeah so the question good question does a serpentine belt reduce the horsepower demand that an alternator when it's excited load up on the on the engine and the answer is no it does not change the horsepower what it does change is you when you think about this is a big challenge when you're loading up a large alternator on an engine as you're adjusting and tightening the v-belt right you're actually that's actually hard especially not on the crankshaft pulley that's fine the water pump in the front of the engine as your side loading that there's so much tension that you can put on that before it actually becomes too hard the good thing about a serpentine is because you don't need that separation to create a good contact you're gonna affect effectively less side load the water pump there is no doubt besides money and the ability to put one on your boat that everybody wants a serpentine kit that's just everybody wants one sort of like an isolation transformer it's not like the jury's out on if it's a good idea or not everybody wants one it's a question can you fit one in and do you have in terms of your priority lists on your boat is it enough of a priority to do it fine actually but if one was given to you or offered to be installed on your boat no one would say well you know what actually I'm gonna stick with a v-belt nobody would say that any other questions yeah go ahead yeah well that's a good question question was where should the external regulator be mounted should it be inside the engine room or outside of the engine room the leads from the external regulator are not that long so in an ideal way ideal world you'd have it outside of the engine room especially on sailboats those little tiny little engine rooms get smoking hot like crazy like insane right there off the wall hot so where how do you mount an external regulator near an alternator and you only have about four five six feet of cabling and not have it in the engine room and then have the cover on but not in so ideally yes it's better but that being said you know what realistically they're made to handle a lot of heat like I see them a lot in an engine room on sailboats power boats it's easier right the bigger the engine room the less heat there is right but in a sailboat it gets pretty warm there's not a lot of airflow in a sailboat engine room well engine room is a wee misnomer here you have a sailboat and you have an engine room congratulations congratulations financially you've done a few wise decisions in your lifetime okay but yeah so in an ideal world yes but practically often you'll find them in the engine room themselves yeah yeah it's a sit and there's a lot of gotchas with external regulator I just want to say I can't I could spend an hour talking to you on the problems that I've encountered seeing external regulators miswired on boat or people again not reading the manual and foregoing like 90% of the benefits and being proud of themselves and thinking all I did so great here like it's amazing and look I didn't even use a manual look how good I'm doing and I'm like you defeated the whole purpose of this incredible device if I met the inventor I'd be high-fiving him we'd be hugging it out I'd be like wow it was genius so smart and they're like oh is that what it does I'm like you spent all that money and you're forgoing all the benefits if you're gonna choose to put an external regular on your boat please take the time to read the instructions even if you're gonna delegate the task to someone else make sure that person is the type of person who cares about doing things right as opposed to just telling you what you want to hear and doing it quickly okay because you will forgo all of the benefits and I've seen also miss installs where the batteries literally like massive damage can happen if it's not installed properly if it's installed properly it will be heaven but if you don't it's gonna give you a lot of grief any questions on external regulators yeah electro max ballmart would be the two main ones there used to be zan tracks used to make one but i don't think they do anymore and ball mar and electro max really I think the two biggest players anybody else have any other recommendations I don't think there really is those are two big players oh yeah yeah the problem with you know what we're not gonna go that's a can of worms that could be a whole day on lithium I lessons learned from lithium ion installations yes you can custom profile but the problem is not the external regulator it's the alternator because the alternator is gonna work imagine it's it's it's like it's like feeding a Kodiak bear like you can't feed it enough fish to quench its desire to have current like they are endless so the alternators burn out you need a really strong beefy alternator to feed a lithium iron a lithium phosphate battery bank otherwise they just simply the limiting factor is not the battery anymore the limiting factor the weak point is the alternator so you need a really amazing alternator when you do a lithium iron phosphate battery well you can but you gotta just I just saying is like it's nothing use cookie cutter cook cookie cutter what I'm saying is go back to rule one rule run is nothing is ever easy always go to back to that rule and with lithium if you don't do that rule you're just gonna be in a world of hurt world of hurt okay any other questions on external regulators see that again yeah actually there's the electro max actually has the ability actually be going to a computer they'll do pin out four gauges like for example ball Mar will actually intercept the tack output to know if it actually the alternator is actually working which is silly but it's possible that you're altered regulator might say oh I don't need to work because the batteries are certainly in charge and then if you enable the mode to say well you know what even though you don't need to I want you to work so that I can actually get my tach output that's a feature that ball Mars Ballmer has but this is getting weird eking out right now right like let's be see people glazing over there's like whoa too much information here Jeff like not go too crazy okay if you want to talk about I could literally talk an hour about just this device and I'm not done we're starting like we're just okay it's a neat device ultimately external regulator think I want to have my alternator recharge my batteries faster that's ultimately the purpose okay