Bow Thruster Question

[tobnpr]

Terri,
I'm no expert on batts, but I've always thought that as long as the battery has enough CCA's available for this type of application it should do the job (CCA's as opposed to reserve capacity). When you refer to an undersized battery, perhaps one with more CCA's will perform better?

Are there battery specs provided by the thruster maunfacturer?
You now know what the problem is- voltage drop. So if it's not the battery itself- and the cables are adequately sized- it leaves only one other source for the problem; the connections. Perhaps a bad crimp causing too much resistance?

 

[Theresamarie11]

Terri,
I'm no expert on batts, but I've always thought that as long as the battery has enough CCA's available for this type of application it should do the job (CCA's as opposed to reserve capacity). When you refer to an undersized battery, perhaps one with more CCA's will perform better?

Are there battery specs provided by the thruster maunfacturer?
You now know what the problem is- voltage drop. So if it's not the battery itself- and the cables are adequately sized- it leaves only one other source for the problem; the connections. Perhaps a bad crimp causing too much resistance?

I'm certainly no expert on batteries either and lewmar doesn't give a battery spec. I've been reading up and would like to stay with my 2 battery set up if at all possible. There are so many different kinds of batteries.

In general, a thruster is probably more like the starter motor load than the load for the house circuits (deep cycle battery load).

So cranking amps are probably more important, but in this case I have the thruster connected to the deep cycle battery (actually my house battery is a dual use with 750 CCA). Deep cycle use seems to lean more towards either reserve capacity (25A load for some number of minutes) or the 20 hour Amp hour rating. So if I stick with a dual use battery, I probably should still look for something a bit bigger in overall capacity and CCA. I think I've seen dual use batteries up to around 1200 CCA.