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thank you for joining us today we are continuing our conversation with maya and aladino on their sailing magic carpet adventure i was thinking we we should talk also about the pros and cons of 12 versus 24. do you want to maybe give it this and describe where your head's at both of you in terms of twelve versus twenty shares well to put it simply um we know that 24 volt devices would run more efficiently and that we could have wire size which is a reduction in both cost and weight and maybe a little bit of installation headache but that one's tiny i like that so so those being the two major things makes one thing well 24 no doubt about it but on the other side i am not quite sure it is worth it for the size boat that we have it still is a relatively small boat and we don't have that many devices so speak not that long cable runs what i can see instantly is for example the windlass it's all the way up forward um i'm leaning towards 12 volts just because of both sides it not being necessary and our boat not being too complicated with too many devices uh but yeah maybe i'm missing something in the in the entire picture of where maya what's your thought on that i want to take the same page here leaning towards 12 volt but also don't feel like i understand enough to totally make that decision what one thing that i thought could be interesting from 24 volt standard standpoint is charging um for example alternators i know there is 24 volt alternators that do an incredible output which if you then compare it to 12 volts it is a higher output yeah the same with uh ac chargers um i mean a hem and 100 amp or 24 volt charger is double than 100 mm 12 volt charger so that's what i find appealing but i don't know if i want to go that route just because of that yeah so you're absolutely right so generally um your summary good um yeah so why would anyone leave 12 to go to 24 or why would you something 24 volts versus as you double the voltage you half the average so all your cables sizes can be reduced by a factor of two right um so the cable sizing is dramatic right so you're literally halfing the average so that's significant and that's definitely a driving factor right so you're cabling for your windlass you know if you've got a 1200 watt windlass or 1500 watt windlass well you know the current you're going to see at 12 volts versus 24 is gonna be literally a factor of two between the two so that would be a really good way to have voltage the effects of voltage drop are going to be minimized they're still there but they're going to be not as high as on a 12-volt system you know inverters alternators um that all makes sense but where it gets complicated and this is where it gets complicated you're right because um is not all things are at 24 volts so not all charging sources can be 24 volts and not all um loads can be at 24 volts so the dilemma of going to uh 24 is that you might have to um have uh a dc to dc sort of converter to run your 12 volt modes from your 24 volt loads now that's not too complicated you know again victron make some good products newmar as well we've done that you generally see that around 55 60 65 feet you know they're gonna have certain loads that are 12 volts um and they're going to have everything at 24. i and you're right it's tempting to do that although very few 36 foot sailboats have a 24 volt boat because where it gets complicated is what about your engine are you going to have a 24 volt starter and are you going to have a 24 volt battery bank to start your engine and are you going to have a 24 volt alternator or are you going to do a 12 volt alternator with a 12 volt starter so now you have two systems on board you've got a 12 volt for your engine and then you would have to install potentially either a secondary um if you want secondary alternator to go direct or you would simply have dc to dc charging converters that go from 12 to 24 and that's fine too um so that's another way so you could 12 to 24 yeah oh okay there's that too yeah and that's a big thing it's funny this morning i had uh i was doing some comments on youtube and there was a bunch of owners that were talking about that motors so that would be one option right um it's on the table you could go leave your charging circuit at 12. now the problem with that is there's no redundancy from your 12 engine system to your 24 fold system so that's where you know now you're having two battery banks but there are two different levels right there's one at 24 one at 12 and you can't use one or the other right so that's where if you're going to have redundancy off the lithium maybe you would have redundancy off maybe maybe you have two agm batteries that are connected in series there are 12 volts and you have a small little house battery bank as an emergency sort of like something ever happens on your house you can fall back on your uh standby agm battery bank right you could do that that's one option certainly a lot of people are doing that i've seen that with lithium some people are doing that when they're connected to shore power they'll have um they'll disconnect their lithium in a partial state of discharge and they'll run their boat at the dock or their dock loads outside of the engine are going to be powered off their agm battery uh when they're connected to shore power and they're leaving their boat unintended for periods of time so that's another consideration but then the the issue is you know are you going to be able to source everything you need in 24 volts now the good advantage you have is you can do that research and you could buy all your equipment your you know your windlass could be 24 volts your inverter can be 24 volts your solar controllers can be 24 volts everything on your boat you know your water pump you know well we can find you know you'll probably be able to find uh a lot of devices that can run 24 and if they don't then what you could do and we do that a lot is you could run those devices off of your 24 by having it converted again right so i was there's a comment on youtube this morning there's a boater he's running his whole boat at 48 inverter everything and his 12 volt loads are simply run via converters okay yeah yeah the other thought of why i was leaning away from 24 is exactly we can supply all the items now but what if we need to replace them in some exotic locations then it gets harder and also redundancy and out of redundancy if we were to lose one battery then we're back to 12 volts um kind of that thought that you need double to maintain a 24 volt battery so to speak yeah yeah so i mean to be honest that's why you would never i mean i don't think i've ever seen a 36 foot boat with 24 volt and i don't think i would do it on my boat i can tell you the reasons why but i think that the real main reason why people do 24 is to reduce cabling size and to reduce the effects of voltage drop on far away places you know your battery bank is unlikely i'm going to be at the one end of the boat or the other right you know it's generally always a little bit uh aft of midship on many sailboats or midship the benefits that you're going to get from a 24 system but also then all the issues associated with it you're right um it's worth considering um and certainly for an alternator it would help right to have half the current go through right that's that's definitely an advantage the inverter again half the current have the cable sizes but those devices are not going to be that far and i don't think your alternator uh it can be that huge because it's really going to be a function of your size of your engine you can't choose any alternative you want you know there's there's going to be some limitations with your engine that you have and that's that's going to be a factor realistically that's going to limit all the benefits of going with a 24 volt system unless you were getting an engine that could accommodate any size alternator including a massive you know let's say 100 and 300 amp or 150 amps at 24 volt alternator right not everyone can fit that on their engines totally yeah yeah so we see all the benefits but yeah it's more out of simplicity there as well uh yeah yeah 12 i mean i'm not saying the decision is final and you can all all of this is sort of you're going to all sleep on it but the [Music] 99 of people would face that question or 95 i would say and 95 would probably choose 12. yeah add your boat size at your bone size now if you had a 60-footer completely different and i would strongly suggest to go to 24. like i would be i would be fighting really hard uh for you to consider you know a 60 65 foot boat i'd be pushing really hard for 24 especially if you're running winches that are electric you're running all this you know hydraulics or battery you know bow thrusters you know like throughout aft thrusters some sailboats big sailboats have app thrusters four thrusters right like now that's starting to be a completely different world and then it would make sense to look at 24. just out of curiosity like a lot of cruising boats nowadays are around the 45 foot range like what would you start recommending for that size still probably they're on the fence but most people for simplicity would stick up 12 even even 45 yeah yeah um [Music] if it had to all be done again of course if we could all start from scratch every boat should be 24. and if everyone was using 24 we'd all be happier but the problem is you don't do what you want you always have to consider and i think led's is that you know it's easy in a big home port where some of us are lucky where our home ports are you know huge sort of maybe what i consider these you know marine centers right like florida all these places and the mad here in the pacific northwest uh puget sound here in british columbia there's enough of voters here that there's enough businesses that support voters that it's easier to find what you're looking for but once you leave these big centers totally and even if you're even in the caribbean even accessing that they might not have it on the shelf they have to bring it in it just then gets very cost prohibitive if it's not a readily available part and if it's a special order part it's even worse because as we've seen sometimes you could be waiting six months for apart 12 months right now that same note if we would start from scratch then we would probably make ac 240 volts and we would use metric and not imperial wouldn't we yeah exactly there would be no imperial that's right and although i think only in imperial mostly because i just have to uh you're right it's it's we don't do what we want we do we have to be relatable right to others so if everyone talks in burial and a lot of my clients speak that way or think that way then i'm adapting right and so i think the same thing when you're about you we don't do what we want we do what we should do based on the environment around us so yeah