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jeff cote here with another session of

votingtechtalk.com

thanks everyone for joining me and we've

got a question from a fellow boater

frederick from sweden hi frederick

thanks for emailing me all the way over

to sweden i want to go there one day

i heard it's i've seen the pictures it

looks so amazing

especially the boating part amazing i'm

in the start phase

of designing and installing a new

electrical system on my sailboat here in

sweden

i will go for a system based on lithium

our ion batteries from victron energy

victron energy by the way is one of our

favorite manufacturers

for products big fan i have a victron on

my boat for an inverter charger

and they're awesome do i need an

isolation transformer if i install an

inverter charger

or will the inverter charger itself

protect me from bad shore power

frederick that's a good one in short the

answer is no

so but let's take a little bit of time

to talk about

why so inverter chargers and isolated

transformers

really play completely different roles

an inverter charger does

two things it converts right

ac to dc that's called a converter

which is now called a charger so

charging is converting

ac to dc or inverts which is the

opposite of convert

right and it goes from dc to ac so

that's an inverter

and a charger so that's one device and

that's strictly it it doesn't do

anything else

it's just either inverts creates ac or

chargers

creates dc but you need the other to do

the other right so

it's a conversion process that's an

inverter charger now an isolation

transformer

does not does none of those things and

generally it's a way to protect

your underwater metals from striker and

corrosion

so isolation transformers will deal with

grounding issues right and will also

deal with reverse polarity

so if you're designing a boat i would

and you

are able to install an isolation

transformer on your boat i would

strongly encourage you to have both

devices

as they are built for two completely uh

different purposes

the challenge is an isolation

transformer is

on some models are pretty heavy and

finding a room the space and being able

to accommodate that weight

on your shore power connection is

something that very

few sailboats are able to do not that we

can't

some do certainly the bigger ones do but

most sailboats

below 50 or 60 feet don't have isolation

transformers on board

they don't not that they shouldn't it's

just hard for them to find a place on

where to mount that really heavy

piece of equipment there are now newer

models that are lighter victron makes

them

so that's possible but yes i would

consider both items on my boat as they

do completely different

and very important things so frederick

from sweden thanks for asking

thank you for watching this pys video if

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