Tag: propulsion

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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.

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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.

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Time to move propulsion to Lithium

After a lot of thinking (and some $ saving) I’m finally ready to rip out my gel battery pack and jump to Lithium. The AGM batteries are now pretty old and lost quite a bit of capacity and power. The house battery is even older and can’t carry water pump and head flush well without severely dimming the lights.

The propulsion system setup I have now is something like this

I’ll keep the fuse, relay, and all the components of the motor but replace the rest with a Victron-based system so it will look something like this

This new setup gives me a lot of advantages:

  • More power to the engine
  • Bigger capacity/range – 300Ah vs. 182Ah
  • Less weight
  • Inverter
  • N2K interface / better software
  • Simpler system: house and engine off the same battery bank

Will be super fun to put this all in and configure it. Some of the components have already arrived. It’s a pain to get those giant new batteries onboard. Thanks to my dock neighbor Lauren who gave me a hand.