What Type of Battery Should I Use for My Thrusters?
Transcript is auto-generated.
hi everyone jeff cote here with pacific yacht systems and we're doing another installment of ask pys so we've got a question from a fellow voter ron ron asks what battery should be used for thrusters a cranking battery or a deep cycle battery and how charging should be set up the research i've done leans towards a deep cycle battery but it's interesting the different opinions and reasoning thanks wrong okay first first things first it's a boat there's going to be conflicting opinions and ron's right you got to do your research everybody has an opinion and you gotta it's not so much the opinion that's important it's the reasoning behind it right and it's always a question of tradeoffs so when we do thrusters we generally in most applications are gonna recommend a cranking battery my reasoning is as follows a thruster is a load that is of short duration right it's going to be 10 seconds 5 seconds 2 seconds 30 seconds if you're really going bezonkers and that load is going to be a crazy amount of amperage right could be 200 300 400 amps even higher and that's going to be really hard on a deep cycle battery because remember deep cycle battery is a marathon runner it's a battery that discharges over a very long period of time yet a cramping battery is sort of like a sprinter a sprinter runs for a short period of time but it has the ability to have explosive power so your thruster is really similar to a starter it's a very high load for a short period of time so we always recommend a cranking battery if you're going to go with flooded with for thrusters or even a windlass because they just made for that purpose and we would not recommend a deep cycle battery on a thruster the other reason too is that you're going to notice that the voltage on a deep cycle battery under really really high loads is going to drop down faster than a cranking battery so a cranking battery is actually going to be better for the thruster tube how do you recharge them i've seen many instances where uh thruster batteries are only recharged from a shore power or a generator via a battery charger which is okay but not great because that means that while you're underway or you're using your engines the battery's not getting a charge so if you leave the dock you use your thrusters a lot by time you get to your other destination the batteries have not been charged and now you're using your batteries for your thruster and they're already weak and we know what a weak battery does on an electric motor it causes electric motors to fail because you've got a lower voltage so i'm a big proponent of having the alternators or alternator also recharge the thruster battery while you're underway while the engines are running it's a way to make sure that when you get to your destination and the dock the batteries are completely full so that was a great question by ron thanks for watching this video if you've got further questions that we didn't answer please ask them below or go on our website and fill up one of the forms and lastly if you haven't subscribed to our channel please do so that way you'll get the regular contents and in closing thanks for watching
