Hello and welcome to today's extra-special secret episode
not authorized by Anna.
I wanted to share with you the process that I'm going to
take to install a new toy that I've bought
[Intro Music from BenSound.com]
Those of you that been watching for a while might remember when we went out cruising in October all I did was
worry about the batteries.
And that's mainly because I have no real visibility
of what they're doing charge wise.
As a result I did some research and bought a
BM1 marine battery monitor I think it's called. This is a basically a
display panel that connects up to the batteries via a shunt and will give a
rough, no a fairly accurate - hopefully - reading of the charge going in and out
of the batteries so that we can basically, when we're cruising more
can keep a better eye on what electricity we're using.
There's a few things that come in the box
Most importantly the instruction book
This is the 100 amp
shunt that gets installed in the battery bay and all of the current has to go through it
Then there's this cable connector
the monitor itself which has a cable coming
at the back
five meters of cable
that's off the back of the battery monitor
and this cable
obviously the first step is to
work out where it should go so I've marked out a section here that I need to cut in the
wall in order to mount the panel
I'm just going to start by drilling some holes
for in the corners where I need to cut the wood
Next up is the bit I'm a little
bit nervous about which is actually cutting the wood. I've got my jigsaw here and
I've checked there's no obstructions on the other side of the wood and measured
that my blade goes through okay so here goes
The next job is to put this seal on and attach these wires into this terminal
connector and then these wires also have to go into the terminal connector
It gives you a little diagram in the book
several hours later I have now run the
five meter cable from the engine bay where the batteries are
through a hole - the hole in the hull, into the electrical cupboard, under the stairs
and up into the cupboard where the monitor will go which took lots of battling
The next steps are for me to connect the shunt to the batteries and
also to connect the monitor to the shunt cable which I think I actually do first
So I've passed the cable through from the battery bank and it now comes
out this whole that I cut and I've connected it using the terminal block
following the instructions to the display panel.
I lined up the wires
color-wise. There is no second orange one less you are connecting to your
starter battery which I'm not.
I'm just in the final stages of fitting the
battery monitor. The one thing to note is that it comes with a very short
connector that goes from the shunt to your battery bank so I've had to go out
and buy one that's double the length because the bit of wood that I can
attach the shunt to is the opposite side of the batteries so the battery's
negative row is far away.
so here's the the red positive wire to the monitor
through the 5m cable
everything else is connected into the shunt which I've
attached to the side there. There's my cable going into the negative and everything
else that was attached to the negative is attached to this side of the shunt
I've just connected everything up and you can see there's no power draw from the battery
at the moment.
The charge is a little bit low - it's at 83%. 84%
but that's because I haven't been charging for the last day.
So I'm just going to turn on the fridge and the toilet and you can see the discharge
value going up.
I'm just gonna turn them off again because I've had it on for a few
minutes I've done that a few times and now I need to connect in the solar and
so then I'll turn on the battery charger as well
I've turned on the battery
charger because I'm connected to shore power at the moment
As you can see the voltage has
gone up which you would expect when the batteries are charging
I guess 21 amps
must be the flow that's going in and it's gonna take five hours to charge so
Thanks for joining me for the install of my bm1 battery monitor made by NASA marine
Full disclosure I have had a chat with one of their very helpful engineers
while I've been installing this product because I made the assumption that the big beefy
wire going into the batteries was the connection going back to power
everything on the boat and after I wired everything through the first time I
wasn't seeing any draw being recorded on the device when I was turning lights on
and the reason for that turned out to be because other wires go into the negative
connections on the battery and the manual does say that you shouldn't have
that but I had assumed stupidly that these were just connections to monitor
the battery bank for the old legacy little dial
I was wrong because I
disconnected everything this morning to see if the monitor would suddenly start
working and then lo and behold nothing would power on on the boat so as soon as
I connected up the correct wire on the shunt suddenly it started working
You can have absolutely no other negative connectors to your batteries so I've
even got the solar connector that the positive one goes on to the positive
connector of the battery and the negative one goes on to the shunt for
the battery monitor
I'm very interested to see how much power we are using just as
a general rule and also how much solar we're generating
I'm gonna put together another video where I monitor our battery usage using the
battery monitor
I'll share that with you in the coming weeks
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Thanks for watching - I'll see you again soon