Had the original split charge relay on my 58ft narrowboat for about six years and it finally gave up the ghost last month. Rather than just replace like-for-like, I decided to fit a Victron BatteryProtect 65A between the alternator feed and my 200Ah leisure bank (two 100Ah AGMs in parallel). Cost me around £45 from Bimble Solar, so not exactly bank-breaking.
First impressions are pretty positive. The low voltage disconnect is a proper game changer compared to the old relay — it cuts the load at a programmable threshold rather than just letting the batteries drain flat if I forget to run the engine. I've got mine set to disconnect at 11.9V and reconnect at 13.1V, which seems sensible for AGM. The Bluetooth on the 65A version means I can check status from my phone without crawling into the engine bay, which on a narrowboat is genuinely brilliant.
Only slight gripe so far is that it doesn't handle alternator charging directly in the traditional sense — you still need your relay or a separate DC-DC charger for proper charge management from the engine. I've kept a basic VSR in the circuit alongside it, so the BatteryProtect is purely doing load protection on the leisure side.
Has anyone else run this setup on a canal boat, or gone the whole hog with a Victron Orion DC-DC instead? Wondering whether it's worth upgrading the VSR next season or if I'm overcomplicating things.
