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hi youtubers  jeff cote here with another session of  ask bys  we've got a question from donald donald  asks a really good question actually  and it's something that happens to many  of us he's got a question he says  uh when i'm at anchor and my anchor  light  and potentially my nat flights and radar  are  on as i'm waiting for a um  a fish to open like i guess an area to  open for fishing  see that a lot around here in british  columbia you'll see you know huge  flotillas of boat just waiting  for the season to open or an area to be  opened up for fishing  he says my engine is not running makes  sense right he's waiting  and my battery bank runs low pretty fast  so he asks what can i do well this is a  sort of actually a problem that  is happening to this boater uh donald in  the moment but it happens to a lot of us  we are running all these loads and it  could be an anchor light  it could be um you know in this case a  radar so he wants to see he could have  even a chart plotter on  he wants to be positionally aware where  the boat is where the other boats are  but he's doing that maybe for 10 hours  five hours six hours without the engine  running  so the way to solve this problem is  twofold one is  figure out a way to reduce consumption  so how do you reduce consumption  and that would be one of the first thing  i did on my boat is i replaced the  anchor light with an led version  you know an lev version is about a 10th  or 1  11th less power consumption than a  incandescent light bulb for an anchor  light  so i went from literally drawing one and  a half two amps  to i don't know it's a joke like .2  amps or 0.15 amps on my boat it became  from something to completely meaningless  so the first thing is start reducing  loads  radars is a good one modern radars um  and navico was the first one to come out  with what they called broadband radar  but all other companies have them  raymarine garmin  runo obviously bng being part of navico  and simrad all have these radars  including lawrence  have these sort of low power draw radars  so that would be one ways and they're  about half the power consumption  so that would be another way is reduce  your radar loads by installing a modern  radar  now it's not in everyone's budget but if  you're sort of on the fence  that would be a reason to do it and i've  sold these radars going to sailors  that are sailing from here the pacific  on the west side and they're going to  hawaii or they're going to polynesia or  they're going off shore to mexico  and they're not running their engines  right because they're sailing but they  want to reduce their consumption the way  to do that is to have a radar that  doesn't draw as much power  so the first step is looking across the  board where can you reduce  power consumption by replacing things to  led or more efficient loads  number one number two is then once  you've done that is assessing  what is the amdraw so you should have a  battery monitor that tells you listen  when i'm at anchor  i'm drawing 3 amps 5m 10 amps whatever  that is  and then you need to size your battery  bank accordingly you know  you've got to say well listen if i'm  going to be drawing 10 amps for 12 hours  right that's 120 amp hours and so if  i've got a 120 amp hours you're going to  need a battery bank of a certain size  and there's all  i'm not going to deal into sizing a  battery bank in this video  because there is hundreds of articles  and videos about that topic  on our own website some of them are an  hour two hour longs  if you want to geek out but then you end  up sizing a battery bank to handle the  loads  that you've tried to minimize as much as  possible  so it's really twofold they reduce your  loads as much as you can and then  once you know that you have your minimum  load size a battery bank that can run  your boat for a period of time and those  would be the two ways  of doing that lastly i want to add  because i can see  the youtubers putting comments as i  answer those every morning  people are going to say oh well what  about adding solar yes solar would help  if you know some boaters are going to  say oh i'm going to put a wind turbine  that's another way to get a charging  voltage without having  the engine running other people are  going to put a methanol fuel cell all of  these  are obviously options some people have  generators  they might run their generators to run  chargers to recharge the batteries  but if assuming you don't have a  charging source then the best way is  reduce loads  and increase your battery bank size so  that's a great question donald thanks  for asking  thank you for watching this pys video if  you've got further questions  ask them down below or go on our website  to fill one of the forms don't forget to subscribe and thanks for  watching  you