Swapped my old alternator for a Wakespeed 500 – worth the faff?

Had the Wakespeed 500 on my narrowboat for about eight months now and honestly it's the best thing I've bolted on since I stopped trusting the original 1970s wiring (RIP, previous owner's "creative" fuse solutions).

The CAN bus integration with my Victron Multiplus is what sold me — it actually talks to the BMS rather than just guessing, which means my Fogstar Drift lithiums aren't getting cooked every time I do a long cruise. Old alternator used to thermal-protect itself into a sulk by Stoke-on-Trent; the Wakespeed just gets on with it.

A few things worth knowing before you dive in:

• Fitting is genuinely faffy — budget a full weekend, not an afternoon
• The WS500 app is a bit clunky but the configurability is brilliant once you've stopped swearing at it
• You'll want a decent temp sensor on the alternator body — non-negotiable on a Beta Marine in my experience
• The price stings (~£600-700 depending where you find it) but so does a dead alternator at Braunston

The efficiency gains on charge acceptance are real — I'm topping up noticeably faster at tick-over, which matters when you're moored up and trying not to run the engine past 8pm and upset the entire marina.

Anyone else running one alongside a Victron MPPT and seeing weird comms behaviour? Mine occasionally has a brief sulk after a solar handoff but it sorts itself out. Curious whether it's a config thing or just Thursday.

@DevonNomad eight months in and you're still calling it the best thing — that's practically a glowing review by narrowboat standards where "it hasn't sunk yet" is usually the benchmark. 🚤

Curious though — are you running it with Victron kit and using the CAN bus integration, or just letting it do its own thing via the alternator sense wire? I ask because on my van build I went down the Victron ecosystem rabbit hole and now everything talks to everything except me, apparently.

Also "creative 1970s wiring" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there — we've all inherited someone else's electrical fever dream at some point. Mine had fuses made of tinfoil. Actual tinfoil. The audacity.

What battery chemistry are you running it with? LiFePO4 or still on lead-acid?

@DevonNomad running a Wakespeed on my narrowboat too — the adaptive charging alone is worth the price of admission when you've got LiFePO4 (Fogstar cells in my case). The CAN bus integration with my Victron kit is genuinely tidy once you've wrestled the config software into submission.

Only gripe: the initial setup will test your patience and your language. Got there eventually but my neighbours learned some new vocabulary that afternoon.

Eight months is nothing though — ask me again after a winter of lock-to-lock running in the rain when everything's working harder. That's when you find out if kit's actually solid or just good in the brochure.

@DevonNomad I've not got a narrowboat — my context is a static tiny house setup with a Fogstar Drift lithium bank — but the Wakespeed 500's comms architecture is what interests me here. The fact it speaks proper CANbus to your BMS rather than just guessing at voltage thresholds is significant. Most regulators are essentially flying blind; they're inferring battery state from a number that lies to you under load. The Wakespeed actually listens to the battery.

One pedantic point worth flagging: the adaptive charging @GrumpySparky mentions only delivers its full benefit if your alternator temperature sensor is correctly positioned. I've seen people mount it on the casing rather than the windings and wonder why it's being conservative. Small detail, big difference in charge acceptance.

Had a Wakespeed 500 fitted on Persistent Rust (she earns the name) for about fourteen months now. The thing that nobody tells you beforehand is how smug you become watching the charge curves on the VictronConnect app whilst your marina neighbour is still flogging his batteries with a 40-year-old split charge relay.