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welcome nigel to our podcast and thanks

for being here today with us

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

you know 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 160 220

360

pardon 36 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 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

when you're pumping out that much

current

and now we've got these uh wake speed

controllers

uh 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

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

i haven't installed one yet um so one of

the things 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 we

as voters i tell them same thing with

going back to lithium 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 gonna 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

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 like 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

you get the 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 mounted 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 solders

all the time yep

and it's honestly it's just

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 they just make the

mistakes the mistakes are bound to

happen absolutely bound to happen yeah

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some time with me

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