Lithium Batteries installation

[MtB]

So is it really the rôle of BSS to prevent people from installing systems which wear out and need periodic maintenance? To protect people from finan cial loss and/or their own stupidity?

 

I hold that the risk of a future cell failure in the LA battery is not a good enough reason to ban hybrid LFP/LA systems, if people want to install them in their boats. 

 

 

[rusty69]

3 minutes ago, MtB said:

So is it really the rôle of BSS to prevent people from installing systems which wear out and need periodic maintenance? To protect people from finan cial loss and/or their own stupidity?

 

I hold that the risk of a future cell failure in the LA battery is not a good enough reason to ban hybrid LFP/LA systems, if people want to install them in their boats. 

 

 

Maybe not, but perhaps guided by the manufacturers recommendations and our American cousins practices, it could well be adopted here. Don't cha fink? 

[Alan de Enfield]

2 minutes ago, MtB said:

I hold that the risk of a future cell failure in the LA battery is not a good enough reason to ban hybrid LFP/LA systems, if people want to install them in their boats. 

 

 

Whilst I may agree with you, I also think that the BSS don't give a 'jot' what you (or I)  think is right or wrong, they will do what their 'technical commitee' decide they want to do.

 

Under the 'risk of fires' section they have the authority to make something mandatory that is a possible fire risk (we know that differing lithium technologies have different risk levels), and, in addition, if insurers make a specific requirement  of 'type', hybrid or not, and who is allowed to install then the BSS will just shrug their shoulders and say "sorry chaps, we had no choice".

[MtB]

I agree with you both, I think hybrid systems will end up being banned. It's what bureaucrats do. Mission creep is their raîson d'être, innit. 

 

And all without a single fatality caused by hybrid systems. So they'll know they did the right thing. 

 

Gas cookers will be next. Plenty of deaths have been caused by those. 

 

 

[rusty69]

7 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Whilst I may agree with you, I also think that the BSS don't give a 'jot' what you (or I)  think is right or wrong, they will do what their 'technical commitee' decide they want to do.

I agree. By the time the scheme have deemed it unfit, I will probably have 5 or 6 years of use from a hybrid battery setup onboard. If it is unsafe, it seems rather short sighted not to have done something about it already. However, seeing how long it took them to introduce CO alarms, I am not surprised. I will make my own decision when the time comes.

[nicknorman]

9 minutes ago, MtB said:

So is it really the rôle of BSS to prevent people from installing systems which wear out and need periodic maintenance? To protect people from finan cial loss and/or their own stupidity?

 

I hold that the risk of a future cell failure in the LA battery is not a good enough reason to ban hybrid LFP/LA systems, if people want to install them in their boats. 

 

 

The problem arises due to arse covering and not really understanding the detail. I would draw a likeness with installing a new gas appliance, as you know the overriding requirement is to install it in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions. If for some reason you decide to install it in contravention to the installation instructions, even if it is completely safe, you face a severe uphill battle trying to convince a bureaucrat that it is safe despite the apparent contravention.

 

So it is with the various Li battery and cell manufacturers who state “do not mix with batteries of other chemistries”. Even though they probably mean to not mix with other Li chemistries, the statement is taken at face value by people who have no hands on experience.

[magnetman]

In the case of 'Lifebatteries' the "10 year warranty" is in fact not a 10 year warranty it is a warranty based on number of cycles and assumptions. 

 

"

This Limited Warranty does not cover a Product that has reached its normal end of life due to usage which may occur prior to the Warranty Period. A battery can deliver only a fixed amount of Energy over its life which will occur over different periods of time depending on the application.

For example, cycling the battery more than 2 times daily, may cause the normal end of life to occur before the end of the Warranty Period. The Manufacturer reserves the right to deny a warranty claim...."

This Limitwarrantyed Warranty does nohttps://www.lifebatteries.co.uk/blank-page-2t cover a Product that has reached its normal end of life due to usage which may occur prior to the Warranty Period. A battery can deliver only a fixed amount of Energy over its life which will occur over different periods of time depending on the application.

For example, cycling the battery more than 2 times daily, may cause the normal end of life to occur before the end of the Warranty Period. The Manufacturer reserves the right to deny a warranty claim

49 minutes ago, rusty69 said:

I would think so. When thousands of people have fitted these hybrid systems, manual intervention will be required to remove them again when our proactive BSS and insurance providers deem them not fit for purpose. 

So have the LFP in the cabin and just disconnect when the BS inspection is carried out. The BS is only a snapshot on the day. Would they be concerned if you have ebike batteries in the Boat? or batteries for the electric canoe ?

 

Things can change afterwards. Good reason to have a Lead battery connected to the engine and alternator. Keeps it all straightforward. 

 

There is no lithium bank. 

 

 

Edited February 9 by magnetman

[MtB]

5 minutes ago, magnetman said:

Would they be concerned if you have ebike batteries in the Boat? or batteries for the electric canoe ?

 

Just don't go there! You know what will happen. 

 

 

6 minutes ago, magnetman said:

There is no lithium bank. 

 

An intermittent lithium bank can be hard to find. 

 

 

[rusty69]

4 minutes ago, magnetman said:

So have the LFP in the cabin and just disconnect when the BS inspection is carried out. The BS is only a snapshot on the day. Would they be concerned if you have ebike batteries in the Boat? or batteries for the electric canoe ?

 

Things can change afterwards. Good reason to have a Lead battery connected to the engine and alternator. Keeps it all straightforward. 

 

There is no lithium bank. 

My boat has already been inspected with the hybrid setup in place, and passed the inspection. I will be extremely upset if it turns out that the system is deemed unsafe by future boat safety inspectors, and that I have infact been living in an unsafe environment all this time. 

[MtB]

4 minutes ago, rusty69 said:

My boat has already been inspected with the hybrid setup in place, and passed the inspection. I will be extremely upset if it turns out that the system is deemed unsafe by future boat safety inspectors, and that I have infact been living in an unsafe environment all this time. 

 

I think a boat is a fundamentally 'unsafe' thing to spend a lot of time in. 

 

"Safe" and "Unsafe" are not absolutes. They are (mostly) a matter of opinion. 

 

 

[magnetman]

One of my Boats was passed with a disconnected pile of random lithium batteries enough to blow a hole in the riverbed if I accidentally get the connections wrong. 

 

 

I used to have a car which whizzed around on roads with loads of other cars and even bikes and pedestrians and believe it or not it had a thin metal container with a load of undiluted petrol in it ! 

 

major hazard yet it was for some unknown reason allowed. 

[rusty69]

Just now, MtB said:

 

I think a boat is a fundamentally 'unsafe' thing to spend a lot of time in. 

 

"Safe" and "Unsafe" are not absolutes. They are (mostly) a matter of opinion. 

 

 

Well, yes, but I would expect the opinion of the boat safety inspectors are guided by knowlegeable guidlines which surpass my own. They are afterall trained. I pay rather a lot of money to have my boat checked for safety, so would hope that for at least 1 day every 1460 it is safe for at least 2 hours of that day.

5 minutes ago, magnetman said:

One of my Boats was passed with a disconnected pile of random lithium batteries enough to blow a hole in the riverbed if I accidentally get the connections wrong. 

 

 

I used to have a car which whizzed around on roads with loads of other cars and even bikes and pedestrians and believe it or not it had a thin metal container with a load of undiluted petrol in it ! 

 

major hazard yet it was for some unknown reason allowed. 

Point taken about your boat, but I think it unfair that you introduce cars into the discussion. The boat safety scheme concerns the safety of boats surely, not the people. Clues in the name. We don't have the equivalent car safety scheme, its called an MOT. No mention of safety at all.

[MtB]

1 minute ago, rusty69 said:

Well, yes, but I would expect the opinion of the boat safety inspectors are guided by knowlegeable guidlines which surpass my own. They are afterall trained. I pay rather a lot of money to have my boat checked for safety, so would hope that for at least 1 day every 1460 it is safe for at least 2 hours of that day.

 

Your faith in them is touchingly quaint!

 

Like us gas bods, BSS bods pay about £5k for a couple of weeks coaching in how to compare whatever they are looking at with a set of rules. We/they are not trained in fundamental engineering principles etc; that takes years and a degree. Others have an innate interest and understanding. Fred Dibnah as an example. 

 

What do you mean by 'safe' anyway? It is a matter of degree. Nothing is truly 'safe'. 

 

 

[rusty69]

53 minutes ago, MtB said:

What do you mean by 'safe' anyway? It is a matter of degree. Nothing is truly 'safe'. 

I mean as safe as it can be for the set of guidelines and training that they must adhere to in order to be granted the status of boat safety inspector. That, which I would hope would surpass my own knowlege and that of my clueless neighbour.

Edited February 9 by rusty69

[magnetman]

5 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Your faith in them is touchingly quaint!

 

Like us gas bods, BSS bods pay about £5k for a couple of weeks coaching in how to compare whatever they are looking at with a set of rules. We/they are not trained in fundamental engineering principles etc; that takes years and a degree. Others have an innate interest and understanding. Fred Dibnah as an example. 

 

What do you mean by 'safe' anyway? It is a matter of degree. Nothing is truly 'safe'. 

 

 

Yes. When I was doing my BTEC in marine engineering in 1995/6 the same college was doing the Boat Safety certification scheme. I missed a trick there. I did two yars full time and these buggers were only doing two weeks !!

 

anyway there were random people and I bet if you had asked them none of them would have known what a gripe is or even a forefoot. 

 

Terrible really and I have always made an extra effort to ensure the BSS examiner is a keen Boat owner. 

 

 

Edited February 9 by magnetman

[nicknorman]

16 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

What do you mean by 'safe' anyway? It is a matter of degree. Nothing is truly 'safe'. 

 

Very true. For example in the certification of airliners carrying hundreds of passengers at 35,000’, the certification requirement is not that the wings can never unexpectedly fall off resulting in everyone plummeting screaming to their deaths, rather it is that the probability of this happening is “extremely improbable” and they go on to put a number on it, 1 times 10 to the power -9. What the unit of that event is doesn’t seem to be specified - an hour, a flight maybe. So although a one in a thousand million sounds quite improbable, and you would be pretty unlucky if it were you, a lot of flying goes on around the world and so we can’t be too far off such an event becoming a near certainty.
And if a bad event could happen once in 1,000,000,000 flights that does not mean it will happen on the 1,000,000,000 flight, the laws of probability say it could happen on the first flight, or anywhere in between, or after..

Edited February 9 by nicknorman

[IanD]

15 hours ago, GUMPY said:

 

It will discharge at whatever rate the LA battery will accept.

Watch the video!

 

Which indeed shows that you can connect an LFP battery up in parallel with an LA battery so long as the voltages aren't too different when you do it -- which is hardly news, since this is just what all the hybrid systems do.

 

What it doesn't show is what happens if you have separately charged and loaded LFP and LA systems like @magnetman is proposing and you connect them together when one is at a high voltage/SoC and the other is at a low voltage/SoC -- and as @GUMPY suggests, the current that flows will only be limited be the internal resistances of the batteries (a few milliohms), which could certainly exceed the current limit of the LFP BMS in most cases.

 

Hopefully it will just trip the BMS overcurrent protection which may need a manual reset, but especially on the cheap Chinese drop-in LFP batteries these can be pretty dodgy and self-destruct instead.

 

Which gives a whole new level of meaning to the phrase "may need manual control/monitoring and intervention"... 😉

 

1 hour ago, MtB said:

 

Your faith in them is touchingly quaint!

 

Like us gas bods, BSS bods pay about £5k for a couple of weeks coaching in how to compare whatever they are looking at with a set of rules. We/they are not trained in fundamental engineering principles etc; that takes years and a degree. Others have an innate interest and understanding. Fred Dibnah as an example. 

 

What do you mean by 'safe' anyway? It is a matter of degree. Nothing is truly 'safe'. 

 

 

The problem with any safety regime like BSS is that it can't rely on careful/knowledgeable users (or inspectors) to safely build something which can be dangerous if this is done badly, so the default is to allow things which are inherently safer, enforce obvious precautions on things which are more dangerous, and ban practices which are really dangerous or can't easily be checked to be safe.

 

For example it's relatively easy to make LA batteries reasonably safe by enforcing simple housing/connection/ventilation standards, similar with gas cookers/lockers or petrol engines/generators.

 

LFP batteries are probably safer overall than LA (no explosive gases released when overcharged) so these are likely to be fine on boats -- but this is definitely *not* the case with NMC batteries, and it's not always easy to tell the difference, a lot of NMC ones are quite coy about the chemistry they use -- and the cells can provide huge currents so fusing and protection are probably more important than with LA.

 

Hence the requirements in the USA (ABYC) for professional install (to manufacturer's specifications) or inspection for "lithium batteries on boats", otherwise there's nothing stopping a DIYer putting a big NMC battery on board made from cheap secondhand EV batteries (because they're cheap!!!) but without the protection/certification that these have, and ending up with a horrendous battery fire if things go wrong, which then sets adjacent boats on fire -- which is exactly the kind of thing BSS is there to prevent.

 

The problem with most (all?) hybrid LA/LFP installation is that they *are* invariably DIY, and it's pretty much guaranteed that they can't be built to follow the LFP manufacturer's specs because these invariably say "Do NOT connect in parallel with other batteries of different chemistries" -- to prevent people doing stupid things with them (but a hybrid system *can* be safe...)

 

So even if the hybrid system is put together by somebody who knows that they're doing and used by somebody who doesn't abuse it, it's almost impossible for an insurance/BSS inspector to sign it off as safe, because the differences between a safe and unsafe system can be hard to spot -- and it breaks the fundamental rule of "use within manufacturers specifications" generally used to say that something is safe without a deep-dive analysis and looking at detailed component specifications.

 

It's why I don't think you'll ever see any professional boatbuilder installing such a system, because they (or somebody else) has to sign it off as safe -- and this is going to be pretty much impossible when the LFP supplier specifically says you shouldn't use them like this. And it's why insurance companies and BSS are likely to ban them, as part of their efforts to come up with a sensible "lithium on boats" policy.

 

If any of the drop-in LFP suppliers do start supplying batteries where they're confident enough in their BMS/protection to allow them to be used in parallel with LA then this could all change and hybrid systems can be allowed and certified, so long as it's checked that the LFP batteries are "parallel LA approved" by the manufacturer an inspector can sign this off.

Edited February 9 by IanD

[magnetman]

1 hour ago, nicknorman said:

Very true. For example in the certification of airliners carrying hundreds of passengers at 35,000’, the certification requirement is not that the wings can never unexpectedly fall off 

 

 

Something similar happens with ships

 

 

53 minutes ago, IanD said:

  

 

If any of the drop-in LFP suppliers do start supplying batteries where they're confident enough in their BMS/protection to allow them to be used in parallel with LA then this could all change and hybrid systems can be allowed and certified, so long as it's checked that the LFP batteries are "parallel LA approved" by the manufacturer an inspector can sign this off.

 

The Lifebatteries geyser is already doing this. The webshite looks pretty amateur so I don't know if it is a genuine player but he thinks it works. 

 

 

Edited February 9 by magnetman

[jonathanA]

8 hours ago, IanD said:

It's why I don't think you'll ever see any professional boatbuilder installing such a system, because they (or somebody else) has to sign it off as safe -- and this is going to be pretty much impossible when the LFP supplier specifically says you shouldn't use them like this. And it's why insurance companies and BSS are likely to ban them, as part of their efforts to come up with a sensible "lithium on boats" policy.

 

why would if you were building a new boat   ?... presumably for new build the boat builder would install a 'proper'* system - indeed like you have or at least one that they (boat builder) are prepared to install/warrant. I guess you could still have a customer 'insisting' the builder does something stupid, but that's a different conversation.   

 

* proper - however anyone chooses to define that !!! which could be a well designed hybrid i suppose.

 

I'm not sure i've seen an answer to the how do i 'drop' some lithiums in to an otherwise bog standard starter/domestic twin alternator set up.  maybe there is no safe/sensible way other than swap to a 'fancy' alternator designed to charge Lithiums rather than automotive LA's ?

 

 

[magnetman]

Maybe a job for a travelpower instead of the second alternator and a mains powered lithium battery charger. 

 

 

The standard 12v alternator seems to be the weak link. 

 

If it was done via a travelpower then the main domestic battery could be 48v with converters for small 12v consumers. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of consumers on modern craft are mains powered via inverters. 

 

48v is nice. 

 

[MtB]

1 hour ago, magnetman said:

Maybe a job for a travelpower instead of the second alternator and a mains powered lithium battery charger. 

 

 

The standard 12v alternator seems to be the weak link. 

 

If it was done via a travelpower then the main domestic battery could be 48v with converters for small 12v consumers. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of consumers on modern craft are mains powered via inverters. 

 

48v is nice. 

 

 

One of those £3,500 Travel Powers you mean?

 

 

[IanD]

9 hours ago, magnetman said:

 

 

Something similar happens with ships

 

 

 

The Lifebatteries geyser is already doing this. The webshite looks pretty amateur so I don't know if it is a genuine player but he thinks it works. 

 

 

It's not a matter of whether he thinks it works, or even if it does -- it's a matter of whether he can convince a BSS inspector or an insurance company, and possibly whether he has liability insurance should something go wrong with one of his installations.

 

Anyone installing LFP batteries in parallel with LA when the battery manufacturer specifically says not to do this is not going to find this easy... 😉

Edited February 9 by IanD

[magnetman]

59 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

One of those £3,500 Travel Powers you mean?

 

 

Oh maybe not then. Perhaps an inverter running off the AGM bank charged by the 175A Iskra alrernator powering a lithium specific charger. 

 

At the end of the day the issue is with inappropriate rotating electrics so perhaps this is where things need to change. 

 

I sometimes wonder about a permanent magnet alternator with a magnetic clutch. 

 

The best one would be running from the propshaft then you could pull some real power off it. 

[IanD]

12 hours ago, magnetman said:

Oh maybe not then. Perhaps an inverter running off the AGM bank charged by the 175A Iskra alrernator powering a lithium specific charger. 

 

At the end of the day the issue is with inappropriate rotating electrics so perhaps this is where things need to change. 

 

I sometimes wonder about a permanent magnet alternator with a magnetic clutch. 

 

The best one would be running from the propshaft then you could pull some real power off it. 

But only when the boat is moving, you couldn't use it for charging when moored. Unless you run the prop while moored, like you're not supposed to... 😉

Edited February 10 by IanD

[magnetman]

Just now, IanD said:

But only when the boat is moving, you couldn't use it for charging when moored. Unless the run the prop while moored, like you're not supposed to... 😉

I have never run a main engine while moored in 30 yars of living on Boats. Always had a generator for charging when not moving. 

 

I disagree with using the main engine for this but when the Boat is moving taking advantage of the power available seems wise. 

 

 

More than half of that 30 yars was without shorepower although I admit one of the Boats has had the umbillical for a while. I hate it. 

 

 

and from beginning of April to coincide with the anniversary both Boats will again be off grid and free to roam. 

 

Yaay!