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  2. Amel is going lithium

Re: Amel is going lithium

Paul Brown
 

Hi,

As comment,

I am not so technically minded and have always been under knowledgeable when it comes to boat batterie systems and the carful management required in my 15 years of ownership with power boats and yachts.

Last year in April 2018 I purchased my first Amel, an A55#17 launched 2013 and in 2015 the owner upgraded the entire system to a lithium 720ah Mastervolt. With the purchase I gained a life changing experience, in the respect we constantly run the house down close to 20% before recharging by genset or underway and now I have upgraded the solar to Mastervolt management and Panasonic 550W panels, generally we can live on anchor 12+ days before recharge or making water or running Airconditioning or washing machine or sail for 4+ days using electric winches and navigation equipment constantly, which is very satisfactory I feel. I figure if I could double my solar I may not require additional generation of electricity and perhaps not require a genset at all, with some further modifications to the 220v appliances 

I look forward to what’s after lithium and would recommend mastervolt and their lithium and management systems

Of course this is only my experience and opinion 

Regards Paul - Fortuna II A55#17




On 5 Aug 2019, at 11:20 pm, Scott SV Tengah <sv.tengah@...> wrote:

Dean,

I'll try to write something up over the next week or so. Honestly, I'm very particular about my battery bank since it wasn't cheap and I only get nervous when it goes below 25% state of charge. All the literature tells me that even at 20% SOC, you're going to get 2000 cycles out of your batteries, but my concern is that the reported SOC is a bit of an average. Each battery has 4 cells and I have 6 batteries, so if one of those 24 cells drops below 2.5v or so, it could damage that cell and hence the 4-cell battery irreversibly. The SOC number doesn't reflect individual cell voltages, only the bank as a whole.

Of course I have a BMS that monitors individual cells, but given the way an Amel is wired, even that solution isn't perfect. I will expand on that in my longer post explaining my system and the challenges I faced. But for me, to be safe, I start up the genset if the bank drops below 25%. 

I am considering adding an automatic trigger to start the genset at 25% state of charge and stop the genset at 75% SOC. But that presents other problems, so I'm hesitating. 

--
Scott 
2007 A54 #69
SV Tengah
www.svtengah.com

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