Wattcycle Batteries on our Lagoon 420
Last year we completed some big upgrades and maintenance works on our Lagoon 420 Sailing Catamaran Roxy that we live on. One of them was the battery bank. We had a Victron AGM Deep Cycle 880 AH 12v bank installed as the house bank. This was connected to one Multiplus 12/3000 to power some of our AC systems such as PC, kettle, coffee machine, air fryer and basic household devices. In addition we have a 9 KVA generator on the boat that would power our air-conditioning units (almost never needed but very nice on super hot days) and our watermaker.
We kept that battery bank on board and went on to add a 1264 AH 12v Lithium battery bank by Wattcycle. We used the Mini Bluetooth 314 Ah batteries in parallel, 4 units. Some sources reported having trouble keeping the Wattcycles batteries balanced between each other, so we were very curious to see how our new Wattcycle battery bank would behave.
In addition to the new bank, we had another Multiplus 12/3000 installed which now works as a slave to the existing one. We had 2 Orion 50A chargers installed that keep the old AGM bank charged to power all our 12 volt needs such as winches, lights and navionics. And we have 2 buck boosts installed on the engine alternators to charge the Lithium bank from either engine.
In addition we upgraded the solar capacity on our hard top Bimini from 1280 Wp to 2615 Wp.
We can now power the air-conditioning units and the watermaker from the new battery bank via the 2 Victron Multiplus 3000 inverters.
We have travelled with Roxy from mainland Spain to the Canary Islands, but we have not been able to go properly cruising yet and test our energy supply capacity against our normal consumption. It would be great to see if our calculations were accurate.
What we can say so far, is that our Wattcycle batteries are performing well. We are happy that our installation was carried out professionally by the installers in Motril Marina, which of course is a very important factor. But putting that aside, when a significant load is added via the inverters, the batteries all chip in evenly and supply their charge. Recharging via the solar panels on a daily basis also seems to be happening just fine. When testing 3 high load devices at the same time, the system performed without any problem.
The app that Wattcycle provides, enables us to read the BMS of each battery separately, and we were always able to connect without issues, but sometimes only on the second attempt due to the distance between the battery and the phone used for the read-out. It feels good to be able to monitor the batteries this way occasionally. It also enables us to share screenshots of their behaviour, so let’s start with these screenshots taken just the other day, when the batteries were about to reach full charge somewhere around mid afternoon.
Considering the affordability of the Wattcycle batteries, we’re very happy with our decision and hope we can enjoy many days on the water with this battery bank!
