Off Topic

[buster 0]

I know some of you gotta have boats. Since I am a Sparky as most of you are, and I am sure that you get hit up on "help me's" all the time. Now I am going to hit all of you up. A guy at my work has a boat that has a 24VDC system. He has a 12VDC trolling motor. He wants to run his trolling motor off this 24VDC system. As you guessed (know) it has 2 batteries series. I dont think he should go off 1 of the batteries cause it would cause an imbalance. I cant find a product to convert from 24VDC to 12VDC at 70+ Amps. Any link help please. I dont want to build anything.

[Ken Moore 23]

I would just use one battery myself. But I did find this on the internet: http://zahninc.com/sd12.html

[paulengr 44]

On a dredge, we had two 8D batteries in series. If you've never seen an 8D, it's about 50-80 lbs. It is about 18" wide and about 24" long. Looks basically like 6 car batteries in a single box. The only other people I know of routinely using these things are utilities (backup UPS on an industrial scale) and fire trucks (starting currents on the engines). Let's just say that changing a battery was a job to say the least and I'm glad that I was doing a lot of other mechanical work at the time because I don't think I'm in shape enough anymore to be throwing 8D's around while bouncing around on boat decks. At least in that case, we just put all our 12VDC stuff on one battery. Regardless, you always change batteries together even if one is clearly weak. The reason is that if you put a strong battery with a weak one, the strong one will do all the work. The weak one will not charge fully, and the situation will simply get worse over time. Try www.defender.com. They have a bunch of battery monitors, battery interrupters (preserve charge in the event that your batteries are draining to allow you to still restart engines), DC-DC converters (for 24VDC -> 12 VDC or vice versa), and some voltage relays to allow you to charge batteries independently, avoiding the above issue at least as far as charge/discharge goes. I can't vouch for anything else they sell but I can't count the number of bubblers (ice eaters) that I bought. The ones I got from them lasted for years give or take a few dozen cords eaten by props. I can't say the same for some of the others.

[IO_Rack 181]

You didn't mension the space requirements. I would consider using a third battery on a seperate charging system. The small chargers are relatively inexpensive. I personally would not want to risk draining your starting power when verturing at sea. "We're going to need a bigger boat." That just came to mind.... may he rest in peace.

[TConnolly 13]

Your friend may want to consider running the trolling motor off its own battery. It sucks to be in the middle of a lake with a dead main battery. Edited 15 Feb 2008 by Alaric

[milldrone 0]

buster, I found this http://www.vanner.com/htm/pro_01.htm?serie...mp;a=a&pt=3 Vaughn