Recent content by crisjones

That is probably true in the more popular locations, however we cruised 2 full seasons in Croatia and we only paid €20 in all that time for anchoring in Pula harbour. Obviously that does not include the Cruising Permit/Tax. Just saying that it is perfectly possible to cruise Croatia without...

The problem many people face with Li systems is having a combined inverter charger unit (Victron Multi-Plus etc). While it is best to have seperate Load and Charge busbars, each with it's own main disconnect relay/contactor this is not easy when the inverter charger is both a load and a charge...

Hi Vic, In lines 2 and 3 I guess you mean contactor and not conductor. Anyway unless the main contactor has a spare pair of contacts it will not work as you think. If you connect the +ve from the solar to the battery side of the contactor then you will also be connecting it to the battery...

Hi Vic, I bet that took some time and effort - good job though. For charging voltages you really do not need to go above 14.0 V (3.5V per Cell) - that should give you about 97% of full charge. There is no advantage to going any higher to try and gain those few extra AH at the risk of damaging...

Hi, Not checked this thread for a while but see there has been quite a bit of activity. A few comments on what has been discussed:- Initial balancing has come up in a few posts – my advice would always to do as comprehensive a top-balance as you possibly can when you get your cells. Take the...

Let's hope that Alex did not have to cut up his spare rudder to repair the damage in the bows ;);)

Easy and cheap solution to increase the inertia of the existing whell is to get some stick on wheel balancing weights from Ebay. Wrap them around the circumference of the existing wheel, maybe cover the whole lot with duct tape to finish and there you have it. For a more permanent job you could...

Very interesting stuff. Our BMV is one of the original type and the shunt does not even have the little PCB - the shunt connects to a seperate module that then connects to a Blue Power display via RJ45 network cable - pretty sure it will not communicate with a new BMV700 type display. Also the...

Our Victron Battery monitor is an older unit so it does not use the same communication protocol as the current range of BMV700 units. We do not have a Venus unit either so no chance of any additional communication with the MPPT. It would be very interesting to know for sure if the Venus can...

The 0.1V below float can be adjusted in .01V steps so that could help a bit also, the 1 min time is fixed. At the moment we are in the rainy season here in Martinique so we have cloudy skies most of the time, we are lucky to see more than 3hrs sun, usually less!! Also the sun is low in the sky...

Maybe easier to manage with a hybrid / combined LiFePo4 and FLA system but the options described above do not really seem that easy a solution!! We have only LiFePo4 cells in our system hence the problem I described in my previous post. On our alternators we have programmable external...

There is another issue with regulation of charging sources that is particularly relevant to Lithium systems, especially solar regulators. My experience is with Victron MPPT units, but they are very common and good quality so are probably the MPPT unit of choice for most people. Most people are...

I top balanced our Winston Cells when they arrived to 3.65V per cell using a bench power supply and the instructions from MarinHowTo. I do not have the balancing function activated on our Orion Jr BMS so they have never been balanced since installation. They have been in daily use on board...

Unless you can program this 0.3V difference to a lower value it is not very much use for LiFePo4 cells because of the very flat voltage profile. Our high voltage cut-out (disconnect) is set at 3.700V per cell, so the 0.3V difference is 3.400V, this equates to about 80% SOC so a good way from...

Hi Vic, We have 400AH Winston LiFePo4 at 12V and we can run our watermaker no problem. We have an Orion Jr BMS for our system, it is not the cheapest but it is very good. We can configure multiple inputs and outputs to switch on/off at different cell voltages to control all the main charging...