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so what about for regards to propulsion and Battery Systems where do you think I'm talking I've seen boaters now going uh considering doing 48 volt even running their inverters off 48 volts um actually having sort of their all large DC loads being at 48 volts what's your thought on uh going from 12 24 and now some people with propulsion going to 48 volts any sort of tips and tricks or ideas that you have on um so we um you know we developed that in integral system a few years ago which is basically an eight kilowatt alternator on steroids and if you run the arithmetic you'll Discover it kilowatts or 12 volts is 670 amps there's no conductors available to us big enough to carry it if you run into 24 volts it's you know 300 I don't know 30 40 amps so we're really pushing the limit of available conductors so we we actually designed that to run up 48 volts um purely because of the conductor size issue and also to make it practical to install it so you're not having to run you know conductors this size suitable um but at the time uh there was almost no 48 volt equipment because now we're talking five or six years ago now and um so then you can go down to a standard 24 volt 12 volt systems and with DC to DC converters or battery to battery chargers of which there's a an ever increasing choice these days with with really high efficiencies I mean many of them now are over 95 efficient at the conversion so so that worked but uh we're finally getting viable 48 volt platform for our boats we've now got bow thrusters windlasses winches uh water makers uh air conditioning all of these com these high loads that we have on our boats DC loads we're beginning to see at 48 volts so it certainly pays if you're going to have um High current devices like an 8 or 10 kilowatt alternator to have a 48 volt platform on the boat and put all the high load consumers on it it gets a ton of copper out of the boat in terms of conductor sizes and the higher voltage equipment is generally more efficient and smaller and lighter and and then just to have the the remaining equipment the lights and the fans and whatever but 12 or 24 volts and just have a little buffer Bank of batteries at that voltage with DC to DC converters or battery to battery chargers and it works great we've had it on our boat for at least six years now I'll probably from 2014 so we're talking eight years with um three voltages 48 24 and 12. and it's it's you know it's no real problem doing it that way what size uh battery Bank do you do at 12 and 24 for your boat well with the um that in integral alternator because it'll put out eight kilowatts initially we were doing this with lead asset batteries the Firefly carbon foam batteries yeah and um their charge acceptance rate up to about 60 data charges is the 1C rate so if you've got eight kilowatts you need eight kilowatt hours of batteries um which is basically uh 800 amp hours of 12 volts so uh and then we gravitated to lithium-ion batteries so it largely depends on the charge acceptance rate of those batteries although lithium ion normally has a very high charge acceptance rate if you look at the small print with a lot of the batteries that we've got in the boat Marketplace you'll discover that the recommended maximum charge rate on many of those batteries is 0.3 C so if you've got a eight kilowatt charging device and a 0.3 C charge acceptance rate you need 24 kilowatt hours of batteries to keep the charge rate down to 0.3 C so at the moment we actually have um about 11 kilowatt hours of of torpedo Lithium-ion batteries which will accept the charge rate of 1C um so with an eight kilowatt output from the alternator we're charging them at about 0.7 C something like that so everything's in Balance but you do have to you can't just drop a super high output alternator on a boat uh you've got to think through the design and all of these issues like the charge acceptance rate of the batteries the conductor sizes whether you've got the right fuses in the right place is the battery management system talking to the alternator because if it's not and um the batteries see a high voltage condition developing they'll disconnect and all of a sudden you've got seven eight kilowatts with no place to go and then you get a humongous voltage Spike through the boat and in the one case that we've had you blow out a hundred thousand dollars worth of electronics in a fraction of a second um so you know these systems have to be designed you can't just grab all these bits and pieces off the shelf and and expect them to to work properly and give you a trouble-free system for the next five years or ten years and that's a lot of what uh I do these days is working with people on these higher performance systems to make sure that the pieces are all in sync and that they've got a system that's going to work reliably for the next decade without getting them into trouble the the lifestyle benefits are tremendous in the time it takes us to uh drop an anchor or pull it back up we can generate the store enough electricity to run up over 24 hours that's just amazing we never have to run an engine battery charging your anchor I mean there's the whatever engine runtime we do for propulsional purposes is more than enough to keep up with all the house loads on the boat and store enough energy to to keep up with the house loads for the next day or two it's uh it really is a dramatic change from when we first started the first high output alternator we put on the boat was 40 years ago um so this is not new technology uh but it's qualitatively different and improved over what it was in those early days when we first started doing this stuff yeah and it's not I mean you you're chasing it you know to the end you're going right you're slaying the dragon but people can have wins all along that Journey you know that journey of of getting be more reliable without Shore power not running the engine through solar through wind uh they they can get there but not as far as you got you got to the end like that's the end-all be-all to be able to run your engine for such a short period of time and to have that all that power be generated to run for 24 hours that's the Holy Grail it really is uh but not everyone can get there uh not everyone's willing to have the systems that can obviously provide that level of comfort some people are going to find that uh you know even just from a technology perspective you know some are going to find it too hard even if they can afford it uh but it's inspiring to the rest of us because a lot of us are chasing it I mean reducing that generator run time or engine run time or maximizing uh what you can do to recharge your battery Bank is just provides like you say it's quiet it's a game changer you know it's you just don't have to worry and that's a big one it's also very taken millions of investment dollars um you know we've been lucky we've got a big Grant from the European Union a decade or more ago we got substantial funding from a big American corporation um and then um just to get that integral alternator on our boat when we're uh just a little above idle we're getting over three kilowatts out of that alternator and at a thousand RPM I'm getting close to Six kilowatts um but it took an awful lot of investment to to take an alternator and get it to produce those levels of output of those speeds but we went through I mean this I have a photograph somewhere that I use in some of my presentations of a pile of wrecked alternators that we we went through over the course of the development of that project um so uh but but it hasn't it's worked till unbelievably well I mean to this day even though we've had this system for six years now it still puts a smile on my face when I crank up the engine and I go look at the panel and I see I'm putting six and seven and eight kilowatts in the batteries and the engines running maybe a 1200 RPM right so it just uh well it it's just wonderful basically it's um It's A system that we've all dreamed about over the decades I never could get on our boats yeah definitely the Holy Grail definitely the Holy Grail 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) Videolytics    Tools  Compare SUMMARY