Catamaran owners how are your alternators wired to charge the house?

[belizesailor]

Originally Posted by colemj

Nothing specific there about NextStep - all external regulators that I have used do this. Even the ones that state they have special circuitry to prevent it. Best thing to do when fully charged is to turn on some amps.

Mark

Yes, that's their recommendation...works sometimes too.

Seems like building a simple circuit to continue to feed the tachs would not be hard, but its not found its way up my todo list yet...apparently not on Ample Power's either.

[SeaKing]

Originally Posted by yardie

Thanks Dave.

I'll need to look again. There are a few solenoids down there. Outside of the factory bundle there are wires running everywhere as components were added and removed. I have a block of burned out knife fuses. no idea where they go nor what they do.

Our boat has 2 80amp alternators into 2 sterling digital regulators. I think they can be paralleled to the house bank. We did have an incident where both regulators went overvoltage and shutdown. Since they did it simultaneously I believe they are connected somehow.

Just check out Sterling powers website for their products, Sterling Power USA - Marine Battery Chargers, Marine Battery Isolators, DC to DC Waterproof Battery Charger, Advanced Alternator Regulators, IP68 Chargers, ProConnect Battery Relays, DC Powered Battery Chargers & Alternator Powered Battery Chargers

Call them and let them know what you have and I am sure they can advise on how to improve your charging. I was just looking into that but decided to just replace the bad regulator I have and continue operations as they have been as we are planning to sell the boat in the (hopefully near)future. I only just found out/ figured out that with both engines running only one is charging the batteries at a time because the second operating alternator will see the batteries as full due to the high voltage being put in by the first operating alternator and not charge at a high rate. That is solved by having another special box to run both alternator's charging thru to combine.

[Sonosailor]

Our Tobago 35 alternators are 55A, self-regulating. I switched them to feed directly to the house batteries via a single stud. At the stud, a feed goes to a diode block that splits to two lines at an advertised loss of .25V. These go to the two start batteries. I'd like to use only 1 start battery to start two engines, but when I wire it up the Yanmar control panels set off the alarm. Can't figure that one out!