Trojan Boat Forum

Hello,

I'm planning on makeing upgrades to my battery setup to ensure power for startups and to have enough capaicty to get me through the night. I have a three batery setup now with port and starbord starting/house batteries and a dedicated genny battery. I'm considering Blue Sea charger with isolators/relays. Does anyone have any experience with this brand?

Blue Sea is a well known brand for marine power. I have several Blue Sea devices on my boat and have had no problems.

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Also a lot of useful information on their website
https://www.bluesea.com/

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I am in the process of installing a new battery system. I am using the Blue Sea 3 bank battery switch with a couple of ACR's to combine the banks for charging and disconnecting the banks for use when no charging source is available. I have used Blue Sea products on several previous boats and find them to be well made. I do have one complaint in that they make templates for cutting the dash that are sometimes not full size which makes it a pain to make the cuts. I have brought this problem to the sales people at Blue Sea and the last few panels have had a full size template. I like that they will make custom labels for switch panels to suit your particular need. My boat only had two starting batteries and no house bank. I am adding a bank of 3 group 24 deep cycles for the house bank.

I think you are not looking at the problem correctly.
You need a 4th battery a large deep discharge battery dedicated for your house load. The genny battery should be charged only by the genny and not connected to any other load.... so in this case a three bank charger does the job, each engine battery and the house.
I would use one engine alternator to charge the house battery and the other engine to charge both engine batteries using an ACR if you wish. Reason: as the house should be the battery that gets discharged the most I want it to get the full power of one alternator.
I converted all my lights to LED and so have not removed them from the Trojan circuit in the engine harness.... my fridge, electric heads and stereo draw from the house battery which I find to be a suitable setup for anchoring out and I have yet to see my engine batteries get low.... I do have the crossover if needs be. Also the genny is always there to deal with any unexpected situation. I am regularly away from shore power a week+ at a time. Regular genny charging twice per day keeps things right... it is on for breakfast and dinner generally anyway.
I hope this gives you something else to think about in your planning.......

I'm working on mine this winter. two starting , four 6v deep cycle, and a isolated gen battery. when im done both starting and house bank will be isolated when charging off the charger. when underway i will be able to charge all three banks from the engines, if its a short run i can isolate and not charge the house bank to avoid short, incomplete charging duration which can shorten the life of deep cycles. i will also be able to combine the charge from both alternators to either or both engines. if I have any bank go bad I will be able to isolate it and take it out of the loop.
using blue seas 3 bank charger, two acrs, and three battery switches. I plan on keeping the house bank isolated from the engines and charge it primarily from shore power and the generator in the hope of extending its life span.

That's a darn nice charger, and when mine finally goes, this is the one I will get...

My F32 is me as of weeks ago, but from what I can tell, there is a dedicated battery for each engine, which also power various items on the boat. There is a third batter that looks like it gets installed near the generator. I assume it is to power the generator, but there are a few other busses that connect to it, as I assume at the moment, to power add-on electronics.

A batter charger has 3 banks; 2x2A maintenance chargers, and 1x15A variable rate charger for the gen battery. I am assuming that this battery gets no charge underway. As far as I know, the previous owner has not used the generator in over a decade.

My previous boat was set up with 1 battery for each motor and I had 2 12v forklift batteries in parallel attached to a pass-though inverter. The inverter worked similar to a UPS in the sense that when AC power was applied (shore power) it would pass the AC through and charge the batteries. It is a 100A/2000W RMS unit and I had it tied into my single 30A main breaker.

I am planning to move it over to my F-32 and I decided to tie it in to one of the 30A shore power connections. Since my harbor only supplies a single 30A service, I will probably always be in x-over mode. If my generator works at all, then I can switch over to that periodically to power take the AC load and recharge the inverter batteries periodically. Otherwise, I will probably delete the generator that this will become my main source of power when away from the pier.

yorklyn wrote:I'm working on mine this winter. two starting , four 6v deep cycle, and a isolated gen battery. when im done both starting and house bank will be isolated when charging off the charger. when underway i will be able to charge all three banks from the engines, if its a short run i can isolate and not charge the house bank to avoid short, incomplete charging duration which can shorten the life of deep cycles. i will also be able to combine the charge from both alternators to either or both engines. if I have any bank go bad I will be able to isolate it and take it out of the loop.
using blue seas 3 bank charger, two acrs, and three battery switches. I plan on keeping the house bank isolated from the engines and charge it primarily from shore power and the generator in the hope of extending its life span.

This is exactly what I'm looking at. Do you have a diagram for your setup? I'm not clear on how to separate out the starting batteries from the house batteries as my current setup (original Trojan setup) uses both starting batteries as house batteries, splitting the 12v system between batteries.

Go to Blue seas web site https://www.bluesea.com/ then click on the the far right tab at the top top that says "view Catalog. go to page 137. Im using the "three battery/two engine" diagram. you need three eseries 9001e 4 position battery switches, two si/ACR relays. im using the MRBF fuses that connect directly to the batteries. These eliminate the need for the old push button breakers that are mounted in your battery box. im also using two additional ANL fuses from the House battery switch , one for each of the 60amp leads to the panel since the fuses at the batteries are 150amp.
with a standard charger the acrs would charge all three batteries when hooked to shore power. the p12 charger is able to detect the acrs and will not combine the batteries when charging. this way each battery is individually charged depending on its state of charge.
ill be finishing my system very soon and try to post some more pictures and info.