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can we dive in a little bit into lithium batteries a little bit and uh maybe maybe talking about a little bit you want to weigh in on the pros and cons of making that choice and what are the implications of going down the lithium path for boaters especially the ones that are converting from a standard lead acid flooded or AGM what are the implications yeah so um the first thing I think we should talk about is chemistry because there's an awful lot of um a lot of poor information on on this we have basically lithium-ion phosphate and then we have all the other chemistries nickel manganese Cobalt nickel Cobalt and aluminum and so on the fundamental difference between the lithium-ion phosphate and the other chemistries is that if if you screw things up and the battery goes into a condition known as thermal runaway where it's essentially generating heat internally and it's out of control the lithium-ion phosphate batteries will not generate enough heat internally to spontaneously ignite and all the other chemistry as well so you see an awful lot of people arguing that lithium-ion phosphate should be treated differently and it's intrinsically safe and it's the only chemistry we should have on our boats uh well it's just not true if you go into thermal runaway on any of these batteries you get a lot of heat inside the battery you get thermal expansion you get short circuits in the battery you likely get Sparks and hot spots and then all of these batteries that the electrolyte is flammable at which point a Lithium-Ion phosphate battery can catch fire just like the others maybe not burn quite as intensely but it can catch fire so the idea that they're intrinsically safe is just not true just because they have a different chemistry doesn't mean they can't catch fire and I have plenty of pictures of burned up lithium-ion phosphate batteries but the critical issue to my mind is the quality of the construction a well-built nickel manganese Cobalt battery is going to be safer than a poorly built lithium-ion phosphate battery so what we should be focusing on is the quality of the construction the reputation of the battery manufacturer what standards that the battery has been tested to because we do have some abuse testing standards in the marketplace at the most aggressive one that I know of being UL 1973 and any battery that can pass UL 1973 it doesn't matter what the chemistry is is very very unlikely to propagate any kind of a problem outside of the battery case and that's really what we're looking for we're looking for a battery management system that will make sure that we don't get into the thermal runaway condition in the first place and secondly we want a battery that's constructed such that if things do get out of control it stays within the case and doesn't get propagate outside the case to the problem so that's more to do with with quality and standards than it is to do with chemistry and then and let's say for example tokido probably on a numeric basis I'll bet with all the little uh outboard motors and their other systems they probably have more batteries in the Marine space than all the other manufacturers put together tokido is using nickel manganese Cobalt and I don't know if a single tokido battery that's burned up a boat I do know of some lithium-ion phosphate batteries that have burned up a boat so again it comes down to the construction and the quality and the battery management system and then the other key issue is that battery management system has to have external communication and it has to be able to send a signal if it says for example an over voltage condition it has to be able to send out a signal to shut down the battery charger or the alternator or whatever is charging the boat at that point in time um and very few of these batteries have that external communication uh but because they've recently released avyc lithium-ion standard I think it's t13 now e13 I think is the number uh basically uh wants to see that external communication and it wants to see the battery alarm the operator before it disconnects that's going to require that level of communication and we're also already seeing some of the the battery manufacturers that have had the drop in batteries without external communication doing things like putting Bluetooth into the case so I can send a signal to comply with the standard so so that's what we should be looking for is a recognized brand quality construction and compliance with some standards which will pretty much guarantee that battery never threatens the boat regardless of what happens to it and what kind of stupid things we do to it because sooner or later we'll maybe put on a new battery charger and not wear it up properly or we'll change the alternator on it it won't be talking to the battery sooner or later over the years somebody on that boat is likely to do something stupid and we need the battery to be able to handle that and knock it out of control yeah and they can and and we've had very few boat fires and actually I think a number of the ones that have really hit the headlines were probably not from installed Lithium-ion batteries they're probably from supplementary equipment like that boat that wound up in California where the 30 year old people died they were charging a whole bunch of underwater light batteries and phones and stuff like that it wasn't the diaper believe it wasn't installed what's yeah yeah I don't believe it was an installed system that set the bone on fire and we've had some super yacht fires where they have these um toys they'll have um personal watercraft that are powered with Lithium-ion batteries and things like that we've had some of these toys Catch Fire we've had to my knowledge very few installed well-installed Lithium-ion batteries that have that have caused problems on boats and we must have tens of thousands of them out there now yeah I think the challenge with lithium is well the the fire is the extreme one which we all fear to some extent some don't but certainly I do um I think the other issue too is when they do shut down because of the VMS the battery management system decides to shut down the battery the challenge is the collateral damage that happens with the drop-in Replacements and and also for the owner to suddenly not have power anymore it's great that your battery didn't catch on fire and it protected itself but a boat without power is can be pretty serious especially if you're used to navigation with your tarp water and your Char polars powered off the house battery bank and now suddenly you lose all navigation you don't have GPS you don't have you don't have nothing you know even your wind list won't work you're just drifting and that's probably the fears that we're more worried about we always worry about the fire for sure but then we worry about the Systems Failing and the electrical system suddenly disappearing underneath an owner and they're just on a boat floating away without VHF again all these problems that can happen when suddenly your battery Bank just decides to protect itself and you can't run anything anymore do you want to talk a little bit about that how you guys alleviating those sort of concerns in the abyc standard is to define the critical circuits on the boat and to make sure that there's a redundant power source for them and it can be another lithium-ion battery bank or it could be a lead acid bank or whatever but the other the other thing we have to think about is there are a lot more constraints with lithium-ion than with lead acid particularly temperature you can't you can discharge a Lithium-Ion battery most of them down to about 20 degrees Fahrenheit but you can't reach answer at that temperature so if you're boating for example in in Minnesota on the great lakes in the wintertime or you're in Maine or you're on a lobster boat we have 5 000 lobster boats and um you put Lithium-ion batteries on the boat and you decide to go lobstering in January um You probably won't be able to use that battery unless it's got some kind of a the heating system built into it which basically none of our bell peppers have and then at the other end of the extreme if you're saying in Miami in the summertime and you've you've left the boat closed up for the week and the inside temperature has risen to to 50 or 60 c um once again you're not you can't use that battery uh you can't recharge it many of the older ones the threshold for recharge is 40 to 45C um some of the newer ones are now 55c but but on a closed up built-in in a hot climate you can get those kind of ambient temperatures and then there's one that um we've learned the hard way or pretty much all of these bms's have a current sensor in them and if they see the current the amp drawer go above a certain threshold they disconnect well you have a boat with a big bow thruster and you flick the bow thruster on and all of a sudden he's pulling 500 amps and the BMS has got a 300 amp threshold the battery disconnects from the boat uh and so without lead acid battery you hit it with 500 amps the voltage just sucks but if it doesn't disconnect from the boat uh it might impair the performance same way with the temperature the temperature goes above 50 or 60 C it's going to greatly shorten the life of the the battery but it's not going to disconnect from the boat or so you can't use it anymore and you go down to -20 it's still going to function it's just going to have a much less usable capacity than than you would have at a normal temperature so so we don't have these um these issues on temperature extremes and current extremes and so on with that acid that we have with with um lithium-ion so all of these things have to be taken into consideration and now when we when we talk to somebody about and lift their mind installation we make them collect all of this data so that we can make sure the battery is going to not be put into a situation where it's operating outside of these parameters yeah because otherwise uh we just have unhappy customers nobody wants that nothing like uh losing a vacation honestly so you get it wrong and when the first thing they're going to do is come back to us and complain as they should you know honestly uh many of us fight first holidays yeah that's exactly it that's what's on the line fighting for our holidays we're fighting for our time on the water um do you want to talk about a little bit uh one of the common things that's um a proponent or not a proponent but a pro of lithium is the uh we talked about earlier the charge acceptance rate the car uh and uh car being a unit of one and then 70 means 70 capacity of the max charging acceptance rate do you want to talk a little bit about how do voters take advantage of that High car rate for some of the lithium batteries and also what are the limitations yes so that high charge acceptance rate is it's not much use unless you have the ability to use it um and that's where something like the integral alternator or if you've got an AC generator on the boat and you have a big Bank of battery charges um yeah you can pump in a ton of amps into a battery and store a lot of energy quite quickly and and then um your engine runtime whatever the energy source is for charging uh it doesn't have to run for hours at a time and that's a huge benefit over lead acid because as we know once you get much above 50 60 say the charge the charge acceptance rate tapes off it doesn't matter how big an alternator you've got or battery charger the batteries won't accept the amperage and so it takes hours to fully charge the battery but you know and then in on Harbor for example with that eight kilowatt integral system and a Lithium-ion batteries uh we can quite literally pump certainly at least six and and very often more than six kilowatt hours of electricity into the batteries in one hour yeah in the past with lead acid an hour even with a 200 amp alternator that would have taken us two or three hours so we can dramatically reduce the time it takes to charge the batteries on the engine run time on the boat and and the corollary to that is that we're putting a substantially higher load on the engine when we're battery charging which is way more fuel efficient and also better for the engine in terms of life expectancy and reduced maintenance so yeah there really are no negatives to this I mean it's just one benefit after another that Stacks up um the the higher the charge acceptance rate and the more we can take advantage of it yeah and here in the Pacific well those two things again have to run together you know we we went through a phase where we got increasingly powerful alternators but the battery charge acceptance rate didn't really improve so then on a lot of applications we couldn't really use that output from the alternators after the first 10 or 15 minutes uh now we've gone the other way where the batteries have a very high charge acceptance rate and the charging devices are playing catch-up and and then if we can get both of those working together then we have qualitatively better systems than we've had in the past I mean this isn't just a small change it's a really quite a dramatic change in and how we operate our boats and how long we have to run our engine and how inefficient or inefficient everything is yeah and we see the same thing with power borders and you mention it with the generators um a lot of power boaters have large generators to run a large air conditioning systems which we don't always use and uh you can you're right the the big Advantage um is stacking these high output Chargers and generally 100 amps uh in either 12 or 24 volts and stacking them um and having them you know the max I've seen is uh 350 amps at 24 volts going a large battery bank and it's a game changer right that generator could handle it yes generator is properly loaded uh and you're literally in the matter of hours doing what used to take half a day or what felt like forever like you you couldn't step off the gas you know as soon as you stop running the generator some boats have undersized battery chargers only 50 amp at 12 volts uh tiny little battery chargers and it takes forever for them to get that battery bank charged up either being a lead acid AGM or even a lithium so you're right that it is a qualitative difference in reducing that nuisance and the Gen set and the engines want to run loaded like you said so it is a win-win-win but it is an investment to get there I mean those are not trivial dollars uh you know it you need to have a real problem before you solve that problem because otherwise the cost are a little bit hard to swallow if you don't believe in the benefits at the end well one of my targets for some time which we haven't gone around to going after here but I want to is the trolley Market you have an offload of trolley on top in your part of the world uh they all of them have at least one generator many of them have two generators yeah um we could certainly eliminate one generator from all of those boats with uh some of these optimized DC Systems and in many of those applications especially if they've got twin engines we could get rid of all the generators all together if you put two integral systems for example on two engines you've got the equivalent of a 30 kilowatt generate wonderful um which is operating anytime you run the engines for propulsion purposes and uh and so and it makes the whole system way more efficient and it means you don't have the added maintenance you don't have all the insulation issues with the other generators and it's a pretty obvious Target for for me uh it's just a a bit of a hard sell to get people to change their whole right you know they they come to think that their generator is an essential piece of equipment and the bottom line is that it doesn't have to be right like you're right the technology has changed enough in the last five to ten years to not only make the generator obsolete but actually to gen to create systems that are way more efficient and with significant lifestyle benefits over having the generator on the boat and we need to get that message out there and we need to start um getting some manufacturers on board so that so so that the the public gets their heads around this if we look at the um the catamaran Market the balance catamarans which is a really successful brand out of South Africa um a year or so ago they stopped putting generators on those boats they all have air conditioning in three or four cabins and started putting two integral systems on each of those boats and uh the the owners love it and they don't need generators and they're running air conditioning systems in often four cabins in the saloon and we can do exactly the same to a whole range of other building activities where for decades we've assumed that our generator is an essential piece of equipment yeah there's a lot of different ways of doing it right it's just being creative and seeing about budgets and you're right sometimes the generators do die or they're dying or they're giving you a lot of problem I see both power boaters that never had a generator that wish they did and you can find a ways to give them the benefits of having power regeneration without a generator or and like you mentioned some power boaters eventually you know might take two generators to one or they might simply have one that's just giving them always grief and they just take it out of the system altogether it really depends what the voter is trying to do how far they're going to be from Shore power for how long how much money are they willing to put into being away from Shore power and having that generation I guess it's a lot of it's possible the question is it's all about trade-offs time and money time and money is none of this stuff is cheap as you know that's the nature of boating no no it is not that's why yeah yeah not it's not for everyone you know it's got to be it's not even if you had the money not everyone needs it it really depends on the individual and and what they're looking for there's a solution out there the question is which one aligns better with what you're hoping to get out of it and how much money are you willing to spend to trace for it yeah definitely 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–