I Am a Sportfisher but My Battery Won't Last Without the Engine Running? Any recommendations?
Transcript is auto-generated.
hi youtubers jeff cote here with another session of ask bys we've got a question from donald donald asks a really good question actually and it's something that happens to many of us he's got a question he says uh when i'm at anchor and my anchor light and potentially my nat flights and radar are on as i'm waiting for a um a fish to open like i guess an area to open for fishing see that a lot around here in british columbia you'll see you know huge flotillas of boat just waiting for the season to open or an area to be opened up for fishing he says my engine is not running makes sense right he's waiting and my battery bank runs low pretty fast so he asks what can i do well this is a sort of actually a problem that is happening to this boater uh donald in the moment but it happens to a lot of us we are running all these loads and it could be an anchor light it could be um you know in this case a radar so he wants to see he could have even a chart plotter on he wants to be positionally aware where the boat is where the other boats are but he's doing that maybe for 10 hours five hours six hours without the engine running so the way to solve this problem is twofold one is figure out a way to reduce consumption so how do you reduce consumption and that would be one of the first thing i did on my boat is i replaced the anchor light with an led version you know an lev version is about a 10th or 1 11th less power consumption than a incandescent light bulb for an anchor light so i went from literally drawing one and a half two amps to i don't know it's a joke like .2 amps or 0.15 amps on my boat it became from something to completely meaningless so the first thing is start reducing loads radars is a good one modern radars um and navico was the first one to come out with what they called broadband radar but all other companies have them raymarine garmin runo obviously bng being part of navico and simrad all have these radars including lawrence have these sort of low power draw radars so that would be one ways and they're about half the power consumption so that would be another way is reduce your radar loads by installing a modern radar now it's not in everyone's budget but if you're sort of on the fence that would be a reason to do it and i've sold these radars going to sailors that are sailing from here the pacific on the west side and they're going to hawaii or they're going to polynesia or they're going off shore to mexico and they're not running their engines right because they're sailing but they want to reduce their consumption the way to do that is to have a radar that doesn't draw as much power so the first step is looking across the board where can you reduce power consumption by replacing things to led or more efficient loads number one number two is then once you've done that is assessing what is the amdraw so you should have a battery monitor that tells you listen when i'm at anchor i'm drawing 3 amps 5m 10 amps whatever that is and then you need to size your battery bank accordingly you know you've got to say well listen if i'm going to be drawing 10 amps for 12 hours right that's 120 amp hours and so if i've got a 120 amp hours you're going to need a battery bank of a certain size and there's all i'm not going to deal into sizing a battery bank in this video because there is hundreds of articles and videos about that topic on our own website some of them are an hour two hour longs if you want to geek out but then you end up sizing a battery bank to handle the loads that you've tried to minimize as much as possible so it's really twofold they reduce your loads as much as you can and then once you know that you have your minimum load size a battery bank that can run your boat for a period of time and those would be the two ways of doing that lastly i want to add because i can see the youtubers putting comments as i answer those every morning people are going to say oh well what about adding solar yes solar would help if you know some boaters are going to say oh i'm going to put a wind turbine that's another way to get a charging voltage without having the engine running other people are going to put a methanol fuel cell all of these are obviously options some people have generators they might run their generators to run chargers to recharge the batteries but if assuming you don't have a charging source then the best way is reduce loads and increase your battery bank size so that's a great question donald thanks for asking thank you for watching this pys video if you've got further questions ask them down below or go on our website to fill one of the forms don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching you
