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if you watched our previous videos you know that we like to keep busy with lots of projects most recently we finished a major external refit in the boat yard but right before that we started a project that we've kept quiet until now rewinding back before our haul out chris and i had started to rewire our boat while also remodeling our nav station all in preparation to upgrade our battery bank from agms to lithium we are diving into our nav station remodel slash rewire of the entire boat um right now our panel's below my feet and every time you'll just push something on if you get you're on your hands and knees and it's kind of a pain so i'm gonna move that up and we're gonna put all of our panels and all of our vhf's ssb pretty much everything navigation and boat related right here destruction mode all right let's see if i got this backing plate so we can mount fuse blocks and other electronic things once it's glassed in and has had time to dry we're going to paint over it and hopefully get started on reconstructing everything projects that we do on board all the refits that we've been doing i found that using cardboard is a good way to kind of get the idea of what it's going to look like before cutting an expensive piece of plywood or any other kind of wood or foam whatever you're going to be using well the fun part is starting we started getting some stuff in we got our new vhf in which has an ais receiver in it we got our new battery monitor and shunt this is a victron one it has bluetooth capabilities so we can look at the stuff on our phone that'd be very nice i got our bracket for ssb i'm gonna put it in there and just kind of dry fit everything and make sure it's all gonna fit the right way this thing's on a hinge like that so it'll pop into place like that obviously when we're using the boat and we can access all of our stuff and then whenever we need to work on it which can't happen this will slide down like that and then we can get behind this will be where our but our buses are and uh and everything back here electrical so this is our top piece right now this guy as you can see don't work it's straight and this is a bend we're going to make a bunch of lines uh at 90 degrees all the way down this piece here and then i'm going to come back with my saw here i'm going to set my depth to the perfect level so it's not actually cutting the piece in half it'll just come on down right to about there and that way it's making relief cuts it'll make it malleable so you can actually bend this piece of plywood it's bendy after we moved the panels from the floor to the new nav desk and replaced every single wire i was ready to start building our batteries all of the major lithium battery brands have been used throughout the sailing community however in our research we noticed that there were very few resources in regards to building your own if you're like me you probably think that building your own lithium battery is pretty dangerous which it can be however after consulting with many industry professionals continuing to research and having chris explain the science of our batteries to me i was very confident in our decision so i'm just sitting here with our brand new calib 180 amp cells i have just unboxed six of them we bought them i think two months ago and they've been stuck in customs for two weeks so anyways two months later we finally have our lithium bank all set up and feels like christmas morning before moving forward with this project i explained to marissa that building our own battery meant that we were going to be buying fully functioning lithium iron phosphate cells and a plug-and-play bms which stands for battery management system we had two main reasons we decided to build our own batteries number one is that we could double the amount of capacity that our agms gave us and less than half of the footprint inside of the boat that took up space so this is our new battery box i built this a little while ago i just added some plywood and fiberglass and made this a dedicated area for all things batteries our old spot was underneath the steps and that's what we used to have our four six volt hundred amp power agms and with the transition into lithiums i actually was able to make this space smaller and fit double the amount of power in the same spot the reason that i'm making my own battery is really two reasons number one it's a lot more cost effective and you can get a lot more amp hour total for a lot less money in total we spent sixteen hundred dollars in our battery cells and about a hundred and sixty dollars on our bms and this is for 360 amp hours power to get this with any other name brand battery 100 amp hour replacement like renegy or battleborn we would be looking at about three thousand to four thousand dollars and number two is that you have a little bit more redundancy when it comes to building your own battery i'm able to fix our battery much easier than it would be if we would have a drop in lead acid replacement from battleborn or renegy those batteries are enclosed in a sealed battery case and usually when a lithium battery dies it's actually not the cells it's just the bms and that's just a very standard circuit board about a hundred dollars not really getting much more expensive than that and it's really a shame that that will kill a whole entire battery uh versus being able to take it out like we can in our battery and replace it and get the whole system back up and running again this guy is the brain that controls all the power coming out of your lithium cells ems technology is really the thing that kind of improves over the time and it's also the one thing like i said they can go bad so i'm hoping that our cells will last us a very long time and me having the option to actually be able to take this bms out and change it or replace it or fix it or do whatever is in my opinion a much safer alternative to getting any sealed uh case with a lithium in it when the bms itself is not being able to be replaced our lithium battery cells are 3.26 volts 180 amp hours each and to obtain a 12-volt system i decided to wire the cells together in the 2p 4s configuration this is the simplest option because you only need one bms basically you parallel two cells each into buddy pairs and then each buddy pair is in a series with the others this allows me to use only one bms instead of needing two if i were to wire eight cells together in a 4s 2p connection which would require two bms's to handle the two 12-volt battery packs unlike our agm batteries they were only good for 200 to 300 cycles of discharge our lithium batteries are good to 4 000 cycles of discharge and unlike most batteries when they reach their maximum cycle rating lithium batteries don't just degrade and die catastrophically they just go from 100 effective capacity down to 80 capacity so if you treat your batteries nicely meaning that you don't overcharge them you don't under charge them and you don't take any sort of charge out of them while they're under 32 degrees fahrenheit they should really last a long time like decades lithium iron phosphate is the chemistry that makes up our batteries and unlike its chemical cousin lithium ion it has excellent thermal and chemical stability right after we installed our batteries i wanted to do an initial capacity test to make sure that i did everything right and that our batteries on paper were actually true in the real world we did our tests and it took about three to five days for it to actually drain them from a hundred percent down to twenty percent and we should have been showing about 288 amp hours used and we actually got all the way up to 315 amp hours of battery capacity used at 20 so this is actually a very good thing after doing a lot of research on this topic if your lithium batteries are showing more capacity than they do on paper it's not only showing that they are wired correctly it's mostly showing that your battery cells are in very good health this is something that won't stay as good as it did when we first did our battery install i've already noticed a slight decrease from the 315 amp hours at 20 we're now kind of showing a true 290 to 300 amp hours which again is still above what we should be getting so we're stoked on all of that one of the reasons we have waited almost an entire year to release this video is because we wanted to provide a solid review with supporting evidence and not just show you how we built the battery but why and how it's worked so far next on sailing avocet so you