Captain Lee of TrueLoveboat, Here is an external regulator for you Herr Kapitan. http://www.classicindustries.com/mopar/parts/md2439.html Actually this is the expensive $20 regulator with solid state electronics. The cheap electromechanical one at $8 will probably work just as good. Do you want protection from overtemperature of the alternator? Get a normally closed thermal switch from Norm, screw it on the alternator and have it open the field circuit. You dont want it to shutoff, but work just like the Balmar? Connect a resistor across the switch to reduce the field current in half. At this point your $20 or $8 Mopar car regulator will be performing everyting that your $300 Balmar top of the line whizzbang marine regulator claims to perform. Question : Why don't the car regulators limit the alternator output current? Answer : Because it is not necessary. If you pass 80Amperes through a discharged car battery its terminal voltage will quickly reach 14V and the current will not rise any higher. If you connect another discharged battery in parallel the current will increase and it may exceed the rating of the alternator get the alternator "toasty". If you connect a dosen discharged batteries in parallel, you have a boat and you will fry your alternator if you do not limit the current.
Question : Why doesn't the $300 Balmar regulator limit the current? Answer : Greed. The management at Balmar figured they can jack the price up on car regulators and sell them to boaters as "marine regulators". The idea worked. However, after the alternators started burning up they hired an engineer who introduced the alternator thermal protection by cutting the field current in half when the alternator got hot. The greedy crooks who run the company saw that alternators were not burning up anymore so they fired the engineer and hired a few "bitheads" to put a computer in the product and some silly numbers for the users to program the thing for different battery types. Now that their POS product has a computer in it the greedy crooks figured they can sell it for $300 and the dumbass boaters will keep buying it. Which also proved to be true. 15X markup is pretty good eh? Hey pass the single malt, and let me adjust your AGM setting heh heh. The bithead surfer boy will be happy with his 3% raise and update the useless software every year. So there you are this is probably the success story of Balmar. Do you want the ultimate marine regulator ? Find an old power engineer with white hairs on his butt to build you a regulator that does the following : 1. Limit the alternator output current to the rating of the alternator, field adjustable to level you want. 2. Reduce the alternator output current as required to remain below the rated max operating temperature. 3. Regulate the battery voltage at 14.8V until the current drops below XXAmps. (XX varies based on housebank A/H) 4. Regulate the battery voltage at 13.8V at 20C for FLA batteries. (Adjustable to accommodate other types) 5. Decrease the float voltage about 36mV per degreeC temperature rise over 20C 6. Increase the float voltage about 12mV per degreeC temperature drop below 20C Hear him say you can return the product for a full refund less shipping if it does not perform as stated upon arrival. Hear him say he will fix or replace the product free of charge except shipping if it ever fails during operation within absolute maximum rated conditions. Cheers mate. SV8827 Ahmet From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 11:09:02 -0500 Subject: [Liveaboard] Recommendations re alternators Ahmet, Clearly you do not think that Balmar has good products. What do you recommend instead? Lee Huddleston s/v Truelove Lots to learn; nothing to prove. _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
_______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
