cheesegas

That's why when I remove my oven/hob unit, it'll open up a nice big space underneath, perfect for storing less used appliances like the air fryer, stick blender etc

Ah you're right, misread it!

Have you changed where the other side of the lamp connects to? A standard alternator install will have one side of the lamp connected to positive and the other goes to the alternator which acts as a current sink when the engine is off. However, the Zeus is a current source, not sink; you'll need to connect one side of the lamp to negative and the other to the Zeus.

This all very much sounds like the conversion from internal to external regulation hasn't been done properly. I reckon the internal regulator is still connected to the brushes. For negative regulation, one brush should be connected to +12v and the other via the regulator to negative. Nothing else should be connected to the brushes... The Adverc does not stand alone like the Zeus, it relies on using the internal regulator when it's not pulsing the field up to get 14.4v etc. If you had an Adverc connected previously and simply connected the wire coming out of the alternator to the Zeus, the internal regulator is still connected and will be doing all manner of weird things in parallel with the Zeus! You should have a little pile of bits of potted PCB which you chopped out the alternator to modify it for external regulation.

It functions exactly the same whether in P or N mode, as Ian says - the same current passes through the regulator in either, and the same current flows in the same direction in the field winding. The alternator doesn't know any difference what mode the regulator is in; the field winding is totally independent of the rest of the alternator when externally excited. I'd suggest that you remove the lamp connected to the D terminal, but I do think the internal regulator may not be completely disconnected by the behaviour of the lamp connected to the D terminal you describe.

Hmm, something's not quite with what you've said. There should be nothing connected to the ignition light terminal on the alternator at all - the Zeus controls the light's functions directly, and it's not used as a current limiter like with an internally regulated alternator. There's no need for initial excitation either as I expect (like the Wakespeed) the Zeus applies a small current to the field to get an output on the tacho wire, then when it knows it's spinning, it begins to ramp up to full field current.

Having an inverter doesn't mean you have to use it and all your electricity hungry appliances year round. My setup is just as efficient as one without an inverter in winter... In my last post I mentioned the best way to do it off grid is to use gas/woodburner during winter to cook, and free electricity from solar in summer. As I mentioned before, if you're new to living off grid, it's very good advice to avoid heating things with electricity until you get an idea of how much energy your solar yields and how much energy various appliances use. Then you can look into changing your setup to suit your needs. I CC and live off grid and I'm quite vocal about recommending lithium batteries with lots of solar and electric kettles/induction hobs/air fryers to people. In summer, you save money on gas (although this is only £100 or so a year) and get greater convenience. With ample solar and the correct battery setup, there is no reason to minimise your electricity consumption in summer; quite the opposite, make the most of all that free energy raining down on your roof! FYI I don't have to run my engine to generate electricity for 8 months of the year.

Not sure why they call it an air fryer as it's more like a really tiny fan oven. Mine's definitely too small for more than a couple of Yorkshires but it makes a cracking roast beef in half an hour. Uses about 40ah which is replaced in less than an hour in summer, but if I fitted a bigger MPPT it would probably come mostly from solar directly. In winter it's stovetop casserole beef though!

I like to cook but I've found I rarely use the oven...it's used for the occasional pizza from Tescos when I'm feeling lazy and that's it. Must be a good couple of months since it was last on. In winter, I do casseroles and baked potatoes on the woodburner, and in summer I have a little airfryer which heats up the boat less than the oven!

The advantage of using an induction hob and electric kettle is that you don't need to use gas in the summer months to boil water and cook. With the correct setup - a modest amount of lithium battery capacity and around 1kw of solar, you can cook mostly with electricity for a good 6 months of the year without having the run the engine to charge the batteries. A 13kg gas bottle now lasts me around 8 months as it's only used to cook in winter and for the instant water heater. Not a massive money saver but the convenience of not having to change the bottle and using an electric kettle is nice. I do however agree that if you're new to being off grid, the general rule of not using electric heating things is good to stick by! My alternator is switched off in late April until the solar gets less in Oct. Looking at re-doing the kitchen with a 2 burner gas hob and a 1 ring induction hob for year-round cooking, to replace the usual 4 burner + oven stove I have at the moment.

Either do it yourself or get some more 12v circuits added, it'll greatly reduce power consumption as you can fit USB A or C sockets to charge devices, and also charge your laptop with a 12v laptop adaptor. I highly highly recommend not buying the cheapo universal 12v laptop chargers on ebay/amazon as they tend to run very hot and can be extremely electrically noisy which puts strain on the DC power supply inside your laptop. Most major manufacturers will sell a car charger for their laptops which is more expensive but better made and won't void the warranty. If you have a big 15" laptop though, check that your 12v wiring is up to the task; the laptop charger could draw around 10-12a, and if your wiring is too thin it'll overheat. More of a problem on older boats. If you have 500W+ of solar, you'll generally find that power is plentiful in the summer but if you go off grid in the darker months you'll need to run the engine. Fit a battery monitor like a Victron Smartshunt or BMV before the inverter ideally, so you can keep track of the battery state of charge, and get some idea of how much energy you need to put into the batteries to replace what you've used. General rule is to avoid using anything with a heating element in it unless the engine is running; exceptions are if you have lithium batteries (which I doubt you do) or if you have lots of solar and the sun's out. What record player is it? Older ones have an AC synchronous motor which can be sensitive to some inverters and either run too slow or not at all. Newer ones generally have a DC motor powered by an AC to DC converter which means they're not that sensitive.

Worth noting that Maxview use Teltonika RUT260 routers with a bit of custom coding to work with the app. They're about £150 which, when combined with a Poynting antenna for about £80, is significantly cheaper than a Maxview package. Not as easy to set up as you don't get a nice app, but still straightforwards.

I'm also an off grid liveaboard and had the same thoughts - however, my setup hasn't changed for just over a year now in its current incarnation and it's required absolute zero maintenance or manual intervention other than replacing/tensioning the alternator belt. 60-70a is asking a lot of a single V belt! My advice is to avoid the Pi setup as it's quicker, easier and only a tiny bit cheaper than a Cerbo. What solar controller do you have? Only the seriously old/PWM ones don't have a ve.direct/ve.can port.

Agree with Ian above. Also, the price of a Pi4 with case and power supply plus all the USB dongles for an MPPT, ve.bus for the inverter etc is very close to the price of a Cerbo S or even a GX if you have two MPPTs. You can make DIY ve.direct cables but these lack the galvanic isolation of the Victron ones. With VenusOS Large on a Cerbo GX, you also have access to NodeRed which makes the programming possibilities almost limitless. You can add 3rd party Ethernet relay boards for unlimited outputs and so on.

Great! Do you have it talking to a Cerbo over canbus? DVCC doesn't yet work with the Zeus which is a shame, it would do away with the voltage sense cables.

Little loads add up very fast. My compost toilet extractor, wifi router, Fire tablet (on the cabin wall for system monitoring) all add up to 1 amp. This is 24ah a day! LED tape is pretty damn inefficient in terms of watts consumed and lumens output compared to something like an LED torch for a couple of reasons. As it's on a tape, there's no easy way for the LEDs to shed their heat, no heatsink...so they run hot, which in turn reduces their output. The high brightness tape is a lot more inefficient too. Also, so you can cut it to length and use a constant voltage driver, there's loads of current limiting resistors built into the tape, as you probably know, this way of driving LEDs is far less efficient than a constant current driver...but then you wouldn't be able to cut to length.

South Dock don't charge to lock in and out but they do charge to moor up inside. There's a visitor berth in South Dock at the blue crane end of the marina, right in the corner. I also wouldn't fancy single handing a 60' narrowboat from the South Dock lock to Greenland, it's very tight with lots of fibreglass boats!

I think everyone likes solar! I have 1kw of panels on the roof and no space for any more. Fridge stays on year round, the first year I was on the boat I turned it off and used the great outdoors and gave myself the worst food poisoning ever. And a fox pissed on my fridge box. These regulators are great for liveaboards without shore power as you can put a huge amount of energy into the battery very quickly. My alternator usually gets switched off around May and solar does everything including charging the starter battery. That's about average I think, if a little on the high side. In winter, cooking with gas, I use around 70-80ah per 24hrs. That's with the fridge running, laptop charging if I'm working from home, wifi router on 24/7, being reasonably careful with power. In summer, the inverter stays on 24/7 and I use my electric kettle, toaster and induction hotplate, usage goes up to around 2 or 3 times that.

That’s really really crap. My favourite time to go from Limehouse to teddington is 6am on a Sunday in summer. Nice empty river, you beat most of the Clippers as they start at just past 7am, really peaceful.

The reg itself may use very little but it'll still be powering the alternator's field which I think for the Zeus is up to 10 amps, so there's a good bit of current flowing in that cable which explains the sense cable. Yep, that's why I mentioned it was odd - perhaps a large difference will damage it, but a 1-2v difference won't. Would be nice to know from them.

I expect it's because there's around 10 amps flowing in the supply cable, which will induce a small voltage across it, making it unreliable to use to sense battery voltage. The sense line will pass a matter of milliamps which will mean the voltage at the battery end of the cable is the same as the voltage at the regulator end of it. It does seem odd that it'll cause damage if there's a 1v or so difference between sense and supply cables though, and I don't think it's mentioned in the manual.

Pylontech and similar are actually a bit different - if you were to chain up say 4 of them, the Cerbo talks to the first one only via CANbus - this automatically assigns it the Master status. This master battery then talks to the other three via a proprietary protocol and aggregates the data and any cell overvoltage etc error. That's why, for example with Pytontechs, each battery has a CAN and RS485 port (connecting anything to either port will automatically make it the master) and two Link ports to connect battery to battery. Most of them are sensitive to which Link port you use too, as some also assign master status based on the first one in the chain. I'd strongly advise not putting Pylontechs for one on a boat - they're not designed for things that are damp and move. No conformal coating on the boards, mechanically things aren't very well fixed down inside compared to something like a Victron inverter. Seen a good few fail within the first year, and one install in the engine bay of a large Dutch barge didn't even last a month.

Whilst it's indeed possible to control the charge/discharge FETs externally, this is the reverse of how other BMSs work. For example, RECbms/Pylontech will take control of all charge sources and tell them when to start and stop charging rather than being told to switch on and off. The contactor/FET in these BMSs is a last resort, which is how it should be in my opinion. However, having an external battery gauge such as the Victron BMV along with a JBD BMS is a good interim solution though; setting the BMVs relay to close at 100% becomes the command to stop charging, and opening it at 95% or whatever is the allow to charge. This will however result in short cycling if it's being charged with a heavy load on the battery which is less than the current the charger can supply I largely agree with this, but there are more and more drop ins appearing on the market with CANbus. Renogy's newest offering is fully Victron compatible for example, and there's a few more coming to market, can't remember the brands offhand though! There are of course Pylontechs etc which have an internal BMS and will speak to a Cerbo happily to take control over charge sources, but they are designed for domestic installations and I would not recommend using them on a boat for a few reasons.

Yep, apologies, missed out that bit! Those features are designed for lithium batteries.

The Bluetooth is just for configuration, there's no need to use the app once it's all set up. The only other direct competitor on the market, the Wakespeed, is configured by using a piece of extremely old software to send it text commands which is fiddly and very easy to get wrong. I expect the 'next generation' is marketing speak for saying it's easier to configure. Older external controllers like the Sterling and Adverc are designed for lead batteries and lack features like the ability to switch to float voltage, reducing load at low RPM and integrating with a CANbus system like a Victron Cerbo to dynamically reduce charge current to avoid damaging the batteries or management system by charging too quickly.