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all right everyone thanks for joining for another session of boatingtechtalk.com we've got a question from a fellow boater named david david goes on to ask jeff I've got a new to me pilot house with a . kilowatt generator i also have on board a victron watt inverter charger and i recently installed a water maker okay all right so far that's the setup my first time in anchor i turned the water maker and after a few minutes the generator stopped and went in shutdown mode okay i understand that i should have stepped down or turned off the charger when i'm wait making water can you explain what happened well this is a quite common occurrence the reality is that all of us um no matter how big your boat is could be -footer could be a -footer could be a -footer it could be a -footer it could be even -footer most of us have more ac appliances on our boat that both the shore power or the generator can handle all of us all of us and of course there's exceptions but even i'm telling you many many of us will have to be very careful deciding what loads can be run concurrently at the same time and it gets trickier because loads aren't loads depending on where you are in a load and what kind of load it is there are what's called inductive ac loads and resistive ac loads and a water maker is an inductive ac load and inductive loads mean that you might have a high surge of power required to run that load so even though you might be running that load at amps sometimes when maybe a dc motor is turning and suddenly turning on you might see a high in rush more than the typical amperage that you would see running that load and that's normal it's called an inductive load so when you're actually uh no matter what your generator size is you're going to have to make some decisions as to what can be run at the same time and also the sequence by which you run certain items at the same time so generally you want to run the first items that you care about first so if you've stopped and now you want to make water first and depending on size of your water maker you might want to disable or disconnect or turn off all the loads that are really not essential right now and start by loading your generator with the things that matter and probably i would go start with the inductive loads first because those are the ones that are going to need more power to start than to run and then what i would do is i would start loading up and adding additional loads but remember you don't want even if you've got a or . kilowatt generator you're not going to run it at max you can run it pretty close but not at max and certainly not over because otherwise your generator is going to have show a fault so the key and this is the same thing for shore power by the way even if you had a amp shore power cord at or or amp you many of us have to be careful and we can't run like a high output charger a water heater a water maker or whatever maybe even run something in the galley have an induction stove top or a convection microwave many of us won't be able to run all those loads at the same time so over time one has to learn what is the operating amperage of any given load i know that's part of it and then the also is reality is it an inductive or resistive load and do i ever see a peak or a spike in that current draw and if i do allow my inductive loads to start at the beginning so they have more buffer to take up and as you start loading your generator put your resistive loads at the end because you know that your resistive loads are not going to equal or not going to exceed sorry what you anticipated and so nothing's easy it's a boat even if you have it all you still have to work at it and this is a clear example of a typical scenario that happens to many of us so that's a great question from david and thanks for all of you to chime in and listen to boating tech talk i appreciate it you're curious we've written whole articles about this go on our website search it out and we've got a lot of other tech talks about this very topic if you haven't subscribed to this channel please do it actually it really does make a difference it encourages us to keep posting so if you're watching this video and haven't had a chance to subscribe we really do care because the more of you that are watching the more of us over here are willing to spend more time in creating content so thanks ag