LIVING OFF-GRID AT SEA | Are lithium batteries worth it? | (Episode 363)

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Parlay Revival.

[00:00:05]This week we are talking about our Battleborne lithium batteries and whether we feel safe having them on board. I'm not going to try defend them.

[00:00:12]I'm just going to talk about my experience and my knowledge.

[00:00:15]>> But the episode takes a turn for the worse as we struggle to get our badly corroded fuel tank out of its little hole.

[00:00:21]>> Oh my goodness.

[00:00:22]>> But when we do, we discover that we have a rotten engine room bulkhead hidden in behind it.

[00:00:27]>> Look at that. It's just disintegrating.

[00:00:29]If you've been following for a while, you'll know just how bad of a time we've had with bulkheads on this boat.

[00:00:35]>> And unfortunately, it seems like our troubles are far from over. Ah, frustrating. You think that you're getting one job done, another one pops up.

[00:00:50]All right, guys. Let's talk about Battleborne batteries. So, before we start, full disclosure. About 5 years ago, we got 10 of these Battlebborne batteries sponsored by them and we installed them and for us they have been working flawlessly for the last 5 years.

[00:01:12]But recently they have received some really bad press uh on this particular battery by a YouTuber with over a million subscribers and it's really hurt the company. But before that happened, Battlebborne sent us eight of these bad boys. The reason that we wanted to upgrade to these is these are smart batteries and I can monitor with an app which will show you guys every single battery and how much voltage it is, whether it's balanced, how much it's drawing. Um, this a big upgrade from us because these old batteries you can't.

[00:01:46]So, the technology has changed and we're also doubling our capacity. So, a huge upgrade and that's why we're even able to consider putting air con on the boat.

[00:01:58]As part of the plan, we got four cabins that we want to cool and I think that's going to be possible with these batteries and a solar upgrade and no generator. We're going to be able to run air conditioning on a catamaran.

[00:02:14]So exciting. Such a massive upgrade for us. But back to these batteries. I'm not a battleborne technician. I'm not going to try defend them. I'm just going to talk about my experience and my knowledge. I have felt 100% safe uh with these batteries in the boat. Battleborne have made 400,000 of these and not a single one has uh ever caught fire.

[00:02:40]They're also rated to discharge at a rate of 100 amps. It's a 100 amp battery. And the way that we use them and most cruisers, the most we could ever pull from one of these batteries is if our 3 kW inverter was pulling at max capacity and we happened to be running the windless or a winch or something. Those are about 80 amps. So that would be a total of about 320 amps over 10 of these batteries. So each battery would be pulling about 32 amps in that max capacity. So, if you use the right wiring and connections on these batteries, I'm pretty sure they're going to be safe. But again, I'm just telling you that I have felt safe for my vessel and my crew and myself and my dogs having these batteries in for the last 5 years. So, yeah, we got these batteries for free. But those of you who have gotten to know me over the years will know that there is absolutely zero chance that I would install these batteries, even if they are free, if I thought they were unsafe in any way.

[00:03:40]Especially when you consider how much load we are actually going to be putting on these new batteries. This is rated to be able to pull its capacity out of this battery. So you should be able to pull 270 amps out of one battery. We got eight of them. It's impossible for us to ever pull that much power out of this battery. So personally, I feel totally fine and safe installing these. They didn't pay us to say anything. And they also said we didn't have to film anything if we didn't feel comfortable.

[00:04:07]But I do feel comfortable. But that's just me. I suggest doing your own research if you want to uh invest in some lithium batteries because they're not cheap.

[00:04:14]>> I'd also like to reiterate that I'm not upgrading these batteries because I think the old ones are unsafe. I've been waiting for Battlebborne to release these new batteries for over a year simply for their smart monitoring capabilities. But anyway, let's move on to the actual installation. The first thing we have to do is make sure these are 100% charged before we connect them up into the house bank. So, what we're going to do is we're going to use two of our solar charge controllers, our MPPPTs, hook them up to these batteries.

[00:04:42]As soon as they go into float mode, we're going to consider that charged, and then once all eight of them are charged, we're going to hook them up into the bank. So, as soon as we do that, I think we can get that done this morning. We're going to have over double the capacity that we have right now. So, pretty exciting times. We have induction cooking, we got electric jugs, we got air con on the way. Uh we're going to be very power hungry. So yeah, this is just really exciting for us. Okay, so I'll tap into the this is meant to be the aft panels starboard. So after panel starboard. Okay, we are at um 133 volts.

[00:05:19]Uh zero volts coming in from solar.

[00:05:22]Obviously no current. So I'm going to hook the negative up. We should see this bounce right up. But uh 13.3 is not a bad starting point. Okay, I'll connect the solar up.

[00:05:34]Okay. Little spark.

[00:05:36]Okay. Now we have It's going up 34.

[00:05:42]Nice.

[00:05:44]Now we got a bulk charge happening at 34.4 amps. And the voltage is already up to 13.5.

[00:05:52]So I don't know, within an hour or so, this might go into float mode. And then we can put another battery on. We got eight batteries to do. Okay. See how long this takes. I think we'll see these going into float mode pretty quick.

[00:06:04]Okay, this is what's going into the boat. Um, so first thing we have to do is get these old ones out. So, we're going to cut the power to the boat, turn the inverter off, isolate everything so there's zero load coming off the batteries, and then pull them out and disconnect them one by one. And then we've calculated that we can get five of them in here and three of them in here.

[00:06:32]So they come with these little feet that you can put screws in. So the ones under my bum here, they're going to screw up against the wall. And then the ones down here, there's going to be four of them upright and then one of them across the top. When that's all said and done, we're going to have 26,000 kW hours of lithium batteries. These are just like Lego blocks. You can put them upright like that. You can put them on their side. You can just stack them however you want. So, it's pretty cool to be able to fit them into these tight spaces. And then we're going to do a bunch of shuffling. We're going to get all these solar charge controllers out of here, put them somewhere else. Um, have this just batteries and two inverters. We got two 3 kW inverters now that are going to just talk to each other. It's redundancy if one fails for when we go across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. So, let's get rid of these old ones and squeeze these new ones in there. Okay. So, the first thing we're going to do is disconnect the um links power distributors. Um that's just going to isolate the batteries from the boat so it can't get any charge from solar.

[00:07:35]Um even though we got the the breaker off, it can't send any power out to the out to the boat. And uh we'll start hooking these batteries one by one.

[00:07:45]Okay. So, if you don't have a good understanding of DC power, the most important thing when doing something like this is to make sure you do not let the positive and negative terminals or cables touch each other, which is actually easier said than done. As you can see, as I was disconnecting each battery, Jamie was holding on to the cables, keeping the positives well away from the negatives. We are not sponsored by Victron or anything, but I do think their gear is the best, including the Lynx distributor there that all the batteries can conveniently connect to.

[00:08:12]Each battery gets its own fuse inside the distributor. And when we do these installs, we make sure that the cables are exactly the same length in order for the batteries to be drained equally under load. We didn't need the old straps anymore because we're going to be screwing these batteries straight down into the locker floor with the feet that I showed you earlier. I did need another hole though to bring the huge four cables from the batteries to the electrical cabinet, which left that beautiful fiberglass itch all over my legs, which I had been missing for a few weeks. We were then ready to start dry fitting the batteries just to make sure that they would actually fit inside the space. Till now we had been relying solely on my measurements and calculations. So to see them fit was a big relief. We aren't able to fit another single battery in these two compartments. So talk about maximizing the use of space. The fifth battery in this set was just going to be sitting on top though and we had to lay it on its side to be able to use the drawer above it. So out we went to make some wooden brackets to hold it in place. We got a hard time about not using the right PPE when using power tools last time. So, I'd like to draw your attention to the air muffs if you don't mind. And uh ignore the lack of safety glasses or the bare feet. We like to live on the edge around here. We had to screw the wooden brackets in from underneath. So, we pulled out all of the batteries again, which aren't light, by the way, before doing the final install. Okay. We made this wooden frame for the top battery that's sitting on top, so it can't slide around at all. Now, it's going to go in.

[00:09:36]We have to connect the negative um cables and then put these little protective caps over it. And then they they're going to go down against the fiberglass on the bottom. Then we can do the uh positives on the top. So we'll whack these on, send them down, and should be able to start hooking them up one by one.

[00:10:01]Nice.

[00:10:06]So, we scratched up every terminal to make sure we had good contact and bolted on the cables as mentioned.

[00:10:12]I like the caps as we're going to be stacking them in all sorts of ways and can't afford any connections to be getting close to each other. We then started sliding them into the smaller space first and screwed them all to the wall to secure them. As I said earlier, all of these charge controllers and associated cables are going to be moved to a different space. So, it's going to look a lot tidier than it does right here. Another beautiful thing about these batteries is that they don't need any ventilation and they won't even be getting remotely hot with our day-to-day use. So, we stacked them right to the brim. The other compartment was a little tighter, but we managed to screw them all down. And this little device is the hub that all the batteries talk to in order to monitor every single one. A lot of these cables you see here will be removed once all the MPPPT charge controllers are removed. So, I'm really stoked about how things are turning out and I'm happy to report that we didn't short anything out during this install.

[00:11:00]I guess miracles do exist. Okay, so that's the batteries installed. We screwed these ones to the wall. They're not going anywhere. We screwed those ones down to the floor. And then you saw us make that those wooden brackets for that top one to sit into. And we just dry fit that. I've got it up at the moment cuz we're still doing a bit of wiring. All of this solar here is going to go and we're going to put the other inverter in there. So far so good. Now, this is the most exciting part is the app for uh Battleborne. So, let's see.

[00:11:34]I've never done this before, so we'll just uh work our way through it. Okay, let's I've I've downloaded the Battlebor app. Let's open it up. I want all eight of these batteries to talk to the hub.

[00:11:45]Then, I've plugged the hub into the Serbo GX. So, that's and then I've disconnected the the old shunt. So that should tell my touchcreen up there how much um power where what the voltage is and how much power and all of that. But uh we have to get this going first I think. Build your system. Continue.

[00:12:05]System name.

[00:12:08]Hello. Okay.

[00:12:11]Connect. So it took about 5 minutes to set everything up. And it wasn't long before the system had recognized all eight batteries in our bank. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

[00:12:22]>> I was liking what I was seeing. And these smart batteries were definitely a cut above the last ones. They were all perfectly balanced after having fully charged them beforehand. And I'd be able to monitor these batteries whenever I wanted. Let's have a little play. So, I think I can probably Yeah. Click on one battery. 99% charged already. 90° F.

[00:12:42]What's that in Celsius? Power 200 W. the power system. Oh, here we go.

[00:12:49]I think you get the idea. But I was pretty happy with the app as I feel it's important to know what's going on inside the bank at a singular battery level. We had gone from 1,000 amp to over 2,000 amp of lithium in one day. But we will also need to increase the solar power by double if my air conditioning idea was going to come to fruition, which also means investing in more solar charge controllers, which are not cheap at all.

[00:13:12]Anyway, the lithium upgrade was a gamecher for us as we would literally never have to worry about power again with our current consumption levels.

[00:13:20]This is one of the main reasons I wanted this upgrade so bad is that I can check each battery. So cool.

[00:13:35]Okay, let's talk about the fuel tank.

[00:13:38]This was a big debacle that we had.

[00:13:41]First thing we had was diesel bug severely. So we cut an inspection hatch in the top of the fuel tank, cleaned all the fuel out, got all the diesel bug out, all the sludge at the bottom of the tank. There was black sludge all over it. And we found severe pitting of the just the bottom what where the diesel bugs were sitting and a bit of water and stuff on the bottom of the aluminium fuel tank. So, we've done a few episodes mentioning this and so many people are saying to use some sort of a liner in there, maybe some Belona. I personally just don't think that's the right way to go about it. It's so hard to get things to stick to aluminium. And if you put some sort of a filler or a liner or something on the bottom of an aluminum fuel tank that's had fuel in it for 14 years, I don't think the right way to go about it is to just cover it up. So, we're going to rip this tank out and we're going to put a whole new bottom on it. We've already lined up a welder.

[00:14:41]We've had three welders come and quote this job and we're going with the one who we think is going to be the most professional because these welds have to be perfect. Um, but he's still actually quite affordable. It's about $1,000 to get him to weld this new bottom on, including materials. So, I thought that was really good. Uh he's using um 5083 aluminium which is uh definitely suitable for fuel and we're going to pressure test it afterwards to make sure that his welds are absolutely perfect.

[00:15:11]We're going to stay in a home stay up the road for a few days cuz already stinks like fuel in here. So we got to take all the hoses off, all the return lines, the fuel supply lines. We got a fill line and we got a vent line. We've got a fuel sender. tells us the tank level. And then two stainless steel brackets. After all that's done, I think we can uh pull it out.

[00:15:36]I hope. There's no way it's going to get out there. No way it's going to get out there. We spoke to um Dan, who's become a friend of ours, but he's the guy that's building Delos 2.0, know. And he said it'd be really hard to weld anything inside the tank because all of that fuel, all the impurities in the metal itself, in the aluminum will make it really hard to weld nicely. So, we're going to cut the bottom off and he's going to weld onto the outside of the tank where there's hopefully no contamination or impurities. I'm going to be happy if he can weld a new bottom on this. He said he can even curve it up the sides a little bit just to make sure we get all of the bad aluminium out of there. He's confident. We're confident in him. Dan says it's possible. So, I think this is the right way to fix the bottom of your fuel tank. And we've put all of our fuel over into the starboard tank. And because of our new fuel transfer system that I designed, we are able to run both engines perfectly off the one tank. One of the upgrades that we're going to do to the tank is we're going to add a stripping point to the bottom of the tank. So, that's what we have on superyachts. It's to make sure that you get all of the water out of the fuel when you're when you're polishing it. So, if we just kept using the fuel supply line, there's always about this much fuel at the bottom of the tank or water because water sits below the fuel that you never pick up. You can try transfer fuel or do the fuel polishing when it's rolling around, but I still can't see that last little bit of water getting sucked out of the tank. And it's the water and fuel interface where the diesel bug lives. And how do you get water in the fuel? You can either bunk a bad bad fuel with water in it or the inside of the tank can have condensation. Especially now that we've adding air con, you can have condensation inside the tank that runs to the bottom. There's no way that water can come out. And you saw that in the starboard tank as well. Okay, too much talking. Let's just get into this. We're going to pull this tank out now.

[00:17:34]Hopefully one of those two-minute boat jobs that takes about 2 hours.

[00:17:41]Okay, go.

[00:17:46]Go more.

[00:17:48]Okay, that hose was the last thing stopping this tank from wanting to come up. So, we'll see what happens.

[00:17:57]It's getting jammed.

[00:18:04]Work smart, not hard, they reckon.

[00:18:06]>> Really? Yeah.

[00:18:07]>> Yeah.

[00:18:09]Hang on. Hang up.

[00:18:15]>> So, the 500 L fuel tank did not want to come out. As you guys know, we've had to destroy so much of this boat in order to repair it. But I was hoping that wasn't the case here. But these straps were really holding us up, but they had inaccessible nuts on the other side of the bulkhead, making them almost impossible to remove. The best we could do was to move them to the side, but everything seemed to be not wanting this tank to come out. We slowly started removing and cutting away more and more things until we felt like we were ready to give it another go until Jamie almost snapped his Achilles tendon like yours truly over here.

[00:18:49]>> Oh my goodness.

[00:18:51]>> We then tried a different tactic and pulled one side up first and lo and behold, the thing came out. Well, almost out.

[00:19:00]>> Okay, I can't go any higher.

[00:19:01]>> But with one final yank. Okay.

[00:19:03]>> Out she came.

[00:19:08]>> How that's going to go back in? I don't know.

[00:19:14]Goodness. This looks up in here. All looks up. Look at that. There's a hole this big in the bulkhead here. And this is all just got sloppy engine room buildge. Anytime the engine room's got some water in it, it can just slush through this hole into this compartment here. This is meant to be a watertight bulkhead. They've put foam around the hoses and stuff like that. And there's a hole that big in the bulkhead. That is ridiculous.

[00:19:44]This is the actual engine room drain here.

[00:19:48]And that's got a a gland on it that's watertight. And then this hole, see, it's all oily. So this tiny little wooden frame here is what's holding 500 L of fuel. Oh. So they did they packed it with foam, but the foam just pushed through and they never bothered to seal it again.

[00:20:09]This foam was probably blocking that hole there. It's going to be so hard to get this back down on those frames.

[00:20:19]It's got pitting from the inside, but also where these straps are, these rubber straps, it's got corrosion from the outside.

[00:20:28]This is fine. This stuff is okay. This is just like surface oxidation. Not worrying about that. But this here is almost through from the outside. This strap here wasn't even on that frame.

[00:20:38]You can see the frame here was sitting over here. And this middle one came off as well. Actually, that's to the side. So, I don't know if they've worked their way loose or they were never on the actual frame. See all this corrosion here? Really bad. It's actually like where the plywood is. So, the outside of the tank was badly corroded where it was sitting straight on the wooden frame rather than the rubber strip and the moisture in the wood was eating away at the alloy tank.

[00:21:05]This outside corrosion has got nothing to do with diesel bug. Obviously, I think anyone with an aluminium fuel tank that's more than 10 years old definitely needs to be pulling it out and having a look like this cuz that's about to leak.

[00:21:15]This is only 3 mil aluminium and that's about 2 mil deep. This bottom is not in good shape. Anyone who just lines the tank is just cutting corners. Have to cut this thing off completely.

[00:21:29]We'll get it upside down. But lining a tank, an aluminium fuel tank, diesel tank, it's just it might last a couple of years, but you're just doing you're justing the next guy over. And to my dismay, as we investigated this hole in the engine room bulkhead a little further, we realized just how bad the situation was.

[00:21:51]It's all rotten.

[00:21:55]This is exactly where that wet bloody bulkhead was on the other side.

[00:22:00]On the outside.

[00:22:03]>> Yep. It's starting to feel like this boat is a little cursed for some reason.

[00:22:07]broken bulkheads, two lightning strikes, blisters, the list goes on. But we'll continue to troubleshoot this one next week. So, make sure you subscribe if you're new here, and we'll see you at the same time next Sunday. Cheers, guys.

[00:22:21]>> These frames are just glued down.

[00:22:24]Cockroach. Ew. No way. Is he dead or alive?