As happens with any new site design, I’m improving a bunch of little things to make the site easier to use.
The latest around the menu:
Sticky Menu
This design (and the old) have a sticky menu that appears only when we scroll up. The idea is that if we realize we are in the wrong place while reading a long article or comment stream, we will scroll up to get to the menu, but particularly on phones, that can take an age, so the menu appears immediately.
However, I found that implementation was jittery, with the menu appearing and disappearing at the slightest change in scroll direction, so now we have to scroll up for more than a second for the menu to appear and back down for more than a second for it to disappear.
Questions?
While we are thinking about the sticky menu, it struck me that I use it all the time while reading on my phone, but never on a wide screen device like a computer, so I’m thinking about hiding it on wider screens.
That said, I’m primarily a computer and big tablet user, as well as an old guy used to using scroll bars to get where I want to go, so I’m not typical.
For example, when I initially put the old site up five years ago I never even thought about a sticky menu until a bunch of phone-reading members explained to me why it was vital for them (thank you).
So what do you think about removing the sticky menu on wider screens? And if so, should it show on tablets, or just phones?
Also, does the present sticky menu, after the fix detailed above, need any further improvements?
Please leave a comment.
Search Box
Member John reported that the search box was counterintuitive because, after typing in our query it was logical to then click (or tap) on the search button, but that disappeared the query box—big piss off.
This is core WordPress behaviour, but that doesn’t make it right, so I wrote script to hide the button when the search entry box is open.
Question?
My thinking here is that with the button gone we will naturally hit the return key after typing our query. Do you agree or do I need to do more?
When we went to Polynesia, we used Predict Wind. We could get weather in all latitudes. Next year we will again be sailing south of the US Pacific Ocean Prediction Center maps. Need I again use Predict Wind to get what I need? Someone asked the same question about the south Atlantic. I think you did not have an answer. I would like to follow your advice, but I need to figure out how to get information in lower northern latitudes and perhaps south of the equator. Or do I just stay with Predict Wind?
Answer
Predictwind is just a tool for downloading and displaying information generated by government models (with some interpolation in inshore areas). So I think it’s easier to first think about the underlying data.
Once we have that sorted we can pick the tools to get and display the information that best meets our needs.
I generally don’t get political around here, and we have a rule against that in our comment guidelines, but sometimes a situation is so egregious that I simply can’t keep my opinion to myself:
How terrible the electrical systems are in production boats, to the point of useless, at least for offshore use. They were running the engine 8 hours a day to keep up with demand!
Just getting the alternator and regulator right reduced charging from eight hours a day to one.
They would have got the same benefit with an appropriately sized lead-acid bank, but it would have been bigger and heavier, so in this case lithium was a clear winner, but only for that reason.
Without the alternator and regulator upgrades, upgrading to lithium would have been a total waste of time and money—getting charging right is the key to success.
Anytime I write about batteries and charging someone is bound to bring up one of the clever gadgets that fool a stock alternator into charging at a higher current for longer without resorting to external regulation.
And I can certainly see using one of these as a quick and relatively inexpensive way to make the stock alternator charging a small battery bank on a boat used for weekends, and perhaps the occasional week cruise, charge more quickly and efficiently.
But for an offshore voyaging live-aboard boat, these things are not a good idea.
Most alternators that come with our engines will not last long if pushed hard day in day out, particularly if trying to charge a large bank (lithium or lead-acid)—stock alternators are simply not designed for that kind of duty cycle.
That said, the Nordkyn will extend alternator life by monitoring its temperature, but that’s going to mean that most of the time the alternator will not be putting out much because stock OEM alternators heat very quickly as soon as they come under load.
Of course you could use the Nordkyn with a heavy duty alternator, which would be a good combo.
But my thinking always has been, and remains, if we are going to the trouble of installing a high-capacity bank, we might as well do the charging right with a rugged alternator designed for the job, installed right, and with an external regulator that won’t be subjected to the heat inside the alternator.
And then if we are going to do the alternator right, we might as well go the whole hog and do the regulator right too.
Fun Demo
By the way, Victron have a fun demo showing how fast they can burn out an alternator when charging lithium batteries. There’s a lot of good stuff to learn here, particularly the counterintuitive fact that low engine RPM will do more damage.
That said, we offshore boat owners should understand that even a big lead-acid bank can fry alternators too—our 800 Ah at 12 volts (9 kWh) AGM lead-acid battery bank on the McCurdy and Rhodes would happily lap up 250 amps for an hour, at least, if we had had an alternator that big, and regularly sucked 150 amps for two hours out of the alternator we did have.
An exchange between Matt and member Charlie in the comments to Matt’s excellent article got me thinking about the latest design fashion to draw boats with plumb bows.
Initially I was skeptical because there is no consensus among web site experts that dark modes do anything useful, and I have always believed, as many web designers do, that the most readable colour scheme is good old black type on white background.
But then I read further and there are benefits to dark mode.
But, then again, none of those benefits are compelling enough to make that the default for the new design, particularly since many people hate dark modes.
What to do? Not a problem:
If you like dark mode, simply install the Night Eye extension in your browser and switch it on and off at will. I have tried it in both Safari and Chrome and it works great on AAC in either.
Yes, I could add the code to AAC to switch back and forth, but that would slow the site down. Not much it’s true, but adding code to a web site is a bit like adding weight in the ends of a boat: a bit does not hurt but a little bit here and a little bit there sure adds up.
But Night Eye only adds code at the local browser level, which is intrinsically faster, since only those who want it install it.
You can even try Night Eye for two months for free and after that it’s reasonably priced at $US9 / year.
Thanks to Charlie for the idea. Also see my answer to Charlie for more of my ideas on how we can get other functionality he suggests with no added code.
I’m always on the lookout for tools that will work well on a boat without taking up too much room or adding too much weight.
At first glance this looks like any other tap wrench, but look closer and we find:
Two chucks nested—no it’s not tapered as claimed in the listing— one behind the other, which allows it to securely grip any tap shank from 1/8″ to 1/2″ (3 to 13 mm). Normally we need two, or maybe three, tap wrenches to cover that range.
The handle can be slipped back and forth for use in tight spots. And, better yet, there’s a detent each end.
The top is a hex head to accept a wrench in a really tight corner.
The only thing I can find fault with is that it’s a bit bulky to get into really tight corners, but I already have that problem covered off…and that will be the next tool-tip.
This may be a Canada-only tip since Maximum tools are a Canadian Tire store brand, but rumour has it that most of their tools are relabeled Gearwrench, so that might be a source…
Or you can come and visit our beautiful country and pick one up.
The engine on most sailboats is installed at least partially below the waterline, consequently, with most exhaust systems, the only thing preventing the engine from flooding with water after it stops is the siphon break installed at the highest point in the raw-water cooling system.
That’s bad enough, but the other problem with siphon breaks is that they are usually installed in some inaccessible place, so on a lot of boats they don’t get any love from one year to the next.
This is also made worse because I have never seen an engine manual that calls for regular disassembly and cleaning of the siphon break.
Maybe the engine manufacturers want it to stick closed so our engines will flood and they can sell us new ones…not really, but I do sometimes wonder…particularly when I’m thinking about saildrives, the existence of which clearly proves how much engine manufacturers actually hate us owners.
Sorry, rant over.
Anyway, the photo above shows the state of the siphon break on our J/109 when we got her. Looks to me like no one had looked at it since the builder buried it high in the engine space 18 years before.
I figure that the only reason the engine had not flooded was because the J/109 has a shallow hull form, so the engine is higher in relation to the waterline than on most cruising boats.
Needless to say, I replaced it.
I strongly recommend adding the siphon break to our annual maintenance checklists.
One of the most important advances in sailing hardware in my lifetime was the self-tailing winch. If you came to sailing after these came on the scene you will not fully appreciate them, but, trust me, suddenly having both hands free to put our full weight on the handle was game changing, particularly for shorthanded sailing where there is rarely another crew around to tail.
But since then—some 40 years ago if memory serves—not much has changed in winch design…until the Ronstan Orbit™ Winch.
I have not used (or even touched) an Orbit Winch, but being able to easily slip the line without removing the handle looks to me like one of those seemingly insignificant features of deck gear that’s actually a game changer.
As significant as self-tailing? Probably not, but then few things are.
And being able to pull the winch apart for service without tools is cool, too.
Right now the Orbit is only available in smaller sizes, but I’m guessing that will change—Ronstan and Andersen are sister brands.
If I needed a new winch in the sizes available, I would be looking hard at the Orbit.
Andy Schell and his dad propelled by an electric outboard.
Andy Schell and his dad propelled by an electric outboard.
Andy Schell and his dad propelled by an electric outboard.
Thanks to an article by Eric Klem, and to a lesser extent one of mine, we all now clearly understand how bad weight in the ends of the boat is for sailing performance.
What’s this got to do with electric outboards? While thinking about a new outboard for our J/109, it just struck me that the answer is plenty:
Outboards clamped to the rail aft or, worse still, on the back of a dinghy stowed in davits, are a big performance hit because they are a long way from the axis of pitch and even further from the centre of gravity.
But what else are we going to do with a machine full of gas (petrol)?
Plus, we will probably also stow a jug full of fuel for the infernal machine—diesels I get along with, outboards not so much—back there.
Electric outboards are way better in this regard because we can stow them below and further forward. Even a few feet will make a difference because the negative effect scales by the square of the distance from the axis of pitch, and said axis is often quite far aft.
So moving the outboard from the stern rail to say the forward end of the cockpit locker is a huge gain.
Heck, we could even take the battery off and stow it where the weight will do the least harm.
McCurdy and Rhodes 56 Morgan’s Cloud anchored in an uncharted harbour in Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard. When 500 windward miles separates us from any safe place to winter and summer is drawing to a close, sailing performance offshore is top of mind.
McCurdy and Rhodes 56 Morgan’s Cloud anchored in an uncharted harbour in Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard. When 500 windward miles separates us from any safe place to winter and summer is drawing to a close, sailing performance offshore is top of mind.
McCurdy and Rhodes 56 Morgan’s Cloud anchored in an uncharted harbour in Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard. When 500 windward miles separates us from any safe place to winter and summer is drawing to a close, sailing performance offshore is top of mind.
We just published another article on the importance of keeping drag low on our offshore sailboats.
Some may wonder why we make so much of this? Here are two (of many) reasons, which got cut from the article to keep the length reasonable:
#1 Fixed Props Suck
Back when I had my Fastnet 45 I had a great crew and we were pretty competitive racing inshore “around the cans”.
For one race we were in the process of having a new MaxProp hub bored for the somewhat idiosyncratic shaft, so I had taken off the old folding prop so the machinist could measure it, and substituted a spare fixed three-blade prop. We were granted the standard PHRF 12 seconds/mile adjustment.
We went from near the top of the fleet to DFL¹. We simply could not get out of our own way or sail to our handicap, even with the adjustment for the fixed prop. Not even close.
Being at the helm and trying to keep the boat moving as boat after boat sailed over us was heart breaking—I can still vividly remember the feeling 35 years later.
Yes, feathering props are expensive, but they also have one of the best cost benefit ratios of any piece of gear I can think of.
#2 A Clean Underbody is Vital
The summer we voyaged to Svalbard from arctic Norway we had been in the water for over a year and there was no suitable yard to haul the boat, so there was a thin layer of slime on the bottom (no shell).
On the way north across the notoriously bumpy Barents Sea I was horrified by how slow we were, to the point that before the return trip we spent hours building a scrubbing device to get the worst of it off while standing in the dinghy, and I even went over the side to check the cleaning and touch up (in a dry suit).
Lucky we did, given it was a five day stone-beat to windward across the cold, foggy, and bumpy five hundred miles back to Norway. I shudder to think how much longer that would have taken without the makeshift bottom scrubbing, even though we motor-sailed for much of it—you don’t hang around in the Barents Sea in late summer.
Just a thin layer of slime slows a boat a lot more than would seem logical.
Two Other Thoughts
In both cases the problem was not so much straight-line speed but it was the excessive deceleration in the lulls, slow acceleration in the puffs, and the loss of pointing ability that was so horrible.
And keep in mind that in each case there was only one slowing factor—fixed prop on the first, slimy bottom on the second—on otherwise optimized boats!
Davis call this a “dehumidifier”, which is stretching the meaning of that word to breaking point. In fact, it’s just a small enclosed heating element.
Nonetheless, we have used these for years and find they make a real difference, but without any moving parts or the need to keep the temperature above about ~7C, which is required for a real dehumidifier to work.
We have three of these on the J/109: aft cabin, salon and head. We used the same three on the McCurdy and Rhodes 56 with good results, so three seems optimal even for bigger boats.
Ceramic Heater
Great to take the edge off when working on the boat on cold days. We don’t leave it on unattended.
Dehumidifier
We run this hard for several days in the fall, before it gets cold, to really dry the boat out. Makes a big difference. The one in the photo is overkill for the J/109, but sure does get her dried out!
Wet/Dry Vacuum
After the boat is all put away and winterized, we vacuum all the water and spilled antifreeze out of the bilges so it’s dusty dry. Makes a huge difference to how dry the boat stays over the winter.
Heated Storage Not Required
Our J/109 has been in heated storage the last three winters, but only because our boatyard converted all their buildings to heated. Sure, it’s nice, but expensive.
For years before that we laid up the McCurdy and Rhodes 56 in unheated buildings here in Nova Scotia, and in Maine before that, and even so, the above four tools kept her nice and dry.
So impressed that the Dragonfly 32 was on our short list when we bought the J/109, and might easily have got the nod if we could have found a secondhand one in our price range.
I could babble on for pages about the many things I like about these boats, but it’s the elegant simplicity coupled with pin-your-ears-back performance that really grabs me, as well as the quality of the design work and build.
Also, great to see a family business making boats and doing well.
Have a listen to the CW judges talking about the boat, particularly the guy on the bottom left. That’s Herb McCormick, who I often call the “Father of AAC”, in that he gave Phyllis and me our first writing gigs at CW nearly 30 years ago, and taught us a bunch about writing over the next few years—Herb is the writer I aspire to be.
He makes some good points on the design.
And here’s another video of the carbon version really kicking up her heels in a good breeze.
Of course the boat is way out of financial reach for most of us, but it’s fun to dream and we can also learn stuff by looking at really well-thought-out boats that aim to sail well instead of being floating condos.
An irrational drop in price makes a boat cheaper. A rational drop in price makes it more expensive.
Originally Gautam Baid about investments, modified for boats by me
Never truer words were said. Refits almost always cost more than the purchase price of the boat, often double or more. And worse still, the money we spend on a refit depreciates by 50% to 100% the day we finish it.
So it’s almost always cheaper to buy a better and more expensive boat in the first place.
The good folks over at the Ocean Prediction Center have a feature on their weather-maps page to cycle through weather maps for the last 3, 7, or 14 days.
A great way to study how systems are moving and evolving over time in the area we plan to cruise or the ocean we plan to cross.
It’s important to understand that this is historic (before today), not forward looking.
It’s easier to understand what’s going on if we slow it down, or better yet stop it and use the buttons at the top to step through at our own pace.
Don’t let the historic nature of this tool put you off. Knowing what the systems have been doing for the last two weeks is invaluable when planning cruises and voyages.
And those who have taken the trouble to learn a bit about 500-MB weather maps will get even better insights by looping those maps.
Other useful options are to add satellite imagery and look at how waves and swell have developed over time.
A few weeks ago I wrote a Tip pointing out that the “unlimited” air time package for Iridium GO! exec was not actually unlimited and therefore I recommended staying with the truly unlimited package available on the original Iridium GO!.
I have now dug into this in a series of emails with Craig and Matt at PredictWind.
The result is that, although I was right that the unlimited package does have limits, if we put aside semantics it sounds like a good deal that will enable users to download and analyze the weather, in the way we recommend, for known costs.
This Tip is focused on PredictWind’s capabilities as they relate to the techniques we recommend in the above-linked Online Book. It’s not a review or a recommendation to go with PredictWind or buy an Iridium GO! Exec. That’s up to you.
Here’s what an offshore sailor will need, what it will cost, and the capabilities delivered:
All in US$. Monthly costs rounded up. The standard PW package at $249/year will do, but if we are going to do this right, we might as well go the whole hog.
Capabilities
Up to 4MB of GRIBs a day (plenty).
Unlimited email, including attachments (to download weather maps and forecasts not offered directly by PredictWind).
Confirming #2 with the folks at PredictWind was the primary reason I wrote this Tip.
Other Benefits
The Iridium GO! Exec is much faster than the original GO!, but not really fast enough for true internet access, which Starlink is.
GO! Exec can be used to make a phone call without using a linked cellphone, which makes it far better for emergency use, particularly in a liferaft, than the original GO!.
Watch Out
We are only protected from cost overruns with Iridium GO! Exec and the PredictWind “Unlimited Package” as long as we stay within the PredictWind apps listed above.
If we turn the firewall off to get true internet access, we will need to buy added data packages, which we may blow through in minutes.
I have repeatedly recommended looking at forecaster-generated weather maps, as well as GRIBs, to get an overall understanding of how weather systems, and particularly fronts, which are not drawn on GRIBs, are developing.
But wait, lately some of the GRIB-viewing tools have added AI-generated fronts. So can we now not bother to go through the hassle of downloading weather maps?
Two pictures are worth a thousand words:
The one at the top of the post was AI generated.
Now let’s look at the real thing from the same time:
A quick glance shows that the AI version misses a huge amount of vital information that’s on the human-generated map. At least nine—count ’em, you may find more—developing gales, as well as a bunch of fronts, are shown on the real map that are missed on the AI-generated fake.
I could go on for a couple of thousand words on how much better the real thing is, but do I really need to beat that dead horse when one glance shows the clear superiority of the real thing?
That said, the most important advantage of the human-generated map is that it shows where lows are developing on the fronts, as well as the type of front: warm, cold, or occluded.
And if we don’t understand that last paragraph, we need to learn more about weather basics before we take a yacht to sea…and regularly looking at weather maps is the best way to do that…as well as reading this:
In the last few weeks I have been getting a series of emails from Battle Borne aggressively promoting sale pricing on their lithium batteries, see the above.
As far as I can see, these are batteries that don’t have any way to communicate with external charging sources or even a way to inform you that they are about to load-dump and turn your lights out.
In our opinion, this type of battery is:
Potentially dangerous on yachts, because there is no warning of load dumps, as we explain here.
And further, our advice is that only batteries that can communicate through CANbuss (wires), not Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, with charging sources and monitoring systems should be used on boats, particularly offshore boats.
I generated this graphic with AI (DALL·E). My first. Not wonderful, but not terrible either.
I generated this graphic with AI (DALL·E). My first. Not wonderful, but not terrible either.
I generated this graphic with AI (DALL·E). My first. Not wonderful, but not terrible either.
I was very sad to read of the recent death of a crew member on the Salty Dog Rally. According to this article by Don Street, the cause may have been, at least partly, dehydration from seasickness.
And Don suggests how that could possibly have been avoided: a seasickness medication delivered by suppository.
Based on my own experience with a crew member who was so seasick I feared for his life, I think Don is probably right.
And, further, I recommend that all boats venturing offshore should carry anti-seasickness suppositories.
In the case on our boat, like Don’s experience, the crew member slept for about 6 hours (his first real rest in 3 days) after using the suppository and awoke able to keep down both food and water; and had no further trouble for the rest of the voyage.
What Don does not mention is the particular medication he used. In our case it was Gravol Suppositories¹. However, do be aware that the person who uses this will likely be out for the count and useless for at least four hours.
¹Clearly I’m not a doctor, so make sure you do your own due diligence, including consulting your doctor, to make sure this particular drug is going to be safe and efficacious for you and your crew.
Let me close by extending our condolences to the family of the crew member. How horrible that what should have been a fun life-experience turned into a tragedy.
Comments
If you have general thoughts on seasickness medications, please comment on one of these articles on seasickness, not here. We have already discussed medications and other remedies there.
This photo of the founders of Boréal on one of their boats works well to show the point of this tip but, to be fair, it’s the camera angle that makes this installation look so dangerous.
This photo of the founders of Boréal on one of their boats works well to show the point of this tip but, to be fair, it’s the camera angle that makes this installation look so dangerous.
This photo of the founders of Boréal on one of their boats works well to show the point of this tip but, to be fair, it’s the camera angle that makes this installation look so dangerous.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article on renewables in which I opined that the days of wind generators are, for most cruising usage profiles, over. Too much windage, too much noise, in return for less generated electricity, particularly when it matters, than many people believe.
The interesting thing is I got surprising little pushback.
Anyway, here’s another reason to think seriously before installing a wind generator: the things can be seriously dangerous, as this cruiser found out the hard way.
So if you do decide to install a wind generator:
Make sure it’s high enough that no crew member, even standing on the side deck or lazarette, can extend their arm into the spinning blade.
And, further, if the thing runs amok in high winds, it’s better to let it destroy itself, rather than risk limbs trying to physically stop it.
I’m as concerned about climate change as anyone, and maybe more than most, but obfuscation and pretengineering does not help us get to a sustainable future.
A good example is the way that electric-drive vendors use horsepower when talking about the diesel engine they want to replace and kilowatts when talking about their offerings.
You see, horsepower and watts measure the same thing: power.
1HP=.7457kW
It’s that simple,
I was triggered to write this by an electric-drive company claiming that installing their serial-hybrid drive—diesel generator driving an electric motor—in a long thin efficient motorboat would save 30% in fuel burn over the standard diesel engine that comes with the boat.
But here’s the smoking gun, they promised 8.5 knots top speed with the generator driving the electric motor, but with the standard diesel that boat can do 18 knots and cruises efficiently at 10.
Yup, all they have done is decrease the power, probably by more than half. Of course that will save fuel.
But here’s the thing, in most usage profiles for cruising boats, simply putting in a right-sized diesel engine and settling for say 9 knots cruise and about 11 knots wide open—still faster than the electric—instead of 18, would almost certainly save more fuel as well as costing way less (think less than half), and weighing less, than an electric motor, generator, and a huge lithium battery bank.
The latter to run silent for an hour or so…and then have to be charged with…the diesel generator, in most cases.
Wait, it gets worse, weight is a killer on a boat like this, making the hybrid setup an even sillier idea since it will weigh way more than the right-sized diesel and so make her even less fuel efficient and take up more space.
What fevered mind came up with the idea that burning diesel to create rotation (generator engine), and then turning that into electricity (generator alternator), and then turning that back into rotation (electric motor), is more efficient than burning diesel to make rotation (diesel engine) in the first place—conversion losses are a bitch (they compound)—one conversion always beats three.
Sure, electric is great, as long as we stay close to a source of renewable produced power, but staying close to the dock is not what people will use this boat for—and no, a practical amount of solar panels are not going to help much.
Which brings us a full circle.
It’s always a danger signal when a sales person talks HP one moment and kW the next. They are probably trying to hide something, and now you know what that is.
And no, there is nothing magical about a horsepower or a watt just because it was produced by an electric motor. The whole torque thing is most-all BS too when applied to cruising boats—great though if you want to get a heavy train moving from a standing start.
More about all this here, including a very cool calculator, which will let you see if your usage profile will benefit from an electric drive. It’s a bit out of date but the basic physics does not change…conversion losses are a bitch…wait, I already said that.
A few years ago I got interested in efficient motorboats and wrote several articles on the subject. At the time there were almost none around, with the exception of the FPBs from our friends Steve and Linda Dashew that cost millions, and a first try from a budding designer in New Zealand that still cost more than most of us can afford, and since then his boats have got bigger and way more expensive.
Other than that the market was, and mostly is, all huge barge-like trawlers so inefficient that some 47-foot examples have 300 HP engines, and even with that power and horrendous fuel burn can’t get out of their own way.
But at last that seems to be changing, with two new efficient motorboat offerings. I will write about the other in another Tip, but check out the 32-footer from Pogo that can cruise all day at 10 knots and top out at 15 knots, driven by just 50 HP!
And all of this brand new for €130,000 (US$138,672).
Of course this is not an offshore boat, but totally fit for coastal cruising and staying aboard for a week or so while doing it.
They also make an outboard version and are promising a 40 footer.
While the mission is very different, the idea of focusing on doing one thing really well, while stripping away all unnecessary complication, is very like the Adventure 40—love it.
There has been a lot of excitement recently about the release of a new alternator regulator that takes direct aim at the WakeSpeed WS500‘s position as the only truly smart regulator, primarily because it measures the current (amperage) that goes into the battery and then acts on that information, rather than making a bunch of guesses about the state of the battery that are usually more wrong than right, like, for example, the regulators from Balmar—I explain all this in more detail here and here.
The new regulator is the Zeus from ARCO, and both Panbo and Rod Collins, who advised during the development, are pretty excited—I recommend that you read Rod’s article for an insider’s view on how this new regulator came to be.
I’m super excited too since the new regulator fixes a problem that I have been beating on Al Thomason, inventor of the WakeSpeed, about since the WS500 came out: no easy way to program it and see what it’s doing over Bluetooth—Al and I seem to chat every six months or so about one thing and another and I’m sure he is getting sick of hearing it!
And the Zeus seems to be easier to install and program in a bunch of other ways; for example, the harness it comes with will work with both N- and P-type alternators.
But here’s the thing.
I know from our chats that since the WS500 was released, much, possibly most, of Al’s energies and smarts, which are prodigious, have gone into making his regulator work seamlessly, mostly over CAN bus, with the ever more sophisticated lithium battery management systems from companies like Lithionics and Victron, as well as many others.
Here’s an example of how tightly Al has integrated the WS500 with Victron’s products, including their system monitors.
We are talking close cooperation here. For example, in a multi-BMS multi-battery Lithionics setup, if one of the BMSs goes offline, the WS500 will know that and automatically adjust its charging profile accordingly.
The point I’m making is that it’s all very well for ARCO to claim that they have all this cracked on day one, and much more besides, but is that real when one of the smartest engineers in the business has a five-year lead on them?
And process control programming and communication, which is what this is, is an iterative process of try, debug, try again, debug…
And further, keep in mind that with this stuff one bad bug could take out thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars worth of equipment in the blink of an eye, or render your system down until sorted out.
And one of the things that I know Al has focused on, because he’s a deeply experienced process control engineer, is failsafe, so if his regulator ever gets confused about what’s going on it defaults to shutting things down, or at least switching to less potentially damaging charge parameters.
This is actually one of the reasons it can be a bit frustrating to get the WS500 working the way we want it to. The default configurations are very conservative.
So sure, if you have a nice simple and robust lead-acid battery-based electrical system, give the Zeus a try, if you wish.
But if you have, or are contemplating, installing a sophisticated lithium battery-based system, I suggest sticking with the WakeSpeed WS500 for a while while ARCO make the almost inevitable early-days mistakes on someone else’s boat. And also until the manufacturer of your battery and BMS tell you they are 100% happy seeing their batteries charged by the Zeus.
And one final thought. The Zeus page claims to make it super easy to change parameters with your phone. Sure that’s cool, but with ease of change comes the temptation to play around indiscriminately and changes can lead to big problems, so be careful.
All that said, don’t get me wrong, I’m still super-happy to see a competitor to the WakeSpeed WS500—bet we see that Bluetooth capability I have been bitching about for four years real soon.
Disclosure
I like Al Thomason and he has been good to me by tirelessly sharing his smarts in phone calls and emails.
On the other hand, I’m on record as more than a little sceptical about Firefly/Battle Born, the company that bought WakeSpeed, so I think those two kinda cancel out.
You should also be aware that Al has arranged for AAC to get two WS500 regulators for free, one of the early ones (now working on our J/109), and a month ago, one of the newer ones with a NEMA 2000 output that I will install this winter and play with next summer.
