BMS is back on!

After all the wiring was done and working last year, I had to disconnect the system to organize wires better and get them away from rotating parts. Of course, once things reconnected, the BMS refused to work properly – not seeing batteries, not turning on the distributor, etc. Tried a lot of troubleshooting with no success.

I took it back to local distributor where they ran some bench tests and confirmed it was working OK. With holidays and travel getting in the way, I finally picked it up and brought back to the boat this weekend.

Plugged it back into the system and it still didn’t power up. It did ask to update firmware, which I promptly took care of. As soon as it booted up with the new firmware, we were back in business – everything working nominally! I did a happy dance. One big TODO for this year can be checked off. Next up – tackling that remaining vibration in the shaft.

Organized DC cabling

When we finished connecting all the DC stuff last time we left a giant mess of cables inside the compartment under the saloon seat. It was getting dark and we were just too tired.

I’d love to someday use that compartment for storage so today I tidied up all the cabling and washed that locker inside. Looks much better.

Finished wiring DC circuit

With help from my friend Viktar, the final motor wiring and remaining DC components were connected and tested. Batter charger / inverter is in place, 48V to 12V circuit for main DC panel is in place, batteries are charging, motor is hooked up. Was finally able to remove the last remaining old battery – house. Now the boat is 100% on the Victron Lithium-based system.

Replaced DC main switch

Since my main switch now works on 48V (upstream of the 48V -> 12V converter), a new beefier version was needed. Lucky for me it fit into the same slot/hole so the swap was fairly easy.