Is there such thing as goin tooooo big on my alternator upgrade?

[Mystic38]

this is exactly the benefit of lipo!!!... there are no other real reasons to invest so much money other than the rapid/efficient charging.. after all, it is pointless to run your engine longer than needed..

Originally Posted by Eastward ho 24

My concern is from what I’ve read lifepo4 will take all the charge it can get leaving you with a situation where your alternator will be running wide open most of the time and I believe this will wear it out sooner. .

You need to provide validated sources for your assertion that your alternator will "wear out sooner" by just doing its job... wear in an alternator is predominantly mechaniical and hence linked to hours run so its really a silly statement and secondly, if you actually believe this then you are saying that you would prefer that the engine wears out instead of the alternator?...

lipo enables the most effective and efficient use of your alternator and engine.. get the job done with both engine and alternator running at high efficiency... or run for 3x longer with regular batteries... if you plan on not doing this..simply save your money and dont go lipo

and finally, you have a 24/27hp engine... be wary of the load you are putting on it.

[Eastward ho 24]

I don't assert my alt will wear out sooner. I can only assume. I just look at it like having a car that is governd at 200mph. It'll do 200mph but if you run it at 200mph all the time I'm sure it will wear out sooner. Not apples to apples just a hunch. I see the 200 amp alternator Maine sells looks like the answer and I do fabricate and weld I'm tempted but I don't know What size belt lengths etc. Any one happen to have a bracket? It's been recommended the balmar 170 and the balmar external regulator will be a good option for a 300 ah lithium bank and a 3gm30f...

[Eastward ho 24]

Is saw this ; forgive me for the trivial questions as this is a new territory for me. Is this the mount I would need


https://markgrasser.com/?product=yanmar-3gm30f

To fit this

https://shop.marinehowto.com/products/cmi-200a-large-frame-j180-mount-extreme-duty-alternator

To my yanmar 3gm30f?

[witzgall]

With a 300ah LiFePo4 bank, our XT-170 alt in a kit with regulator and temp sensor, and Altmount kit is a perfect match for you. It runs cooler than the at165 it replaces, with a smidge more output. Cheaper too.

Mark Grasser has some nice products, including some belt conversion kits for engines that we do not offer. He has the rights to make them under our patent (Utility, slip over the pulley), and in fact is the only company that can do so and sell in the US legally.

If you need help, please contact our tech support.

Chris

[Pizzazz]

Need to start from the basics. Alternators are designed as cheap sources of electricity, not very efficient, but provide 12V DC current which is useful on cars and boats. There are many sources of inefficiencies but the fundamental one is low voltage, high current which results is resistive heat dissipation. Typical 12V alternator efficiency is 60% or below, some are advertised as having higher peak efficiency but only in a narrow operating range. It is safe to assume 50% on the average, especially in sailboat applications. This means that if you are producing 200A at 14V useable current, the alternator is also producing 200 x 14 = 2,800W of heat. This is equivalent of running two household electric heaters at full blast in the small engine room on top of what the engine produces.

So, most people who want to have a large lithium bank and a massive alternator are going down the wrong path. The alternators work best as a supplement source of current, ideally paired with wet cell batteries, producing 60-70A charge for an hour, then gradually dropping as they heat up and the batteries top up. The emphasis here is on cheap batteries, cheap alternators, cheap operations. There is a strong argument to be made regarding charging voltages and external regulation but this is house keeping.

The only way to get out of this mess is to increase the voltage of the alternator but then you get into less popular and more expensive 24V, 48V, etc. solutions. You might as well go to a proper 120V or higher generator which can be 85%+ efficient. This is why the inverter generators are so efficient, they produce DC current at very high voltage, then invert it to AC and despite the losses in the inverter, they are still 82-83% efficient.

The other way is to go a full blown generator where you get high efficiency but you need to maintain fixed rpms for the fixed frequency requirement of AC power generation.

In summary my recommended approach is:

1) If you are optimizing cost, you cannot do better than wet cells plus a cheap alternator with regulation but do not go too crazy because you are heat limited.

2) If you like solar, optimize for that (massive solar plus lithium) but note the cost and capacity to manage cloudy days.

3) If you want quick charging of a massive lithium bank, then get a proper generator and a respective charger but note that that once you have an easy to use generator, you may be better off using it directly for large loads (bunch up cooking, hot water and water maker run times, then you do not need the storage element.

Choose one of the three options and be happy. You can modify it, like add a little bit of solar in option 1 for backup and redundancy. But if you do not have a plan, you will end up buying too much on one (eg too much battery capacity), then fixing your solar, then fixing your charging situation and you will end up spending thousands of dollars for an overspec’d system.

SV Pizzazz

[motretu]

what is needed is an engine mounted/driven high frequency/voltage alternator feeding an inverter that can put out the required voltage/current/power for charging the battery bank of choice. this gets the charging efficiency up, alternator heat and size down, and the inverter can be mounted in a cool area away from the engine compartment and have its own cooling fan. sounds like an adaptation of what honda gensets have been doing for many years.

does such a kit exist?

[svJasmine]

Be careful with lifpo and an alternator. When the BMS says stop while charging, the diodes will blow every time. I haven't read this whole thread, and this may have been mentioned, but wanted to speak up.

[sy_gilana]

If you want the ultimate alternator, look no further than the Delstar Series 180 brushless alternators. Nearly 500 A out of some of them, they will outlast any other by a long way. web page is www.dixie-electric.com
If I had spare cash to throw at my engine, it would be one of these, and a Davco filter.
There are better things out there than Balmar and Racor.

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by motretu

what is needed is an engine mounted/driven high frequency/voltage alternator feeding an inverter that can put out the required voltage/current/power for charging the battery bank of choice. this gets the charging efficiency up, alternator heat and size down, and the inverter can be mounted in a cool area away from the engine compartment and have its own cooling fan. sounds like an adaptation of what honda gensets have been doing for many years.

does such a kit exist?

I believe it may, the Triskel may be similar to what your saying.
But sit down when you price one, and good luck on spares, best carry an extra everything. It’s price that really becomes the kicker in many of these discussions, many things are possible but when compared price wise to existing school bus or Surplus Military alternators the attraction breaks down.
I still say if you want to make lots of electricity, use a generator, it is after all made to do just that, your not modifying anything, your using a device as it was intended to be used and most often that is the way to get trouble free service.
Now by all means take advantage of your propulsion’s engine to make electricity if your motoring anyway, to not do so is not using a resource, but to sit at anchor running your propulsion motor to make electricity is not logical in my opinion.

Some just hate a Honda, but $1,000 buys you a 100 Amp charger at 14V, and it’s complete, total cost $1,000. It also adds zero to the running hours of your prime mover motor, requires not installation, nothing is easier to replace and they seem to last for several thousand hours if the oil is changed regularly.
From there you go to a built in generator, and some are of course better than others, but there are some good ones that only weigh 200 lbs and can drive 200 amps of charging, but nothing else, that’s 30 amps at 120 V or close to anyway.

[Taipe]

[QUOTE=Eastward ho 24;3066760]This may sound silly but does the serpentine belt conversion have anything to do with heat or efficiency?


Probably a little less belt slippage when alternator is at full load. My friends' experiences with Electromax is that their serpentine kit ought to be reliable, provided that the kit is off their shelf (meaning no special ordered crankshaft pulley). Their alternators are likely to be a different story though and I would steer clear of them for that, also based upon friends' experiences.

[Nemesis33]

I've got an Electromaxx SHO alternator on a Nanni 30. We're going into our 4th season charging a 550ah bank of AGM's. Very happy with it. It only takes a couple of hours to charge the bank up from half dead.

[rom]

Originally Posted by motretu

what is needed is an engine mounted/driven high frequency/voltage alternator feeding an inverter that can put out the required voltage/current/power for charging the battery bank of choice. this gets the charging efficiency up, alternator heat and size down, and the inverter can be mounted in a cool area away from the engine compartment and have its own cooling fan. sounds like an adaptation of what honda gensets have been doing for many years.

does such a kit exist?

Yes, it is called a rectifier. Not an inverter. it is super cheap (doesn't have to be MG), works pretty well, and can be external to the alternator. The other part is called a voltage regulator, it is also super cheap (doesn't have to be balmar), works pretty well and can be external too.

[s/v michaela]

If you really have your heart set on a HO alternator,,,,,, I have a brand new electromaax 160 amp I'll sell for $500. That's $250 less than the ones I just looked up on Ebay....jus sayin....

[tommo85]

It can certainly be done! I hung a 210 amp Leece Neville alternator from the front of our 30HP engine 2 years ago using a custom (super heavy duty!) bracket direct from the engine mounts and a 6 groove serpentine belt. We removed the internal and fitted a Balmar regulator to it. All in for around $500 I think, but I had access to a machine shop at the time and did all the work myself. Alternator is https://www.finditparts.com/products...le-avi160j2008, was $100 cheaper when I ordered..

With 400AH AGMs when they're depleted after an overnight sail we see 170A flowing into them in the morning, decreasing over the first hour of motoring to ~100A. We're really happy with the efficiency of the setup, which in our book is measured in not needing to have the engine running for long periods to get a good chunk of charge into the house bank, while being able to run the watermaker at the same time.

The gotcha is definitely in the mounting IMO, that'll make or break the reliability of this system so worth investing a lot of time and over-engineering them.

[argonauta1]

Some 20 years ago, I redesigned the charging system on our Beneteau 440. We removed the engine driven refrigeration (the worst possible) and installed a 12 V Glacier Bay system. That left the belt drive off the engine shaft available to drive a second alternator. I selected an Amptech J310Se 300 amp truck unit with a Stealth dual-sensing HD regulator. Including the existing 90 Amp hour original unit we ended up with a highly functional very powerful charging capability. We also carried two solar panels and a wind gen. Obviously we upgraded electrical storage. We kept the existing gels and added four golfcart 6 volt in series/parallel to provide 400 amp hour 12 Volt storage. A combiner hooked up the two banks and we charged both at the gel rate. This gave us an overall storage capacity of 950 amp hours. Operating we could run the fridge and watermaker, while charging batteries from a low of say 70% to around 90% in about 45 minutes.

On our subsequent circumnavigation, we had little problem and saved many hours of engine time which beside the ever ready electrical power, we enjoyed much more sailing and spent much less time listening to the diesel.

Obviously advances in state of the art electrics both in consumption reduction and charging to weight ratios means a whole different system selection. Overall though, enhanced electrical generation and a large storage capacity is the way to go for preparing a coastal cruiser for serious offshore sailing. Bigger is better!