Introduction and thank you- battery bank project

[HRowland]

Hi everyone,
I have been lurking for many months and have learned a lot from both posts and the tutorials done by Mainesail. (also thanks to Nigel Calder for his great book!) I just completed a battery bank modification project on my Ranger Tug R27. I merged the house (two group 27) and thruster (single group 27) banks, installed a Victron battery monitor, added heavy duty bus bars, and did a few other things. It is working well, I have more capacity for the house bank and the thrusters actually work better with 3 batteries in parallel.
I want to thank everyone in this forum for their informative posts.

Here is a a link to a description and pictures of my project on the TugNuts web site.

The TugNuts • View topic - House and Thruster Battery bank merge project

Howard
Ranger Tug R27 "Little Debbie"

[smac999]

1 gauge wire on a 195a bowthruster with a probabal 60-70 foot return run is pretty small.

what's the voltage at the thrusting while running it?

[glenn.225]

HRowland

From your webpage.
"I also discovered that the ACRs are not connected properly by Ranger, they feed +12V directly to the remote LED connection, this is not needed or even recomended by Blue Sea. The minimum connection for the ACR to function is the two batteries and a ground. The additional connections are for a remote status LED and start lockout. I rewired mine and ran a cable forward to have a remote status LED visible from the helm. The start lockout is not used."

I had seen in another site that the ACR should be connected as above, i.e. to both batteries and a positive to LED and neg. I did not see where on the Blue Seas instruction it said not to do this. Just looking for more info.

Edit:OK now I see it just need to read the instructions.

[Bash]

Welcome to the forum.

[Sandero]

Nice work!

[HRowland]

Originally Posted by smac999

1 gauge wire on a 195a bowthruster with a probabal 60-70 foot return run is pretty small.

what's the voltage at the thrusting while running it?

I have never measured at the bow thruster. It is not trivial to do this, it is partially blocked by the AC evaporator unit and ducts. I will check the wire gauge leaving the bow thruster ANL fuse. I do know that the ground return from the bow thruster is 1G, I had to reterminate this cable because the original ground bus had 5/16" studs and the new one I installed has 3/8" studs.

The bow thruster does work well so the cable run voltage drop is not an issue.

Howard

[Zil]

Less voltage drop is more power left in you battery bank.

[Zil]

Nice work. Excellent post on tug nuts.

What is the distance for your cables? Have you measured the actual amp draw of the thrusters?