There will be : 4no 215W Victron panels used ex solar farm from a guy in Deeside - tested at 46V open circuit 6A with a bit of sun so good as far as I can tell. They will be in 2 sets in parallel to a 100/30 MPPT each set. DC to DC connected to starter battery as a buffer to charge from Alternator at 30A max prob limit that to be honest. These will feed into a fused distributor box (lynx) connected to these batteries via two Daly 150 A BMS's and a multiplus inverter / charger. Kit got through 12v boating group on FB at trade Adding an old Raspberry Pi as a system monitor with an old phone as a remote screen via Bluetooth with the smart shunt and hope to add a 12v 600A immersion as a dump for solar when batteries are full. ..oh and a galvanic isolator for the shore link.. All to run our 55ft NB while we live on it/work from it. Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
As every day passes I'm getting more convinced with LFP for the boat. I know we have 2 big challenges. One is roof real estate for a decent solar charger set up and the other is the old BMC which has just a simple Lucas 36a alternator. It would have been done already I think if we'd got twin alternators but theres a lot of faff to change the system. Have you had a chance to put the Daly BMS modules through their paces yet? I've been through 3 lfp sterling batteries on exchange/upgrade in 18 months due to the shonky performance of the BMS. The first 80ah battery we bought has been fine, I've had it on test on and off and its as accurate as I need it to be. However, I'm paralleling it with another, and we are now on our 3rd. Sterling have been awesome, and they actually swapped the last one out for a 100a version so we got a mini upgrade. So far so good but I was close to sending the whole lot back at one point. With no BMS you have no warning of system shut down as you know, and I'm not a blind faith kind of bloke. Our 180 amp bank will be fed with a 30a abso b2b and feeds a 1600w pure sine inverter. Small stuff for the T3 but it'll power the life essential hairdryer and straighteners plus a 600w immersion on the calorifier. I'm trying to break the 100a battery at the moment. It's charged when it needs it and simply sits solely hooked up to the Dometic fridge. It's been on a week now from 100 percent charge...this morning's app reading with the fridge on a cool down cycle. It's interesting following the relationship between discharge and voltage in real time. But if course with out the app functioning properly you are completely in the dark!
Not all wired together yet but I'll let you know. Real estate is an issue , think the 860W we've got is all I can fit.. maybe with bigger panels but 4 is all I can get with bike space at the front. The Daly's are separate from the 3.2v eve cells. Sterling's are all in one aren't they?. Came in at about £600 per 280ah battery when built up £210/100ah...not incuding shunt gives a 150A discharge / 75A charge per battery but should be good for about 6000 cycles though not sure if anyone has got there yet! Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
I've been looking at Lucas A127 replacements at 70A seems common and straight swap from what i see don't think any more is recommended Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
I could, but I quite like it. It has an old charm and not only delivers whatever it does through the split charge diode from the SB to keep the LBs topped up, but it's also unstressed and we have learned to modify our behaviour so we can cruise for months with no issues...however Our alternator man has offered an upgrade next time it needs a rebuild so that may be on the cards. Been 10 years though
The A127 should be a straight swap for the A115 36A alternator and a BMC 1500 diesel (if that’s what it is) wouldn’t develop enough power to drive anything bigger.
So, there is only one real challenge and there isn’t much you can do with the roof unless you build an extension. Do what Clarkson would do and bolt a big block V8 with a huge alternator to the deck.
@Deefer66 I'm not sure what's inside the Sterling cases but I suspect similar to yours and @pkrboo and @77 Westy (probably) that the Bluetooth capaeable BMS unit is just strapped in near to the cells. I need our overland stuff to work, and I think that's why Sterling have been so patient with these issues. To give you an idea of how frustrating it got I set up a rig to discharge and recharge the lfp with the faulty BMS, just to be able to compare what was happening in practise Vs what the BMS thought was happening. 80lfp into 1600w inverter out to oil filled rad on low setting. I'd discovered by messing about that the low setting corresponded to 80ah draw. So the battery should be flat in an hour if it was fully charged Start screen. As far as I knew the battery was fully charged. But the BMS insisted it wasn't. It would budge above those figures no matter what I did So knowing it wasn't likely to be 63 percent but actually 100 I set the clock and to be honest, nearly exactly an hour later the whole thing turned off I'd been on the phone to Charlie Sterling during this whole time whilst he got me to change parameters in the app. Way above my pay grade. Nothing we did could effectively reset the BMS, and whilst they need a few cycles to learn and settle down it was decided just to replace..again! What I did take out if this is an enormous amount of respect for the LFP battery to cope with massive discharge rates and still provide voltage to the death. It's convinced a previous sceptic to work with the tech. I've had one of those batteries chucking out 135amps for 15 minutes powering Mel's hairdryer. The concept is awesome. It'd be good to ditch the generator eh @pkrboo
If your cell volts were as BMS shows it was well off full. I got them up to 3.6v / cell at balancing, giving total 14.2, after leaving them for while they drop to 3.5v /cell at 14v for the battery which is still 99.9% with the charge curve they have.
I’ve set the BMS to limit the maximum cell voltage to 3.4v so they are never 100% charged. It should increase the cell life and I don’t need the full (176Ah) capacity that they are rated at.
That was the point. The BMS wasn't reporting the cell state correctly. No matter what changes were made in 'the back office' the BMS still wouldn't play This has happened on 2 Daly units. Must have been a bad batch and maybe Sterling unfortunately got them all
