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we hear this term uh quite a lot um the the term is drop in lithium replacement or drop-in replacement for lithium so standard probably AGM or lead acid flooded batteries on the boat and a manufacturer has promised that they can just swap the battery out what does a drop in battery replacement mean to you for lithium and what are the implications that come to mind well there's a lot to do it you know they pull out a leader acid battery and they replace it with a Lithium-Ion battery but from my perspective there's no such thing as a drop in lithium-ion replacement for lead acid because the there's the parameters the operating parameters and the safe operating envelope what we call the soe for lithium minor are different to lead acid so a lithium and iron battery has to be integrated into the electrical system on the boat and in fact I tell people that they shouldn't think of it as a battery it's an energy storage system and the emphasis there being on the word system which means that you've got to tie it into the charging devices and you've got to look at the maximum amp drawer on the boat there's a whole lot of issues that you've got to take into account the maximum temperature the lowest temperature you might see and that you really don't have to with the lead acid battery the lithium ion is more Persnickety and it needs more control capabilities and you simply won't get that with a drop in battery and it may function just fine but on the other hand it may get you into trouble and there's no real way to tell which end of the spectrum that's going to be the okay or the Troublesome without actually looking at the whole application and making sure it's designed properly you may get lucky and you may not and we shouldn't be trusting to luck when we put these bits of equipment on a boat no it's too much at play and it's so disappointing to have a boat system like I had a boat owner did the exactly the drop in we'll sold the drop in uh promise the drop in underway motoring for long periods of time which a lot of people do here because you know the the wind's coming direct or there's no wind and you got a motor after 10 11 hours of Motoring uh the battery went into a protection mode and they literally ended up having no house battery and no house battery is a big deal uh you know they were able to they were able to find ways around it uh but it those batteries when they came back to the city those batteries went out and were changed for something different something with more consideration and you're right the things that are too good to be true as we've learned in life are generally too good to be true and we might chase them but sometimes uh we're also we got to be willing to be disappointed um any other sort of uh ish common issues for you like for us when we do lithium we're thinking about what's going to happen yes yes there's one other battery and then you deeply discharge that lithium-ion battery it's going to have a higher long-term charge acceptance rate than the lead acid battery the lead acid battery might have a very high charge acceptance rate for maybe a half an hour and then it's going to taper off um the lithium ion if it's well discharged will push your charging devices to full continuous output for potentially hours at a time if if it's a big battery bank and then you're going to stress out all of the conductors the electrical circuits so then you have to think about whether the conductors are the right size and whether the overcome protection is okay and are you going to fry that alternator if it's a standard alternator that came with the engine for example Yanmar um some years ago put out a bulletin that if you put Lithium-ion batteries on the boat you had to derate their alternators and they didn't tell you how to do it because there is no easy way to do it but you have to derate air alternators to 75 of their rated output because otherwise you had a risk of frying the alternator so so there's a whole series of peripheral issues that have to be addressed with these installations which again comes down to the fact there is no such thing as a drop in lithium-ion battery and from my perspective I agree I think you you I mean there's no harm in thinking right like you've got to understand the implications of a choice you have to I mean hope and you mentioned earlier is not a it's not a substitute for Preparation we might all hope for the same outcome uh the ones that get their uh with a higher degree of certainty are the people that prepare for that outcome by avoiding the many pitfalls that we've learned over the years uh with lithium and batteries um including you know how do you share one alternator with a star charge profile charging a lithium like you said over taxing the alternator running at a high output for extended periods of time burning out that alternator uh there's so many different little things that you want to think about as a boulder when you put in lithium even though even though the manufacturers say some of them say it's just so easy unfortunately it in my opinion it never is truly that easy albeit it's doable it's doable if you sort of read up and prepare and think about the contingencies that might arise from the installation and you mentioned another one too about heat earlier or low temperature here in the Pacific Northwest we've seen that and that's a real issue boats that are on trailers um you know um and you know they're on this outside and it's zero degrees uh Celsius um you know 32 degrees Fahrenheit it drops to minus five maybe 20 degrees Fahrenheit those are real issues that might happen here in the Pacific Northwest with boaters that are actually the boats are not in the water and the batteries do uh get to below freezing sometimes like right now it it does happen and that's also something another consideration for going with lithium as well yeah lots to think about but it's doable um a lot of boats and I get laid up for months at a time um if you've got some minor parasitic load and you discharge that lithium-ion battery down to it so shut down threshold um there are many of them in the marketplace where you can't just plug them back in and recharge them they actually have to go back to the manufacturer it's quite likely you've discharged one cell more than the others and it's down to a point at which it's not really safe to recharge it without specialized equipment so um and again with lead acid we can discharge them totally dead and most times we can just plug them back in and recover them lithium ion you may not be able to recharge it you may have to send it back to the manufacturer so there are always um sort of small differences that add up to quite a big difference in practice yeah good well said life's not easy it's a boat if it was easy it wouldn't be a boat it's like golf if it wasn't hard it's not golf it's just there's no way around it you're going to be humbled and it's part of the journey it's just part of the journey it's just that's that's what it is it's what it takes to earn your stripes to be out there enjoying the beauty of the water and everything else the scenery you just it's not going to be it's there's gonna be bumps yeah prepare for it and avoid them as much as possible all right well thank you Nigel anything else you want to add on that or does that give a little good wrap up for people to start educating themselves more a little bit on lithium now I think it's good to go thank you Jeff so if you're curious again go on our website and find out more answers and solutions with this sort of setup and thanks for asking and thanks for all of you for listening and tuning in English (auto-generated)