Morning all, I thought it was time to do another post on our electronics upgrades to Nautilus…
So, what’s changed?
Well firstly I managed to loose the original diagram I did in Adobe Illustrator!! I rebuilt my laptop and I forgot to back it up!! Anyway, it gave me the chance to start again and make things a bit clearer (I think I like the new version better).
What you see below is v.1.1, which has a couple of key upgrades to my original design…
Firstly, I have put the ARGOFETs back into play. You’ll see them in the bottom left. Each one is connected from it’s respective alternator to both of the Orion DC-2-DC converters. The reason for this is that when i’m motoring on one engine, i can power both of the Orions, thus enabling me to charge the service bank at 60A (rather than 30A). This is on the sensible limit of what you should drive a 115A alternator at, so i’m going watch it carefully as things bed in.
The second big upgrade is that i have moved the hot water heater onto AC2-Out on the Multiplus… “WHY” I hear you ask?…… Well, it allows me to dump any surplus solar energy we generate into heating the Hot Water.
I’ve set a relay in the CERBO GX to tell the Multiplus to turn the Hotwater circuit (AC2-OUT) ON/OFF. Now here’s the really cool bit – I’ve upgraded the Victron Cerbo GX to their ‘Venus OS Large’ firmware that includes some software called ‘NodeRed’. You can then setup a whole bunch of automation rules around how you want things to behave.. (that’s the second screenshot). If you look carefully, you can how I have setup the logic, which is basically:
1) if on shore power, turn on the water heater at 05:30 & 17:30.
2) If we are away from shore and the battery state of charge (SoC) gets to 100% between 11:00 and 15:00, then turn on hot water.
3) when hot water is turned on, then automatically turn off after 1 hour.
and that’s it, I can also manually turn on HW from the touch screen on the computer. All this means I shouldn’t be wasting any solar energy.
Really looking forward to seeing how this all plays out when we set sail from Malta.
