I am very happy to report, it works really well! To my very big surprise, these small TFT displays work GREAT in direct sunlight! They look decent during the night but they really shine in daylight. Since we took the boat out this weekend, it was a perfect opportunity to test the usefulness of my new DIY solution. This experience made one thing very clear, we needed a reliable battery monitor that gives us a long term overview of the battery state of each of the packs. We had two more days to spare but due to the lack of reliable 12V power electronics, we cautiously decided to ditch our vacation and drive back home for repairs. Long story short, they came, gave us a boost, we had all engines running again and left back home. When the waves started reaching unacceptable levels, violent enough to pull our anchor out of the mud to start dragging, we decided to call BoatUS to tow us out of there or - better - bring starter cables to give us a boost! That meant, I had three engines down with no prior warning, no starter cable to wire in the house bank and no way to to recharge my starter batteries due to the then still broken generator! I was aware that one starter battery was weak and end of life but I didn't think it would get this bad this quickly! But bad things always pile up when you least expect them! That loose wire prevented me to keep my generator running because (I think it was) the oil pressure sensor cable has a bad crimp. Mind you, earlier that day, a wire on my generator had come loose that I hadn't identified at that point. So after 4h at this anchorage we had enough and decided it was time to leave to some place nicer - with less reckless people around. ![]() For some reason, I expected this stuff to run off of the big 500Ah house bank. Due to the rather undesirable conditions combined with the strong currents in that particular cove, I decided to leave the ignition on and the chart plotter with depth sounder running. We encountered a (luckily) rare species of idiot: The take your high displacement boat, run it at full throttle close to other boats and don't care of they almost capsize because of their wake- kind of idiot. It was labor day or similar and pretty much everyone with a boat was out on the Bay doing boat things. It was at a cove that wasn't particularly protected. ![]() I built this battery monitor to understand the state of each of the battery since we experienced a total battery failure in one of the worst conditions: About 18 months ago, we were at anchor around Angel Island. For January, it was fantastically warm and calm, a truly great short vacation! We took the boat out to the Bay and spent the night at Paradise Cove in the northern part of the Bay around San Francisco. It was a great weekend for testing high capacity marine batteries.
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