Hooking up batteries on your boat

[Music] hey ironies we're bad at Tidewater with Bill here to explain to us about how to wire all this up you know on the first video we talked about the size batteries and how many batteries you might need some of the pros and cons of that that's all fine and good but how do you hook this stuff up and what how do you determine what size wires you need for everything again it's all a mystery to me so let's go and then a little bit later we're gonna go in the shop and actually wire a few things up that will be kind of fun all right so we're talking about picking the proper gauge for batteries it's all about load and for how many amps are being pulled through that wire as well as what the intended purpose of the end devices was there's two to two trucks that were really concerned with once again it all comes back to a B Y C American podía Council has put together a lot of information for us that says what's the how much how many amps can a wire safely handle the other thing we're concerned about is is the voltage drop so especially with lower voltage like 12 volt to 24 volt systems the more amps you try to push through a small wire even though that wire can safely handle that ant-like the amperage without you know catching fire or ever heating you're not going to get 24 or 12 volts at the end of the wire the it's going to inherently drop throughout the wire so there's length of the ronamayk absolutely yes the the longer the run the more that voltage is going to drop throughout that run now if you use a bigger cable that'll fix it yeah so there's two charts there one is how many amps can we safely put through the through that wire and that's how we use that to determine the circuits as all court breakers are put on that wire for safety reasons other chart is the voltage drop tables that will tell us how it what size wire to use to make sure we're getting good voltage the other end of the wire alright and we're gonna find those kind so a B Y C has that but there's also some nice free resources for boaters oh yeah my favorite one is made by it's put out there by blue sea systems they they make a lot of The Breakers miscellaneous electoral components for boats if you go to the website or they have a nice app on your phone it's a wire size calculator and you put in the different parameters you want and it's going to tell you exactly what what sighs why are you music alright we didn't know yeah so we're go ahead and use this use the ABY see booklets right here and we're going to talk about here because we're gonna with a AC or DC system we're usually bundling wires together so we have you know the positive negative together in a duplex wire or we've run a couple a handful walk together and embark on them all together because those we have several wires together we need to de-rate that which means that because it's got to retain more heat so we need to push less current through it or less dampers to it to be safe also we need to know what temperature the insulation is because not every wire has the same temperature rating or it's insulation the good stuff usually has you higher higher higher ratings on there but you don't always have a good stuff on board and also as it run inside of an inch of space or outside under space because engine spaces are much hotter is that we need to deer ate that wire a little bit further let me say onion and there's charge for that yes they're all all in the manual as well as that blue sees calculator will have options for all of those things and whether we're in an engine room how many wires were bundling together etc etc all right so there's a quick little thing here 16 gauge cable let's say we have 16 gauge cable it's an core brand so I know that's 105 degree Celsius insulation I think we're not running it through engine space but we've duplex it in so it's running you know multiple cables together that's sixteen gauge cable is going to safely be able to handle 17 and a half amps so as long as your circuit protection is below that you're gonna have your you'll be safe now if you're pushing 17 amps through that and it's say 20 feet we're on a cable you're not gonna have good volts at the end it's that's what we need to go to the voltage drop tables okay yes so here this one's telling us you know we've got more concerned about the amperage in the circuit as well as how far we are and we're talking round trippers it's got to come back so if you have if you're 20 feet from the battery that's really a 40 foot run yep so let's say we're powering something that's let's put it at the max there so that where say it's a 15 amp load on that 16 gauge cable mm-hmm well we can't use 16 I'll tell you that right now but if we had a 15 amp load and we were running 40 feet we actually need to use a 6 gauge cable instead of a 16 gauge cable in order to get that you know good voltage at the end of the run okay so now I'm always confused on this the bigger the number the smaller the wire bigger the note yes correct it yes sorry so it's 6 is gonna be a pretty good sized cable compared to 24 something that the 24 would be what maybe like that speaker wire or something usually in boats we don't want to see anything under 18 gauge period except for URI I have no idea you know I have just working my lunch mine yeah okay yeah your your seed smaller cables on things like your communications data wires between things but as far as power US Coast Guard doesn't want to see anything under 18 but it adds a little caveat there you can't run a single wire that's just 18 you have to duplex it together so if you have you know the red yellow cable will put the outer sheath you can run an 18 gauge cable if you're running a single wire down there needs to be 16 or larger oh and the reason behind that is just the physical strength of the wire once you get too small it's very easy to just just to break it by hand so they they require that to get that physical strength in the wire to make sure we don't have a failure I'm out at sea well let's go through the fun stuff and wires whoo stuff up guys it sounds like we won't see what we do our mateys we're back here is bill now we're gonna do fun stuff we're gonna hook all this up what are the components how does it run how do you hook it up I mean we were talking just a couple minutes ago about where a battery monitor would go and I want to let him explain it because I still am not real sure how that all works and where you want your charger set up so that everything works together it's all yours bud all righty okay this is a little system that we had built transfer our new technicians on the basics of a simple circuit but it's great for this demonstration as well I think we'd start by showing the difference between a parallel connection with your batteries and a series connection we're start with a series connection what a series connection is going to do is take the voltage of the two individual batteries and add them together so here we have two 12-volt batteries so we're going to combine them in a series connection that sort of give us 24 volts on this circuit but will keep the same amp power rating so if we have two 12-volt 100 amp power batteries and we combine them in series we now have a hundred our 100 amp our 24 volt bank to do that you're taking the negative of one battery terminal connected to the positive of another a little bit on the actual battery connection here you always want to make sure you have nothing between the LED of this battery post and your ring turtles you can use a washer but it has to be on the very top of everything you can't have it between ring terminals or underneath also we never want to put more than four ring terminals on any given post in a boat let's probe for batteries or when a terminal stud anywhere no more than four I like to use a lock nut just keeps everything from vibrating loose now if they're all right to use a wing nut on those it depends on the battery I'm gonna go ahead and say as a rule of thumb no yes smaller low end power batteries with small gauge connections to them you're allowed to use them but once you get over certain sizes cannot use a wing nut and the reason behind is you just can't torque them down enough and they're prone to coming loose so draw them just use a regular nut you'll be much safer in them and so here we go we've put this in series now and you can see when we put our our voltmeter between the two you should have 24 volts 45.9 that's a 24 volt nominal so all right going back to the other option we have is a parallel connection so a parallel connection is what you're most commonly seeing about a lot of boats out there are 12 volt systems so we use a parallel connection to just add more ampacity to the rest of the battery to do that we're going to hook our the positive terminals of the battery it's a positive to positive if you had a bunch going down here you just keep training them together like that once again we've got a washer lock washer nut and we'll do the same thing on the negative side of the battery so negative terminal to negative terminal now this is where a lot of people I see it's not done to best practice here when you create a battery bank like this they have multiple batteries in parallel connection you always want to take the positive load or the connection on the positive terminal to your house and you want to have the negative feed coming back in at the other end of the chain and you see here we have 12 volts on this bank so those two batteries put in a parallel connect parallel configuration will give you the 12 volts often what we're seeing is people bring in the house positive and negative often what you see is people bring in the house positive negative to the first battery in the chain you're still gonna have 12 volts on here issue is the battery bank doesn't work as effectively as it could by coming in the positive on one battery and the negative on the other end of the chain it forces the whole battery bank to work as a single big battery when you put the two here this battery does most of the work and then the batteries one back just support that battery so they don't work as a giant you know one single cohesive Bank all right so let me get him in when you go to hook your stuff up you're gonna put a pot your positive here but you're not gonna do the negative here you're gonna do the negative at the end of this one instead correct so that it's kind of like running across here exactly got it okay that makes sense for me now yeah thank you how do we run all this in practical terms I mean that's what this whole thing is about practicality guys how do we hook this up what are the components that we need all right so let's start with you're gonna crimp these cables together first and then wire them up yeah okay all right so we already have our test board crimped and ready to go but I figured I'll show you some test cables here just how to how to properly crimp and prepare these so the first one we have is a four gage battery cable or a larger game gauge cable here always want to use heat shrink that keeps the moisture and everything out of the battery out of the battery cable make it last a little bit longer slide that on first I can't tell how many times I've done this without sliding in order then you gotta fight it on we have our tinned copper terminals one thing you want to always do is make sure you match the hole size of this to the post that you're putting it on you don't want to have an oversized Pole going onto a small post it's just has room for play and error it's always matched the hole on the terminal to the post that it's going one go ahead and you can strip back some cable here I already did it for you so when you're stripping back these jackets you always want to make sure that you're not cutting into any of the strands of the of the wire if you were to cut into and some of those strands fall off you've just reduced the ampacity of that wire so always make sure when you're stripping back the insulation you don't cut into the the strands of the conductor there also when you're on a boat you always want to make sure we're using stranded cable sometimes your see the household romex on a boat the problem with that is it's that solid copper boat's flex boats move so over time that copper flexes and moves and eventually will fail the stranded copper gives you the flexibility you need to not have the wire fail over time from repetitive stress I also want to use tinned copper that will help with your corrosion resistance so that the wire will last longer so decrypt this thing just slide your can your tremor alone I've got these great crimpers here I personally like to when I can match the brand of the crimper to the brand of the wire to the brand of the terminal because everything everything's sized just perfectly sometimes you're fine that if you use a different manufacturers terminals that wall thickness is a little bit different different so you have to make sure everything's crimp just perfectly takes a little bit of the guesswork out when you kind of match everything together on these ones here I've got these nice number 4 gauge drawers so you put it in their crib I like to do a double crimp when I can so we've got this one here we will slide this up and I've got my heat gun to set the heat shrink you're doing heat-shrink these ones are adhesive-backed so when you head it to freight you should see a little bit of adhesive just start to squeeze out from the the ends of the heat shrink and that's how you know everything is good and sealed up another thing to watch out for with these you want to make sure that your heat shrink doesn't encroach forward onto the flat part here because what can happen there is when you go to put this on if you have just a little piece of something in between the contact surface and the busbar that'll decrease the surface area then it'll heat up the conductor over time so make sure you keep that flat part nice and clear all right so next we have the branch cable or the smaller gauge cable hook our tape between the the fuse block we have and our load which in the case is a light bulb this is a 16 gauge cable I've got a nice little set of strippers here strip that back and once again you want to make sure that you don't cut into any of those internal conductors EE important when these smaller gauge cables because there's fewer conductors to begin with now a bill that said also I think I should call about marine-grade words tinned correct yeah I'm strand yeah we use an core wire here all that is 105 degree Celsius installation it's also marine rated so it's oil and water-resistant jacketing and it's all tin stranded copper okay yep then we have our nice little terminals you're also you notice that they are these are tinned copper as well and they're also all color-coded so red is for 22 to 18 gauge cable the Blues are 16 and 14 gauge cable the yellows are 10 and 12 beyond that you're not hand crimper them anymore you're using this big boy so that just goes ahead slides on if ideally you want the wire to be just at the tip of this you have hand crimpers I recommend ratcheting crimpers the nice thing about there is it won't release until you've got a full crimp on it the first crimp or two to the day doesn't really matter the hundreds of crimp of the day you if you don't have ratcheting crimpers you may not be getting the full squeeze on these are also double crimp which means we put a strain relief crimp in the around the jack of the cable at the same time that we do the crimp for the main the main conductor that goes in there now we're done all right I got a question here I think we're using this little four key thing what's it called Spade terminal case Spade terminal this one here is a ring terminal with the circle right okay doesn't matter which of these you use in your breaker box no not at all they're both a byc compliant I can tell you I personally prefer the Spade terminal when we're talking about fuse blocks and those things because you want to take the screw all the way out to part of noise right now I've come across one thing you do want to see with these Spade terminals for any of you I see compliance you want to use what's called a captive state so it has this little Forks at the end of it that keeps it from just sliding out if the screw gets a little bit loose okay all right yeah all right so then you know here again guys were talking murine bouncing around I mean you know how many times you are you out there and you know it's it's not a walk in the park all the time anytime you have a loose connection or connection that's not perfectly solid you have less surface area making that connection so it's the same thing as if you were trying to push more amperage there were smaller gauge wire at that point in time all right so now we're going to go ahead and put together kind of a little sample system here so we've got our battery positive negative terminals it goes to a battery switch here we have our main over current protection which we'll talk about a little bit into our breaker panel in which case is the fuse panel goes out to a switch the load and then completes the circuit back to the battery so we'll go ahead and hook this up real quick since we're actually turning on we'll tighten it down all right so we were talking a little bit earlier about battery monitors this would be a great time to show you where we would hook one in yeah so if we were to put a battery monitor up under here we'd want to put it in this cable between where the battery charger hooks in at the battery switch and the battery because we don't want to have any loads coming off or coming in before that battery monitor it's a couple of different styles out there I personally like the ones that network in so you can share it over the Dyneema 2 mm network to the rest of your equipment get that data anywhere on the boat they come in either a shunt style in which case you'd break this wire apart you have one on one side one on the other and that measures the amperage going through that or a ring style which is clamps around the cable and uses the Hall effect to measure the amperage going in and out of the battery a couple options there is a lot of that's a really a topic for another day we could go on forever about electronics all right so we have the main over current protection here go into our air distribution block which it could be your you're starting to break a panel of the boat switches with fuses and in any number of things the big thing that this serves is to step our circuit protection down so this is a hundred amps circuit breaker which is fun for this big heavy gauge cable far too large for this 16 gauge cable so as we step down here we need to make sure we've recirc elected it to protect that smaller gauge cable in the line cable runs into your switch to the load and then completes the circuit back to the battery got it all right so what else do you want to talk about I tell you what it's made my head spin guys there's a lot of stuff here and I think you made it look I'm not gonna see simple but you explained it well the where it's gonna make more sense to people and I'm looking forward to our next couple videos where we're talking about the inverters and the solar and wind power type of thing Thanks I mean I appreciate your time my pleasure anytime and guys stay tuned because we're gonna have a lot more of this and Bill did a great job I think give them a thumbs up way of please thanks all righty

Channel: Vagabond Epicurean

Views: 125,469

Rating: 4.7610064 out of 5

Keywords: sailing, boating, waterfront vacations, coastal cruising, adventures, beach, marina hopping, marina life, marinas, Chesapeake Bay, ICW, Atlantic Coast, Coastal Cruising, Chesapeake Bay Living, marinas Chesapeake Bay, marinas NC, marinas SC, marinasGA, batteries in series, batteries in parallel, hookup battries on boat

Id: 0ddBrQ14etw

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2019