My other van's a...

roadtripper

2021 Caravelle Executive
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Recently been away in the other vehicle I look after the electrics in, we have a bit more space than the traditional VW seat base for our battery bay...

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Yes, that's 5 110 Ah leisure batteries :cool:

The far left is the starter, the other 4 are our house bank.

Charging wise it's mostly old school, just this monster relay energised directly from the ignition not even voltage sensing - the fancy stuff just seems not to last in the engine room

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Everything powered from this rather lovely 52hp Nanni Diesel. No ECU here just a solid 20 year old Kubota block that just keeps on trucking. I think the only work we've had done on it beyond regular services is an oil ring change.

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By now the clues should give away that this is our 62 foot narrow boat owned by a bunch of us. That engine has run for about 45 weeks a year for now over 20 years, so glad we took the engine advice we did when we had her built. The equipment top right is the reservoir and control system for the hydraulic bow thruster, a healthy 10hp not a wimpy 12v system, the pump is on the back of the engine between the block and the gearbox.

Despite the massive battery bank folks still keep slamming the bank flat, most of them are not from a camping or sailing background and treat it much like a holiday cottage. So we had a Merlin battery monitor fitted that alarms at 50%. Personally I'd have linked that to a really loud buzzer but I was overruled so it's just an indicator...

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Lurking behind that MDF grill, well out of fiddling reach, is the heart of our electrics, a Mastervolt Dakar. It's an amazing bit of kit, both in capability and price when we had the boat built. Today inverter systems are common but 20 years back, not so much.

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The Dakar is what the monster cables from the house battery bank go to, along with the 16a shore supply socket. The Dakar then does whatever it needs to. No shore power? 1500w self throttling full sine wave inverter kicks in to run the mains in the boat from the batteries. Shore power on? Inverter shuts down and transfers to mains, house bank gets a 30A four stage charge, all 12v loads floated by the Dakar.

I'd quite like to move up to DC-DC charging as the bulk charge of the house bank is healthy but the final 10% is glacial. I'd also like to get solar on the massive roof, but again with a large group to convince likely not to happen.

A tew shots of the inside, you can tell from the decoration the majority of the group are more retired than I am. She's smart and wearing her age well but it's a bit holiday cottage. Best antidote to modern hectic life though, at 20 tons she moves at a fast hike flat out in a canal so you can't rush. She'll do much more in rivers, much to the surprise of the cruiser crowd, but then the simple narrow boat rudder gets a bit of handful to hang on to!

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So what other unusual vehicles do folks look after?
 
So for those that feel the sting of replacing a battery or who are trying to reconcile the cost of LiFePo I had an email from the person handling our winter maintenance on the boat today saying that the capacity of our house bank is down to 80% and asking what my view on that was.

Given what we do with the boat as a group I've recommended we replace the lot, so that's 4 x 110Ah good brand leisure batteries.

Luckily we own her as a group to spread the cost but of course I will now get emails about the cost and suggesting either just changing some (heck no) or using "this battery I found on Amazon" (likewise)...

It was last done mid 2021 when folks decided not to do it at service and a cell went in the bank over the summer and dragged the other 3 batteries down with it but not before buggering up many peoples holiday plans with electrical issues, usually the fridge locking out on hot days.

I suspect there is a high correlation with those who are cost conscious and those that never look at the SmartGuage; if I had my way the 50% charge alarm would be linked to a klaxon not just a small LED but I was overruled as people felt being woken at 3am to charge the batteries may ruin a holiday... :unsure:
 
Time to investigate buying up the other shares in the barge?!!
Funny you should say that, turns out I just did as one of the other members of the syndicate wanted to reduce from 2 shares to 1 (y)

We have replaced the main bank with slightly larger batteries and thankfully this time no questions, I think folks saw the benefits.

We also changed our charge relay to a slightly smarter solid state approach which is really helping, a full summer overnight is only using 15% of the bank even with a full size fridge.

Ideally I'd like to move to LiFePo but it's not practical right now as changing the Master lot combi charger/inverter is a huge and unnecessary cost. Should that ever need replacing I suspect any replacement with be Lithium aware so...

At least I have room for a decent switch and fuse panel on the boat...

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Funny you should say that, turns out I just did as one of the other members of the syndicate wanted to reduce from 2 shares to 1 :thumbsup:

We have replaced the main bank with slightly larger batteries and thankfully this time no questions, I think folks saw the benefits.

We also changed our charge relay to a slightly smarter solid state approach which is really helping, a full summer overnight is only using 15% of the bank even with a full size fridge.

Ideally I'd like to move to LiFePo but it's not practical right now as changing the Master lot combi charger/inverter is a huge and unnecessary cost. Should that ever need replacing I suspect any replacement with be Lithium aware so...

At least I have room for a decent switch and fuse panel on the boat...

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Good move, especially as you are not buying a pig in a poke but know what you’re investing in!
 
Good move, especially as you are not buying a pig in a poke but know what you’re investing in!
Yep, our original share is a launch share too, so we've seen the boat since it was a grey hull and stack of timber in a boat shed.

Also handy for the rest of the group as we don't have to introduce someone new to "the system"

Annoyingly we're losing a day as water has got into the fuel tank some time over the summer and it's got diesel bug sludge in, booked in to engineering for a full flush and new filters everywhere as well as checking all the deck seals and breather valves.

Upside of this type of ownership is the boat doesn't suffer from things like damp or other storage deterioration as it's out most of the year but we do get a lot of wear and not everyone is as mechanically sympathetic as you'd like. But we do book it in for a full engine service every 250 hours and as it's ours and not some timeshare or hire fleet folks are generally careful.
 
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To make things even more confusing you can get Dutch Barges built to Narrowboat dimensions. They're better if you intend to do a lot of river or estuary work as they have higher sides for rougher water, downside is you are often dropping the wheelhouse (the sides and roof fold down) as they tend to be taller than the air draught around bridges.

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So recently had a week Working From Boat when she was put back into the water following winter maintenance doing some snagging for the group.

(when you're lucky enough to be able to work wherever you can get internet make the most of it...)

Part of the issue was chasing down a coolant leak in our central heating, now powered by a Webasto water heater not an ALDE gas boiler, still not found it but topping up the header tank with 50:50 red antifreeze is getting annoying.

The other was the last owner had rigged the greenhouse heaters to keep the frost off (good) but has left the inverter/charger armed (oh no) so while the boat was out of the water and off EHU when the temperature dropped and 400w of heater kicked in...

Luckily it was not cold for long so the house bank only got to 46% but did mean I was chasing some electrical checks for a couple of days making sure it wasn't a fault till I tumbled what had happened.

However in the extensive Mastervolt manual (when they were proper manuals not some website) I ran into this extremely useful estimating rule for inverters:

Inverter Rules of Thumb

1. Divide the wattage at 240v by 10 to get the approximate current draw on the battery at 12v

2. Divide the current at 12v by the hundreds of Ah capacity to get the percentage capacity reduction per hour

So in our case we have 400w heaters so 400/10 is 40A off the 12v battery.

This would be 40% capacity used in an hour on a 100Ah battery (normal van sized) but we have a 400Ah battery bank so divide by 4 means we have 10% capacity an hour.

To see how accurate this rule is I'd normally estimate at about 80% efficiency for planning.

So 400w at the 240v side (80%) would be 500w at the 12v side, so 500/12 = 41.6A

So the simple rule is actually pretty good, and I'm likely to use that for estimating from now on
 
That's for a purely resistive load with no reactance?
Thinking here when I plugged in a microwave and couldn't turn the damn thing off quick enough to stop blowing a fuse.
 
Yep, keep it basic for a straightforward rule of thumb.

Side advantage of the Dakar is it's the older low frequency inverter tech that uses the same large transformer lump it uses for 240v to 12v backwards for 12v to 240v - not quite as efficient and sometimes a little humming but very robust to surge loads and overloads. Starts the microwave or Dyson without an issue at all.
 
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