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Can you pull a lithium battery install in a weekend for your boat? Check out this video to find out if you can. Whether you need a remote consultation design or perhaps inviting us aboard your boat, Pacific Yacht Systems is here to help. Check out the links in the description below. Hey everyone, Jeff Cote here with Pacific Yacht Systems with another installment of Tech Talk. We've got a question from Brendan. Brendan asked, "Jeff, I'm taking off on a family holiday in about 3 weeks and I'm considering swapping out my AGM batteries for lithium batteries. Can I tackle that project in a weekend?" So, getting your boat ready for a boating season and especially last-minute upgrades is always a temptation. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Uh here's what's involved in doing a battery swap out from AGM to lithium. You can buy batteries in different formats. So, the physical mounting of the batteries is going to be certainly not too complicated because you can buy lithium batteries in golf carts and 8D and 4D and all different sizes. And generally, you probably are going to be even group 31, group 27. You're going to be able to find a lithium battery bank or batteries that are going to fit your existing battery bank. And so, the physical swap out is not the big concern. And also, taking out the old batteries is going to be a lot of weight, but the new batteries are going to be light. So, the physical swap out in itself is not like a huge hurdle. And that's maybe where we some of us might think, "Well, it's doable, right?" Um and that's what it used to be in the past. If you had an AGM battery bank of four golf carts or whatever it is, two 8D batteries, swapping the batteries out 3 weeks before a cruise not an issue at all. I mean, you've got to give yourself maybe a day, maybe 2 days, but you know, you got to haul the batteries on board, take the old batteries out, put the new batteries in, make sure you all the connections that were on the battery are back on the battery. And that's something that's going to apply, of course, to lithium as well. So, sometimes our battery banks have a lot of connections, so you want to make sure that all the connections are documented, put tape on them, count them, take pictures. I've seen so many battery bank swaps where some of the cable connections fell on the backside of the battery and were not reconnected and gave grief to the owner. So, that applies to a lithium swap or not, but it's good advice is to make sure that you reconnect all the wires. And some battery banks there's a lot of wires on the battery banks. But that's where the similarities end. Once you've swapped to lithium, your job that's not the hard part. The hard part is making sure that now you're going to have different type of battery chemistry on your boat, and so you're going to have to worry about various things like how you going to recharge that battery bank? Are you going to recharge it from your inverter charger, from a charger? If you do so, you might be able to set the battery bank to lithium, which is great, but then you're going to have to worry about your other battery banks on board. How's your alternator going to recharge that battery bank? Is it going to go to your alternator? Is it going to go to your house? If it is, are you going to have an external regulator? Lithium battery banks are going to be particular in what they want, and you can't just put them in parallel with an AGM lead-acid battery or a flooded lead-acid battery. So, you're going to need to have two let's say charging regiments, and this is where the devil's in the details. You want to figure out how you're going to recharge it from the alternator, how you're not overload the alternator from connecting it to the lithium bank. Are you going to put in DC to DC charging converters? Are you going to install an external regulator on your alternator? Is your alternator like Are you going to put Where are you going to put the temperature sensor? So, you see what I'm getting at, and I've done whole videos on like the implications of lithium. I can tell you when I swapped lithium on my boat, and I had six group 31 batteries, and I went to eight golf carts. Doing the wiring, because the wiring is going to be different, you're going to want to have all the cable lengths to be the same and coming to a positive and negative distribution, so every battery is going to have to effectively be the same distance. So, all the cabling has to be the same length, even the ones that are closer or further. So, it took me on my boat, and this is me doing it, it took me 4 days plus. Now, not just to do the battery bank cuz I had to redo all the cabling, but also to put in a D to D C charging converter, putting an external regulator, connecting the external regulator in all the right places, putting the sensors, commissioning it, doing an integration between the batteries, some batteries talk to the external regulator. So, as you can tell, I would not advise anyone to tackle that into 2 days. Now, I'm going to hear someone in the comments say, "Jeff, I've done it in 2 days." And you know what? Great. I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just saying on average, on a boat, things don't generally go the way you want them to go. And so, I would not suggest to tackle that on my own right before a trip. Now, if you get, again, you've got someone who's done it a lot of times, or you've got someone in your corner that's done a lot of installs and they're to sort of show you the ropes, and you've got more than a weekend, and now you've got two weekends, and you've got an expert in your corner, it might be doable. It was going to be stressful, for sure, because again, it's just not straightforward. And the devil's in the details, and you want to take the time. And then you want to test it out. I always advise people when you're going to do big upgrades, I mean, it's one thing to install stuff, but a lot of times what I've seen in the past is that people install stuff and assume it works. And that's the big advantage of having time or having someone in your corner that can actually confirm that things are working the way they should. You know, you should test it out. Do like scenarios. Make sure that the voltages are right, that the communication buses are talking. So, because it's just not as trivial as putting a new battery bank in. So, a great question, and definitely something that one should consider with care or simply delegate, but either way, you're going to want to make sure that someone that does it knows what they're doing. And what I always tell owners because I deal with all of you around the world, and people come to me, and very few of you are going to be able to use our services here, right? Most of you are going to are in a different like area than we can help you. So, the things I would do is ask questions and see how many of those installs have they done, and ask gotcha questions. Questions that you know the answer, and you're doing a test to see if they know the right answer, right? And see what kind of BS they're giving you, because a lot of people unfortunately can tell you a long story on why they can, but you need to see and make sure that they can deliver. So, that would be something to consider. You can find out more information in the links below. You want to help us grow the channel, we'd appreciate it. Subscribe. [music] And also, of course, if you're in our service area, and you're thinking about little doing lithium on your boat, or having us maybe help you do lithium on your boat with our design and consultation services, >> [music] >> reach out. We'd appreciate it. That helps us as well. And I want to thank you all for watching. Take care. Hey, fellow boaters. We're going to be doing a lot more tech talk videos. [music] If you've got any suggestions for future videos, leave them in the comments below. Once again, thank you for watching.