Recent content by madmike

Both of those items (the solar circuit breaker and the 1-2-Both switch) are legacy items that came with the boat. The solar breaker is less "wrong" than it looks; we actually have two sets of 200W solar panels with two MPPT 75/15 units in parallel through the same breaker. I left the second...

Our lead acid batteries have finally bit the dust so we're upgrading to LFP. Here's a description of the system design. It doesn't follow all the ABYC recommendations or all the best practices from this thread, but it seems like the right compromise of safety, cost, and convenience for our boat...

Ahoy, Feliz. It's nice to see a familiar Tartan 37 owner here. One of our new solar panels is from Rich Solar. About 1 year in, it's working AOK. One thing I found looking at all this solar stuff was that it seemed to make sense to use 24V panels for our 12V battery system. We're using two...

Batteries will be inside some kind of home-built box (probably something like IP22), under the quarter berth. There are plywood bulkheads separating this area from the stern of the hull and the bilge where there might be seawater splashing around in extreme conditions. So I don't expect the...

Does anybody know whether EEL Battery is one of the reliable sources? Thanks, everyone, for the input. It's helpful. The point about larger cells having more internal inertia is helpful. "Most of the time sailing is more gentle than speed boats, but once in a while you hit a big wave," sounds...

I'll be installing LiFePO4 this summer to replace our tired out lead acid house batteries. The Fortune and Winston cells look nice because their packaging is a bit more rugged and seems like they might hold up better with the constant motion of a sailboat. Reading through the forum here...

What about having a single contactor on the negative side of the battery? That way you only need one to break the circuits to both charge and discharge busses. One each manual (normally closed) switch between the battery + and the charge and discharge busses will allow selecting what should...

I see. With the external contactor, you can manually connect the battery to loads even if the BMS is unhappy about over-voltage. With a FET BMS in the circuit, we'd need to either change BMS settings by Bluetooth to raise the high voltage cutoff limit, or re-wire something to connect directly...

I'm planning to use the Overkill BMS instead of REC, mostly because it seems a lot simpler. Am I correct that, assuming I can trust the BMS to work properly, it will provide the basic functions of the REC BMS, RBS latching switch, shunt, temp sensor, and Smart Battery Protect? I understand...

1: Couldn't we bring the panel's wires into a junction box and connect them in series with bypass diodes to avoid the partial shading problem? Does anybody do that? 2: The only bifacial modules I've found are 400W or more. My boat isn't big enough. Does anyone make 100 or 200 W bifacials?