Xantrex Link 10 Battery Monitor

Installation at navigation Station

After installing all those extra batteries and beefing up the recharging capabilities of the system as well as the big inverter so that I can make my beloved espresso, the final component that I needed was some way of actually monitoring the state of charge, the remaining amp-hours as well as the current consumption.

The Link 10 is a small and deceptively simple device which is hooked up to the battery using a large shunt directly at the battery to measure all of the electricity going into the batteries during (charging or via the wind generator) and that coming out. It measures the actual voltage and uses internal logic to compute the real contents of the batteries (take a look at Peukert's Law to get an idea of what this can entail).

I had convinced Barry that he needed a battery monitor for Solitaire when he had purchased and equipping her and he purchased the last one at one of the BVI chandleries. I was going to wait until St. Martin to get the more advanced model, the Link20, which can monitor 2 battery banks simultaneously, but Barry decided that he didn't really need to know all that much about the state of his batteries and I bought his used Link 10 at a discount. As is always the case on boats, what seemed to be an easy and straightforward installation ended up taking most of 2 days to complete but once I finally had the system installed and all the fuses replaced I was surprised at how accurate and useful this little device really is. I can recommend it highly to anyone with a DC powered electrical system.

The picture above shows the Link10 in in "Amp Hours Used" mode, showing that I have used 151.1 Amp hours from the fully charged state of the batteries. This is after 3 days with just a short 2 mile motoring stretch to recharge. The rest has come from the wind generator and I think that the consumption is more than fair considering that I have the fridge running, the inverter in use for the notebook as well as for coffee, and other minor drains. I will need to replace my bedroom fan with a Hella to further reduce drain, as I think that running the fan at night as well as using a conventional anchor light instead of an LED one are also major constant drain sources.