Electric Motor & Batteries Update

Two bits of excellent news.

We have an Electric Motor Installer

Today we spent 4 hours with Andrew and Adam from AJD Marine. We are delighted to announce that they are going to be doing the installation of our HPEVS Electric Motor, the Curtis Motor Controller and our new Battery Bank.

There is very little that we have already bought that needs any changes. The biggest change is we will be needing to use electric switches (Contactors) for the batteries due to the loads. We have a list of the parts we need to get and install so that everything will be ready for them to wire up and test.

We have a Battery Supplier

After recommendations from a number of people (and validated by AJD Marine) we have chosen to use a British Lithium battery supplier called Fogstar. Not only that, but having studied this a lot, we have decided to become Brand Ambassadors for Fogstar and have a referral link (yes, that means we earn commission if you use the link and buy their batteries).

The specific battery that we are going to be getting is their brand-new Drift PRO 24V 280Ah LiFePO4 Leisure Battery (Gen2) (not at all a mouthful). We will have 4 of these in 2S2P configuration. That's two pairs of batteries. Each pair is connected in series to give 48V and the two pairs are connected in parallel to give the 600A we need. The specs are amazing compared to all the cheap batteries that generate so many scare stories. This is very visible in all the communications (including to Victron the industry standard, which we have a lot of devices from) and support for interconnection between batteries. The BMS is also top-rated (which is why the batteries can deliver 300A). We are confident that we would be able to open these batteries and not find any nasty surprises (which we have seen in videos opening the generic rebranded batteries).

The combination of being 24V with a 300A BMS is very rare and means we only need 4 batteries, all the cheaper options were going to need 12 or 16 batteries (and there are huge quality concerns highlighted on the Internet). For this system that is crucial to our safety, we think this is a good investment. While we do not wish to motor very much or very far, it is pretty much essential for entering and leaving harbours, rivers and anchorages. If our Electric Motor system failed, then we could be aground in a dangerous situation very quickly.

Onwards

We now have a long, long list of jobs to get done for us to be ready for AJD Marine to come in the second half of October. While we had originally hoped to be ready to launch before the end of October that is not looking as likely as there are some big jobs that we can't start until we are fully ready for this (the Main Mast and the Anchor Windlass being the biggest).