SSL509 ~ Whoops..!!
good morning, yes good morning, did you have a good sleep too? did Tiki have a good sleep? you got kisses, hey pretty girl it's a good girl yes good morning and good morning to you guys assuming it's morning where you are but it is very early morning here the sun's just coming up, we just had a really nice little rain storm first thing in the morning we always get, happens right on cue about 5:30-6 in the morning just as the sun is coming up over the horizon, and then it pops up right over by Cotton Key there like you see there now and that is a beautiful one and a great way to start the day, it's supposed to be sunny the rest of the day so we have plans today, today we start a big project that you guys and us have all been waiting for and waiting to get started, and that my friends is our 24 volt conversion, so today Sebastian and i are going to start laying out some of the gear we have to start with the inverter because we need to start with charging sources first so once that we get the batteries all hooked up in their series parallel configuration we'll be able to charge them so that's going to start of course with the chargers, and the main one being of course our inverter because we're also going to need the inverter as soon as we hook up... hook up the power so that we still have power in the ship systems once everything's complete it's one of those jobs where everything kind of has to come together at the same time so we're going to start laying out the equipment today laying in some wiring we get everything ready and then we need one full day to switch over all the wiring so we start very early in the morning because we can't end up in the middle of the night with things half hooked up or we'll have no power on the boat, so that my friends is today, buckle up (good morning) (good morning) good morning Sebastian (how is everything) looking alive? (yeah) sleep good? (sleep really good, amazing) got your coffee? coffee and bread (coffee and bread) (coconut bread, for me for our friends) (yeah) that sounds good (I really enjoy this bread) yeah we're just enjoying our morning here, getting ready to start work are you ready? (I'm ready sir) today we start 24 volt conversion, big job but we can do it, it'll happen over time but we're going to start framing everything up today figure out what wires we need for the inverter and then go from there (hey somebody want something to for you, yeah) oh tiki? (yeah) Tiki see's the bread? Oh yeah all right back to coffee still have our morning rituals to finish before we get to work so we only get a few minutes (the sun is, bottom of my face) yeah it's getting warm (yeah) it's gonna be a nice day, the days are getting longer now we've already passed our shortest day of the year December 21st and now they're starting to come back, the weather, rainy season stopping lots of sunny days (weather amazing, stunning) morning's getting earlier so all is good, salut (salut, enjoy your morning guys) yeah we're going to enjoy ours and then we'll get back to work so we'll see you in a minute (stop to speak about the work capitan, we know) it's our fact of life, work (no work no food) no work no food that might be a regulated opinion I don't know. okay first project, inverter this is the new 24 volt version of the 3kW inverter that we have installed under the sofa there now in the salon, so we are going to prepare it for installation, we're going to move the inverter from the salon up into the main storage locker, this is where the old inverter that was stock, like what the boat came with, was originally installed was inside this locker but it was more inaccessible so I wanted to put it in a better place, but I've since learned that that's not a better place for the inverter first of all it generates a lot of heat under the seat and second of all it's under that window and I'm not going to get into too much description but let's say somebody left that window open one time and it rained and it shorted out the inverter and luckily it was just rain water so it dried and everything was fine but we quickly realized that being under a window, especially with the potential for saltwater leak when we're at sea not going to be a good place for the inverter so we are going to move this bad boy back up into the locker, so let's have a look at what we got (let me show you) unboxing Victron 3kW multi-plus 24 volt DC with a 70 amp charger built in at 24 volts, awesome yeah you can set it right here if you want, and have a look, but there we are there is all of our inputs and outputs, and in here charger inverter and yes multi-plus by Victron 24 volts capable of 3000 watts so 3 kilowatts and a 70 amp 24 volt charger, that's going to be a nice improvement from what we have now because 70 amps at 24 volts will generate a lot less heat through the wiring of the boat than the existing and... or the existing inverter which is 120 amps at 12 volts so
the cabling has to be much much heavier for 120 amps than it does for 70 but we're going to use the same cables so it's going to be less than half the load on the same wires, it's going to make a big difference and generate a lot less heat I'm sure because that puppy down there generates a lot of heat when we're running at full charge off the generator, because that's the only reason we have the generators just so if we don't have enough sun one day or you know a couple days consecutive we can run the generator and it will power our 120 amp charger to refill the batteries over time it depends how much how much power we need as to how much time it's going to take but that's the general idea, so this one's going to do it more efficiently at 24 volts and we have another battery charger coming in at 60 amps 24 volts and that is going to augment this one so we will have a combined 130 amps between two different chargers at 24 volts, that my friends is the equivalent of 260 amps at 12 volts so it will tremendously decrease our amount of generator time as long as the generator handles the load, and we've already taken that into consideration but we'll talk about that later the generator is a completely separate issue and a completely different subject, for now this is going to be the charging system of the boat in 24 volts along with... another like I said the other charger that's not arrived yet but it's coming so we'll touch base on that one when it arrives but we got to start with something right now and that's going to be this guy, so in this locker right here is where we're planning on putting and I'll show you it's a very deep locker and back in here there's a panel that covers that off and that platform right there that was home to the original inverter that came with the boat, and it was an old old 1500 watt that I replaced many many years ago so that cabinet is now empty and will perfectly house this guy standing upright with all of these wires sitting pretty close to the edge of this platform here where they'll all just go down underneath and then the panel will come in and close the whole thing off again, so in theory it's perfect, let's see how reality goes that's going to be the next project now, Sebastian's going to spend some time here just putting it in there, working it around maneuvering it and see how it's going to fit best and then bolting it down, once it's bolted down we'll probably loosen it again to bring it out attach all the wiring we need and then see if we need to go ashore and pick up some new wires to hook it all up, that's it, all right all yours over to Seb (okay come here baby, now round one) getting enough leverage this will tighten up those gut muscles nothing weighs about 50 or 60 pounds we lost Seb he's buried in the cabinet (be careful) oh yeah don't back up Sebastian she's got the floor open (okay) I'm gonna need some spray nine for your dinghy project (yeah) girl's hard at work too (hey Sebastian) (hey what's up Maddie) okay let me know if you need anything else (take a look) it's perfect (yeah) just fits and it'll hide everything behind the panel that'll close off nicely and all the wires should drop right down in this little opening right here, with lots of room for the radius to come out of the machine out of the inverter and go straight down to where they need to go down by the batteries, awesome wow look at Melby, look at you you're fast holy cow, making big progress already yeah yeah yeah, got to be careful of the fabric that's all no that's good you good to get it looking clean again, I'm surprised it still gets so much growth on it because we haul it every single night it gets to dry out but over months it still gets this growth on it, just from drying out I guess but looking good ladies can't wait to see it finished, good job I know I know some of you guys are always thinking oh captain Rick so nice of you to hold the camera while everybody works well, hey that's kind of my job now I'm teaching other people how to do what I know because I've been doing it for over 20 years I know how to do it, now I give other people the chance to do it and learn we film the projects and my job is now here because without me sitting here videos don't happen, and today I'm working on the next video so I gotta go back to work (okay easy work) what's happening (nothing!) you okay? oh big waves wow I see white again (yeah) looks great beautiful look brand new again, good job ladies (thank you so much) okay so we've opened up our new access area for the batteries here and where the smart controllers are for all the solar panels, that's the multi-plus 3000 there that the 12-volt system and we're just going to open the front panel of it now to find out which wires are going where so that we know how much wire we need to go get if we need to extend some of them because we're going to move it up into this cabinet which means we need some good probably 10 gauge three conductor AC wiring for the wire coming in from the boat into the inverter and from the inverter back down to the house bank system, so that's our next step here as uh Sebastian just removing the screws and that will expose all our connections just don't short the panel out on anything and it'll be good, okay so you can see here these are our heavy conductor 12 gauge wires here so we got ground strap and positives, negative and then this is our AC wiring coming in and out here so we just need to figure out which one of these there's actually two outputs I think so we're going to need to determine how much wire we need from those because this is where we need to get a new piece of wire to run from the second AC output of the 3 kilowatt generator here over to the galley for the new outlet that we're going to install for the electric stoves so that way they'll be isolated on their own circuit their own breaker and that way if the girls do anything, you know, loading overloading too many burners at once it only trips that breaker and doesn't shut down the whole boat, because yeah I don't know if I told you guys before but sometimes that happens, people forget you know that we're running off of a limited system, I mean you can draw a lot of power to the system but the breakers are kicked in so that if you draw more than 15 amps at a time at 110 volts it'll trip the breakers, uh and when that happens it shuts down the entire boat including my computers and it's happened a couple of times where my computer got shut down while I was editing with hard drives plugged into it in the middle of an edit and that causes very serious crashes, so we don't want that to happen anymore so now it's time to isolate the galley from the rest of the boat and that way they'll be protected, I'll be protected and nobody has to worry about overloading the system and shutting down my computers that will be a nice addition but it's something we have to consider today because we're at that point where we need that wire to run across the boat as you can see we have opened up the entire cabinet exposing all the lithium batteries all the way across now so we have a bank of eight batteries back there and there's going to be four here and that's going to give us 12 batteries in a series parallel configuration at 24 volts of 600 amp hours, amazing but now the important part of the project is figuring out how to wire them up where everything's going to be in the proper circuits and the charge/discharge wires are all equally dispersed through the battery banks because they're in two different areas so I've already got that all mapped out, and that is here, so you can see I've been studying that for a while and just how I'm going to wire them all up and what we need to do to accomplish that so we're just going to follow my little schematic there but if you look at these batteries you can see they are all hooked up in parallel configuration so we have eight batteries and basically all just joined positive to negative all the way down the chain eight of them all the way down to the beginning now what we need to do is completely rethink our configuration for the series parallel wiring because now we're going to put them in pairs, there'll be one pair up there another pair right here pair here pair there, and two pairs down under here so there's going to be six pairs of batteries that are put in series and then all six pairs will be parallel together, so in order to accomplish that like I explained you can see that each one of the battery pairs need to have a series wire engaged between one positive and one negative terminal of each battery so that is going to be these we'll call these our bridge connectors, and I've already measured out exactly how long they need to be and made a couple of the sample wires already I'm going to show you how we do that so that when it comes time for you to make your own wires you have a good idea of how to make them so that they should remain very well intact like permanently sealed for longevity because you can see these are sealed terminals so there's no way air moisture anything can get inside the terminal itself and they're all sealed with heat shrink tubing that has hot glue inside and that will keep out any moisture contamination anything like that so that's a big part of our day right there so we need to make six of these for our series circuits, and then we're going to need to make a bunch of these pairs here, now these aren't all going to be the same size these are the parallel wires but we're going to need two exactly this length that I've already made one sample the same, with the heat shrink tubing with the hot glue inside the sealed terminals all the works they're measured out to be exactly the right distance to parallel between that battery and the one that's two behind it, so that's how we're gonna put them in parallel, so we need at least three of these for over this side, three in red, and three in black, so we'll make the matching sets for these and we'll make all of our series wires we're going to show you a little bit how to put those together and I'm going to let Sebastian continue on and just make all the rest of the wires that we need to do the whole job and then we'll look at our next part of the project from there (we don't get a more pressing table cutter?) yeah the one that's in the black case, we got a nice new one okay so we are ready to get into our wiring here got all of our tools out so for this you're going to need heavy duty cable cutters (yeah) so these are even a little bit undersized but we make them work so they do the job, so we got those need a good set of crimpers because we're using big lugs, and where's the lugs? we've got our heat shrink tubing various sizes, this is all with hot glue inside, so these are meant for marine purposes and they will last a very long time good heavy wall double thickness and glue inside found them on amazon, so we got heavy duty lugs for all of our main power circuits in and out of the entire battery bank, and they're nice to have those flanges on the tip there so that you can force the wire in smoothly without you know fraying if any wire on the inside, and they're very thick so these will conduct a lot of power very efficiently without without generating a lot of heat so that's important for your main power in and out for all your charge wires and discharge wires out of the battery bank, so all of this stuff is just things that I've been bringing in and accumulating from amazon over the last... you know several months as we've been bringing in all these shipments we're bringing a few more parts and you know components of the system that we need every trip every delivery, as we can afford it because I've been building a lot of stuff and accumulating a lot of things for probably a good 40-50 projects on the boat that you're going to hear about in time but now we're starting to get into them where we're actually looking at making the changes and upgrades to the boat so now I'm going to turn you over to Sebastian he's going to start measuring/cutting the wires and showing you how to trim them, put the heat shrink on, crimp them, lugs, all that kind of stuff so he's just cutting them up/measuring them now (yes using the the model wire who the captain cut for us, I taking the same size of the wire a little bit more on the top for inside of our terminals) mhmm you can see we're just measuring it from the tip of the terminal there because that wire is going to go right into the edge of the terminal (yep) right up to there, and then you measure it over to this side and cut it right there (yep) so that that will fit into the tip of the next terminal and we've got good coverage with the copper connection and lots of rooms to put our heat shrink good way to use your third hand there (yes this one you know, a monkey man) as long as you don't use your third leg then I'm outta here you can see the glue coming outside there little bit nice perfect sealant that's quite a lunch (now we have a look where maybe everybody working and Sebastian this night is possible is alone and we have a very great sunny day for cook outside) yep that it is, and the whole neighbourhood's out enjoying the day so at the end of day one we've got all of our wires cut out and laid out, so Sebastian's done a good job getting them all prepared, uh we got the whole system ready to start disassembling that's not gonna happen today because it's already five o'clock and yeah I always cut out before dark because we don't want to get in any projects before dark. we start something like that first thing early in the morning especially when we're disconnecting the entire electrical system but yeah you can see here we've got... he's got the four series cables so one, two, three, four series cables, two parallel cables for this set, two long parallel cables for the pair that has to go through the bulkhead here because they're about two inches further apart and one more set of parallel cables up there, back here these are all going to be put into series and then parallel and then we got two wires, negative and positive that are just perfect for running straight into here and where they're going to be paralleled with the other bank of eight batteries so once we have all those paired together we'll have them set up just like in this diagram and this is basically my schematic that's going to outlay the whole system how every component is hooked into the system and I'll get into more depth with you with that later, but it shows how we take the 24 bank... or the 24 volt bank put it through the DC to DC converter run the rest of the 12 volt systems on the boat individually and run all the 24 volt charging sources and loads directly off a couple blocks that are in line with the battery bank directly, so that's all in part two, so that will be tomorrow (prestige mode) and now it's night time and we have a bit of a sad night tonight we have to say goodbye to a friend, but first we have to get there so let's roll. where's Danny's ride?
ah there you go, right beside the capitan (yes man) perfect.. what?! nice ride, yeah man, cool, you ready? (I need to watch all of Daniela message please) somebody's a little stressed been making all the last-minute plans tonight (yes the woman's stress all time) all the time, all the time ready ready? (yeah read) watch your six Houston we have arrived, and hopefully John found it and that my friends is how you parallel park in Colombia this place is beautiful, and this is the first time we've been here since we were here... (with Jeremy and Joe) Jeremy and Joe on our last sail, the last sail of 2020. yes yeah remember it was supposed to be our last sale in March, no February of 2020 ending in March here and we had our last dinner here (what do you think about the restaurant?) well I think we're official so we can ditch this [ __ ] now (very important) that's cool. our guest of honor! Colonel how are you sir (hey John) (hi) (good thank you) I wish we were seeing you under better circumstances mate (thank you thank you so much) welcome welcome (an honor for me) hi guys so the news is, it's kind of a sad night because colonel John's been transferred, so he's going back to mainland this weekend, very fast so new Colonel signing on this weekend and that's tomorrow and then saturday John is flying out for Valencia (yes sir) so we are sad to see him go but we wanted to come out and have one last night and say farewell, one group of friends cheers man there's one thing you guys should know about hanging out with Colonel John it's always fun, but Colonel John is after all a Colonel so it doesn't matter where we go, he has bodyguards and I will tell you we don't always see them but rest assured they always see us and Christian I know is out here somewhere, where is Christian I knew you'd be here somewhere Christian, buenas noches (what is up) but I told you I knew he'd be out here somewhere and he's sitting there so that he can see through the grates of the fence here so he can always pay attention, he's always watching who's hanging out you know who's doing anything with the Colonel, make sure nobody approaches no threats he does a good job and he's a cool guy we've had him on the boat before yeah it's it's an interesting crowd to hang out with but we really enjoy so thanks again Colonel John, we've really enjoyed the time with you and I'm sure it's not the end, it's like you say see you when I see you again and I'm quite sure we will see you again somewhere over that horizon, okay ladies (see you soon) have fun with the kids (yes) ciao (bye-bye) ciao John (I'll see you when I see you)
2021-01-31 13:47
