Twin Alternators

[privileged]

I have twin engines with 80 amp hitachi alts on each engine with external xantrex regulators. Tha problem I am having is when starting the second engine it only adds a few amps extra and keeps turning off the tacho. I have never seen more than 70amps from both alts together. Is there a device to share the sense wire thats compatible with my regulators, I have read about the balmar center feilder, but it is only made for their own regulators.Is there a way of getting more out of these alternators or should I be looking at high out put 125ah ones instead. cheers

[s/v Jedi]

with two engines you need two coupled regulators. Check out the solution from Ample Power too, but I think you will need to replace regulators too.

BTW, two identical alternators on 1 engine need 1 regulator that can supply field current for both alternators.

ciao!
Nick.

[maxingout]

On Exit Only, we had 90 amp Balmar Alternators on each of our engines, and we had xantrex three stage regulation on each alternator.

The rate limiting step of our charging cycle was not the size of our alternators. It was the size of our battery banks. The acceptance rate of our batteries was such that they could not take full alternator output for more than fifteen minutes before being regulated downward.

The only way we could have higher and longer output from our alternators without frying our batteries would have been to add more batteries to the battery bank.

That's one of the reasons that I went to wind generators. In the tradewinds, we had a continuous output from the wind generators at a rate that the batteries could accept without overcharging.