The owner of this vessel came to us fed up with the lack of performance from a tired 30 year old boat. The wiring and electronics needed a full power upgrade as he was planning to do some long coastal cruising to Tasmania and the East Coast of Australia. As we sat and planned this upgrade we soon realised every part of the vessel required attention. He wanted the boat’s electrical system to be automated and remotely monitored and controlled.
At the heart of the system we installed four Victron Energy 24v 200ah lithium smart batteries, a Victron 24v 8000W Inverter Charger, Victron Cerbo GX monitoring system and 1200W of Sun Power Maxeon 3 Solar Panels. The vessel already had an existing 12KW Mase Generator that we used for backup power when needed through an auto start stop function we neatly wired into the Victron Cerbo GX unit. We also added a 24V 175A Smart alternator to charge the lithium batteries while under way. The bonus of using lithium batteries is that you can discharge them to a 20% state of charge without damaging the batteries and also reduce the overall time to recharge the batteries. In this case we were able to completely recharge the batteries in six hours from 20% to 100%.
Now that we had covered the house battery system we still needed to direct charge to six 200Ah batteries for both engines, bow and stern thrusters, davitts and a hydraulic marlin board, as these circuits were 12V. For this we used a combination of Lithium Spec DC-DC Chargers and Voltage Sensing Relays to keep the cranking batteries topped up and ready for their next use.
We removed the old run down switchboards throughout the boat and used Czone Digital Switching behind the scenes to simplify the use of controlling the boat’s many circuits. For this we used Czone COI interfaces to control both DC and AC Circuits. We created “modes’ ‘ within the software to customise what circuits are turned on for the user during day time, night time, onboard and away modes. These were controlled through the boats multifunctional displays when onboard and remote access from ipad, phone or computer when not onboard.
A Complete Simrad Electronics System was installed to a new flybridge dash. The Simrad system completely modernised the look of the new dash and helm on the Vitech. All the old engine gauges were replaced and made digital onto two Simrad GO 7 Displays. Czone and Victron systems were wired into the Simrad Evo 3 Chart Plotters for control from the flybridge. A Simrad NAC 3 Autopilot core pack was added along with Maretron diesel fuel flow monitoring, tank level monitoring and GlenDinning Electronic Throttle Controls. To complete the package we added a wireless Digital Yacht Controller for the owner to maneuver and berth the vessel.
