Lithium, How we did it for less. 400Ah of LiFePO4 You can't just plonk them in!


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Closed Captions:

lithium
how we did it for less on the boat 122.
so lithium's arrived and i've opened
the first one up
these are the
they look like m8
m8
bolts
and the covers
positive terminals got a little plastic
protector in it
same with the negative
some nice big
lifting straps there
i just need to get them downstairs now
and well at least one down so i can just
verify by actual size
the measurements of the piece of timber
i've got cut out i'll show you what it
is we've got to cut out in a second
[Applause]
[Music]
connected a lot the
cables that are on there previously
taking out the other batteries just
running on these two
and uh what i've actually got to do is
move the
shunt from here
out the way
and then cut through this bulkhead
here
and this
piece of timber runs right the way
through underneath the existing battery
box so it'll be just a case of cutting
through there and then placing a new
piece of timber in here to support the
end of the other lithium battery
um
i may even
be able to lift
this other tray out cut that one out
um
i'll have to see i've got cut through to
see where it is
and the problem is you can see that
we're quite
quite high here and the new batteries
are even taller
so
i wouldn't be able to get
the battery
box covers in
but i'll have a go at that in a minute
when cindy's finished
training elephants up on the deck
all right so before i go any further
i've disabled
uh both of our
solar regulators so the charges
are using the app so they're both off
now and i'm going to turn our
main battery bank switch to off and i'm
going to unplug our charger
and mains charger so there will be no
current
going to those battery terminals because
obviously if i didn't switch off the
solar and didn't switch off the battery
charger
um then those terminals would still be
live even though
the batteries are disconnected so
let's get on with that
with all the batteries out now and the
electric off the chargers disconnected
all their solar's off
that
is the one i've got cut along
up there
if i can just move the camera like that
you can see
now on the other side as i said the
floor
is lower there's a false floor
and that piece of wood sits on there on
it
so i'll cut that one
out and i think
we might be
doing less alterations than i thought
but we'll see so i've used my uh
bosch multi-tool
just to
cut through
the bottom there
and through the side
and i just need to remove these two
torx head screws and this should come
out easily and effortlessly
if you're going to buy a multi-tool
buy a good one
don't buy a cheap one fen
or fine or a bosch and go for the
professional series professional series
are usually in this dark blue
well worth the extra money to get the
professional ones
so let's cut through there now
that will clean up stand up all right
you can see the difference in height
what i'm actually going to do now
is i'm going to cut down here
see if i can get this other piece out
and if this floor is at the same height
the other side
i can simply cut along here
to hold the batteries
so i can simply cut along here
to hold the batteries
on the other floor
rather than this false floor that's in
there and that will help secure them as
well so
let's cut that
once i cut that out
and i'd cut that out you can see
that there is actually a big hollow
under the floor there
which means
all i have to do is cut that square out
there
and the blasted lithiums will drop
straight in
without any problems at all
this is all still really solid
it's not a structural bulkhead i'll have
a little bit of tidying up to do here
and along there but otherwise
yeah
[Applause]
what a silly design
could have had those weight that weight
much much lower and saved yourself some
money in production
that's the bavaria all right well that's
it all cut outlet
um
there's a bit difficulty in getting this
out because it's been
stapled together with these crinkly
staples
so it didn't want to come apart even
when i'd cut through it with a
multi-tool
i'm gonna have to clean all the edges up
sand them all round but basically
there's another
six inches
underneath there which is really really
annoying because when i made the
cardboard boxes up
as templates
we were about
two inches short
and what i was going to do
was to raise this up about two inches
so that we had enough room for the
terminals
now i have more room than you can shake
a stick at because all that space under
there
is completely
wasted well if you're going to make a
mistake i guess best to make a bigger
because
in raising that up
i had to go and buy a whole sheet
of marine ply
in half inch like this
and
as you know marine ply is extremely
expensive the world over
it was
750 turkish lira for a sheet and they
wouldn't cut it
so if anyone wants to buy some marine
ply and you're
around the finicky area i may be able to
do you a stunning deal
so all sanded down
batteries down from upstairs
and then they are
that's made a nice neat installation
and i've got
plenty of room
to run my other bits and pieces because
i've got
a small
agm that's going to go in there which
will power the
not power which is
protection for the alternator via the
battery to battery charger
we won't be running the engine tonight
it's actually starting to get a bit dark
outside
almost time to put the christmas lights
on
so tonight i think what i'll do is i've
got to change
my charger over to lithium which will
take a few minutes
that's this one here
and then i'll connect to one battery
tonight
and then rig the rest tomorrow when i've
got more time
a bit out of time today
so i spent four hours in the dentist
here's a small section from our charger
manual you can see by setting the little
tab switches you can change it to
lithium-ion phosphate or life po4
providing it's got a bms internally and
that's what we did
it was just a matter of changing these
little dip switches to one zero zero one
to make the charger go lithium
well i'm working by torchlight now
lucky the gopro does quite well in dark
um so for tonight
we have only on one lithium we've got a
positive
cable to the positive of that one
negative to the negative
uh through the shunt there so at least
we can see what it's doing i've
disconnected and had out our charger
uh and i'll show you there's a little
set of dip switches in there i've got
the
full manual for this charger so
um it was quite easy to set that to
lithium
all i've got to do now is
plug the mains back in
which is
that's it there we
go green lights on
so that's our pumps going off
lights on in the cabin
[Music]
all right we are lithium
let me finish that off tomorrow
oh last night
we ran out of time again
mainly because i didn't expect to spend
four hours in the dentist
but we are now wired up temporarily on
the other battery
so
what i need to do
next
is to create two negative leads
of the same length to go to the shunt
we're going to use the
shunt as the bus bar
um
our
fuses are in there reading
the same voltage and i have all my spare
bits of cable crimps and
uh
lugs
already luckily we carry a few spares
and spare bits of cable and i think
we've got enough cable to make
two leads up but
they are going to be red
which will be highly confusing so what
i'll do is put some heat shrink around
them
make them black
otherwise
someone else like the next guy
is going to get very very confused
so
a bit of wiring to tidy up these
two negative wires here
are for the voltage readout on the fuses
they've got to be tidied up shortened up
this red line
positive that's a feed for the shunt
for the victron shunt that needs to be
tidied up
and then these crimps here need to be
tidied up
but what i'll need to do is turn
everything off again disconnect the
batteries so we're not working on stuff
live and there we are
we are now
entirely lithium-powered let's do a
quick recap for you
so this is our agm battery we haven't
wired that in yet we don't need to do
that until we've got the
battery to battery charger in the
lithiums are charging
from
our
um
mains charger
so that's a 40 amp
three series
charger it has three cables come out
one goes to our house bank which is here
one goes to our agm for our engine and
one goes to the agm for our belt
thruster
and
our windows
so
one 200 amp hour
lithium
second 200 amp hour lithium
the cables
a little bit untidy
i think i can do better rooting those
but you'll note that all of these cables
are the same length until they hit the
bus bar
i made a slight change
i'm now using
the
shunt for the victron battery monitor
the bm712
as
um
a bus bar
and that's because i need to take all
the loads from the other side
and if i'd gone to a bus bar first
um
i would have had to
put it in after this i may still do that
um beca and the reason for that is there
is room to do it here where these old
screw holes for the old batteries were
um and that will tidy up this
terminal here i'm not really happy with
that i've put some
black insulation tape around
the
cables there just to hold them in place
and stop them vibrating
same on the live load side
on the positive side
two cables again exactly the same length
go down to our fuses
150 amp fuses
and now reading
the voltage through them and the
observant of you may see
that there appears to be
0.1 of a volt difference between there
i'm going to get the meter out in a
minute
and just check the resistance
between the bus bar
and the relative batteries i think it's
an inaccuracy
of these feuds not anything for us to
worry about
i think they're just not calibrated
are on to the final stage then which is
to put in our battery to battery
uh charger
this one here smart charger
dc to dc or b2b
now
let's show you this
if you can see the back there
that is our
isolator
the
bottom
one of these terminals
goes to the engine start battery
and the way i did that was to put my
multimeter on ohms with a little bleeper
on it
and measure between that terminal and
the starter battery positive
and it bleeped
so i then tried it on that one and it
didn't bleep
on on that one and it didn't bleep
so that was definitely the starter
battery and what happens with this is
the power from the
comes in on this terminal
and then it's split off
engine
domestics
and bow thruster
so just to double check what i've done
is i've found it at the other end but
just to double check i'm checking that
this one which i now know
is the bow thruster
battery
making sure that i don't get a bleep at
the other end let me show you the other
end
now this is a bit of a pickle in here
and i'm going to tidy this up i think
i'm never happy with it from new so
the
charge wire
from that
splitter out is this one here
and that was on that terminal there
where it went through
that
fuse
so this one here
and actually in german it says charging
cable now you can see that
it actually says charging cable
um so this is the one which is going to
be the feed
to our battery to battery charger now
that only takes 30 amps so we don't need
that huge great piece of cable there
what i was hoping to do was put
a bus bar there
like that
and then connect the battery to that and
this one here is the negative bus bar
we've got space on that
so that's where the negative will come
from
so we've actually got our mains off at
the moment
we're running off lithium and the solar
panels
and as i suspected yesterday
these fuses with the voltage
display
um aren't calibrated precisely together
and eve on charging and on discharge
we're getting 0.1 of a volt difference
and i have checked the resistance of the
cables
and that's what it's down to
so
just the fact that they're not
calibrated
precisely
together
all right let's get this battery to
battery charger out
and see where we can put it
i've now separated out the
charger cable as i said
and that now goes down
onto the battery positive the agm
the negative there is common so that can
go
back to the shunt which it does
again i've tried to keep those cables
the same length a bit difficult but
managed it
um i've pulled the battery forward
in order to get it
get that terminal on
and before i lock it down i've got to
get some
cables on there
and temporarily i used a piece of
red and black to activate this
and make sure that it was set to charger
and it was set to lithium i actually the
default on it is lithium so
um
that was okay
and then what i've got is this is the
top of our old inverter we had an
inverter it's about
yay big i guess
how was it
yeah big it was about that big
about four times the size
it's some
aluminium so what i've done is cut it
down drilled four holes in it and i'm
gonna mount
the
battery
to battery charger on top of that that
will work as an extra heatsink
and if it gets hot
it will protect the bulkhead that i'm
going to screw it to
now there is quite a bit of ventilation
in this bulkhead
here there's a hole that goes up the
back
and up the back there where our charger
is
there's holes in the
in the top of that for ventilation but
if need be i'll put a little computer
fan on there
and i'll power that from the output side
so that the computer fan only comes on
when this is
um charging the lithium but we'll see
how it goes
i appear to run out of um
six mil cable i've got black but i
haven't got any
red so we might have to delay a bit well
we're all done
well just about
so our
batteries to battery
uh
charger
victron
is now fed from this agm
the agm
is fed
from the alternator
but the alternator only
the negative
is common
one thing you do have to do which i
found out
is that the alternator sense wire
which is that
pink one
there
has to also go on there because the
alternator senses how many battery volts
there are
and if you don't have that on it ramps
up the uh
it wraps up the voltage quite a lot
and then the alarm goes off
so
just started
tying these cables up
one thing i think i am going to do is
i've got
another one of these
bus bars
and
i'm going to tidy this lot up here
put put another bus bar here
a short cable from the shunt to the bus
bar
and then i can sort these terminals out
because i'm not happy with all those
there and it makes it look untidy
and there's plenty of room to do that so
that's what i'm going to do
i'm going to connect
the
um
agm battery
to the second monitoring position
on the shunt there
and what that will do is it will tell me
what this battery state is
on the bmv 712
so you see i've just started tying these
cables back tidying them up and the
orion
battery to battery charger is in there
had the engine running it's doing its
job although it does get really quite
warm
i think we may have to put a fan in
there
just so that the air in here can
circulate
but that is basically it
the uh
i think once i've
cable tied everything back
i've left these
uh long specifically so that i've got
enough
to put the
extra bus bar in there and then i can
tidy all this lot up as well
but yeah we are now fully lithiumed up
on our domestics and our agm
uh bow thruster
um
battery is charged from
the alternator or the charger in the
back there and the same with the
start battery
so far we haven't really put it for its
paces but we'll do that
in the next
season
but we've had it off for a couple of a
couple of hours and
taken some life out of the
out of these batteries
and they're charging up okay with the
solar
and the mains charger no issues
a bit annoying
these two
big fuses
which display the voltage
are always
um
1.1 of a volt out i'm going to take one
of these out and see if i can calibrate
it as if there's a
little potentiometer in there that i can
calibrate it to a known voltage
um
but that's it
basically we're done
well like all good videos
you should always have a summary
so we bought 400 amp hours 2 200 amp
hour lithium batteries
they can be charged up to 100 amp hours
each
but the recommended charging current
is 80 amp hours
the max voltage is 14.6
we bought an
mppt 130 from victron we bought two
solar panels at 205 watts output each
we bought a victron battery monitor
bm712
we bought an orion from victron a 12 12
30 smart charger and of course the
batteries
and then of course we bought those two
really spiffy 150 amp fuses
then there was the bus bars as well
so the whole total
for all of the work we've done was 35
797
turkish lira
and with the exchange rate being what it
is at the moment
that comes out at 2753
uk pounds
without the solar just the battery
updates it was 2
284 pounds
so let's look at some of the advantages
conventional lead acid including agm's
and gels
get to 50 percent of their discharge and
you really shouldn't take them much
lower than that some of them can cope
with it some can't but at 50 percent
discharge their voltage is down below
12 volts
now when you have lower volts you need
more amps to drive the same piece of
equipment with lithium you can go to at
least 80 percent discharge
and they're still putting out over 13
volts
so let's look at some of the economics
of lithium now here i've used
the best that you're likely to get let's
look at lifespan first four one hundred
agms gives us 400 amp hours and we'll
get a life span at depth of discharge of
50 percent at roughly
500 to 700 cycles
at 200 amp hours usable
that's 140 000 amp hours throughout
their life
whereas with lithium the same 400 amp
hours
gives you 320
at 80 percent discharge
that's one million six hundred thousand
amp hours in their projected lifetime
and that's only based on 80 percent
depth of discharge now some lithiums you
can go down
to an 85 or 90 percent depth of
discharge it shortens their life but it
can be done
well we really hope you've enjoyed this
video and our explanations diagrams and
footage
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don't forget sail safe
[Music]