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hello everyone jeff cote here with

another session on boating tech talk

today we've got a question from a fellow

boarder named eric and eric was on our

website and eric was trying to figure

out shopping for a battery monitor for

his boat

smart shopping for a battery monitor if

you any of you don't have a battery

monitor and you want to geek out we have

a whole section on battery monitors i'm

a big believer

in knowing where you are in terms of amp

hours on your boat and also the

discharge and charge

of your battery bank which gives you the

voltage it's pretty awesome battery

monitors really take the guesswork out

of knowing where your battery bank is

specifically for deep cycle batteries

so eric asks

jeff i was looking at installing a

victron battery monitor specifically

he's talking to her about the bmv 7112

bravo mike victor

7112

um on my boat and i know this on your

website they're also promoting um the

victron smart chunk what is the

difference and

where would i use it okay great question

first little recap i talked about a

battery monitor a battery monitor

effectively for a boat is a device

that is both a speedometer and also an

odometer for your batteries meaning it's

going to calculate

how much

amp hours you've taken over a period of

time so it knows that because it's

actually is constantly measuring current

it does measures current through a shunt

that device is has a known resistance

and

basically what you're measuring is the

millivoltage differential across two

posts to calculate

current as we know v voltage is equal to

i current and r resistance so simple

little formula

but the bottom line is for boaters why

it's so useful is you're going to be

able to know what the current

going in or out of your batteries are

and also knowing what the amp hours the

capacity of your battery bank at any

given point now of course all of this is

an approximation it's not 100 accurate

but it certainly beats

feeling or simply just projecting what's

happening in your battery bank all right

so a little refresher on batteries

monitors if you've got more questions

lots of videos on youtube lots of videos

on our website lots of articles and

probably well over a hundred

articles on that topic okay so now to

the question for eric

so

at the end of the day a typical battery

monitor includes a

display so the shunt is installed

somewhere close to your house battery

bank or the battery bank that you want

to monitor and that generally is the

house battery bank battery monitors are

more for

deep cycle applications and not for

uh

starter applications okay so generally

when we deploy battery monitors on our

boats we deploy them on the deep cycle

side so that's one thing

now

if you're considering installing a

battery monitor in your boat but you

really don't have a place where to mount

the monitor per se and or actually even

another reason might be that really the

display there's no real good place to

have the monitor itself

so then you could go and deploy a smart

shunt

so smartshot basically does everything

that a battery monitor does except it

actually does not come with a display so

you can either see that information on

bluetooth via victron has an app so you

could look at and i've got boaters that

do this by the way we'll install a smart

shunt in the engine room

and realistically doing a cable run

inside the boat on some boats it's just

it's insane it's like six eight hours

ten hours on big boats to run a cable

from somewhere to another place it's

a huge obstacle so if you're fine with

looking at what's happening in your

batteries on your phone then a smart

shunt might be for you the other thing

to consider is that also victron sells a

bigger suite of products victron is an

awesome company uh and part of that um

they basically have this touch 50 or 70

and they have this servo gx

and you can actually now tie in a smart

shunt via a v cable

directly to

the servo so meaning now you can have

your

five inch touch 50 or touch 70 display

from victron and you can actually see

battery monitor information on that

display so as opposed to having a

battery monitor display and then having

a touch 50 like a touch screen from

victron you can collapse the battery

monitor and simply have the battery

monitor information show up on your

touch 50. so big fan of smart shunts

especially for boats that don't

have a place to mount the display and or

like i said the cable routing cable

routing for battery monitors can be a

real hassle

and it might be out the hardest part of

installing a battery monitor is running

the cable between the display and the

shunt

so if you're on the fence

it really depends on what you're trying

to do and at the end of the day the most

important thing is get a battery monitor

either like eric was asking the bmv 712

which is a bluetooth enabled width

display

or get a smart shunt they come in 500

amp 1000 amp

there's a few different flavors and buy

that and either show it on your

smartphone via the victron app or have

it connected to your touch 50 or 70 that

is also from victron so both are great

products and it really depends on how

much hassle it's going to be to run that

cable and if you really need a display

so that's a great question eric and

thanks for asking

i want to thank you for watching this

video don't forget to subscribe if you

want to get more of this cool content

and also check out our website if you've

got questions that are unanswered we've

actually taken the time to answer quite

a few questions and you might be

surprised to find the answer right there

on our website so thanks again

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